CFS 53: CSIPM statement at the roundtable on regional perspectives during the presentation of the SOFI 2025 Report

Statement of the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM) by Souad Mahmoud during agenda item II of the 53^rd Session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS): 2025 Report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) – Roundtable on Regional Perspectives.

Statement delivered by Souad Mahmoud (Tunisia), World March of Women

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you once again for this opportunity given to the CSIPM to exchange views and contribute to this important discussion. When we talk today about the persistent rise in food prices, we often tend to see it as a temporary crisis, a short-term imbalance caused by conflicts or climate shocks. But when we look at long-term trends, we understand that this inflation is not a simple market distortion: it is the product of an economic system in which food is treated first and foremost as a commodity, and not as a right.

In this system, rural areas – which should be the heart of food production – are paradoxically among the most affected by high food prices. Why is this the case? Because peasant communities and rural workers no longer control the means of production, the distribution channels, nor even the value of their own work.

They are producing, yet they are not able to live from their work. They feed the world, yet they themselves go hungry.

The current food price crisis reveals what many already knew: the incomes derived from land and agricultural labour are being squeezed between two forces – a reality everyone knew. On the one hand, the rising cost of agricultural inputs, energy and transport; on the other, the dominance of large agri-food chains and global finance, which capture most of the added value generated by this work.

What we call “food inflation” is therefore also the result of the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a small number of actors capable of speculating even on hunger.

And within this structure of inequality, rural women occupy the most vulnerable position, but also one of the most strategic. They form the majority in family farming; they assume the

responsibilities of social reproduction – feeding, caring, sustaining life – while remaining the least recognised and the least remunerated. And I believe this is true across the world.

When prices rise, they are the first to deprive themselves in order to feed others, the first to see their incomes collapse, and the last to benefit from support policies.

In my view, this double marginalisation – economic and patriarchal – is not an accident. It is an integral part of a social order built on the systematic rendering of women’s work invisible and on the structural dependency of rural areas.

If we do not break away from this logic, crises will keep repeating themselves and no solution will ever be found, always to the detriment of the same people and the same structures: small-scale producers, agricultural workers, rural women and rural youth.

This is why it is urgent to rethink the food question.

First, agricultural production must be placed within an economy of the commons, where land, water, seeds and knowledge are not commodities but collective rights.

Next, power must be restored to producers – women and men alike. This requires fair pricing policies, short supply chains, self-managed rural cooperatives, and public procurement systems that directly support peasant production.

And above all, we need a real gender equality transformation in rural areas: guaranteeing women’s access to land, to finance, to training, and to political representation. Not to “integrate” them into an unequal model, but so that they can be the architects of a different one.

Finally, I want to raise the question of rural–urban linkages.

Today, cities consume what rural areas produce, without reciprocity. Urbanisation has been built on the transfer of wealth and value from rural territories to urban centres. To protect people’s livelihoods, we need to reverse this logic: build alliances of solidarity between consumers and producers, between territories, to create shared food sovereignty and realise the right to food for all.

Public policies can strengthen these linkages: local infrastructure, proximity markets, rural transport, as well as social programmes that recognise the care and reproductive work carried out in rural territories.

In reality, the struggle against rising food prices is not only an economic issue. It is, above all, a political struggle.

It brings two visions of the world face to face:

– on the one hand, the vision of food as a product governed by the logic of profit;

– on the other, the vision of food as a social good, born of collective work and solidarity.

As long as agriculture remains dependent on global markets, as long as the value of rural labour is determined by the forces of capital and not by human needs, the vulnerability of rural areas will persist.

Protecting the livelihoods of rural populations – and especially women – therefore requires breaking with this dependency, and recognising local economies grounded in social justice, cooperation and equality.

It is not a utopia. It is what must be achieved for food to stop being an instrument of domination and to become once again what it was always meant to be: a right, a bond, and a basis for life.