CSIPM priorities to build resilient food systems
During the 53rd Plenary Session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), held in Rome in October 2025, a new process of policy convergence on building resilient food systems was launched. This process will unfold throughout 2026 and held its first Open-Ended Working Group meeting on 17 December 2025, with the participation of a wide range of actors, including the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM).
Following the launch of the process, the CFS opened a call to submit written contributions on identified priority policy areas and elements that could complement the report of the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition. These contributions will serve as the basis for the first draft (Draft V0) of the policy recommendations, to be presented in February 2026.
The CSIPM delivered a clear message, which was reiterated during the first meeting: resilience cannot be meaningfully addressed without a human-rights approach, with the right to food at the centre. This right, which is indivisible from other fundamental rights, including the right to seeds and access to, control and use of land, water, forests, and other natural resources, and recognised in instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), must be translated into coherent legal frameworks and effective public policies.
For the CSIPM, rights holders are not passive beneficiaries, but active agents of resilience. Therefore, policies must establish mechanisms for shared decision-making, including participatory budget and governance spaces in which farmers, fishers, pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples, youth, women and gender diverse people play a major role. Their knowledge systems, deeply rooted to territories and biodiversity, must be fully integrated into decisions that affect their future.
The CSIPM also warned that resilience cannot be built while ignoring structural barriers and ongoing forms of dispossession. Land, water and ocean grabbing, seed privatisation, free trade agreements, sovereign debt and financial speculation continue to undermine food sovereignty and exacerbate inequalities. For this reason, the CSIPM is calling for policy recommendations that contribute to the creation of binding mechanisms that limit the power of corporations over resources, markets and agricultural data, moving away from understanding land, water and food as commodities.
In contexts of armed conflict and occupation, the CSIPM stressed that resilience does not mean adapting to unjust conditions imposed by war. The use of hunger as a weapon of war must be recognised as a serious crime, and priorities must shift away from short-term humanitarian aid towards the sustainable, long-term reconstruction of local food systems.
Among other pillars for building resilient food systems, the CSIPM continues to advocate for the recognition of the role of local authorities, agroecology and territorial markets, building on progress made in the CFS on urban and peri-urban food systems. Agroecology must be central to the policy recommendations, given its role in mitigating the impacts of intensive food production systems and strengthening the economic and ecological resilience of communities. At the same time, resilience strategies must guarantee fair wages, safe working conditions and social protection for informal, migrant and seasonal workers in agriculture, fishing and plantations.
Finally, the CSIPM proposed that the economy of care, the social and solidarity economy and food social security be more visibly integrated into the policy recommendations. Recognising and redistributing care work, moving towards people-centred economic models and strengthening social protection systems based on the right to food, such as Fome Zero and Bolsa Familial programmes in Brazil, are fundamental steps towards ensuring access to healthy food and resilient food systems for both producers and consumers.
The CSIPM further stressed that resilient food systems cannot be built without fully recognising Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems and rights. Policies must be co-created with Indigenous Peoples, grounded in decolonised and participatory research approaches.
In line with UNDRIP, policies must guarantee Free, Prior and Informed Consent, and recognise grassroots knowledge as a right, as affirmed in UNDROP, as part of an equitable and transformative approach to resilience.
The backbone of the CFS policy documents is the right to food, and should inform debates in other spaces, including WHO, ILO, and the Rio Conventions, in line with the CFS’s policy coordination mandate. Exchanging knowledge, evidence and policy guidance across these spaces is essential to create resilience that aligns global agendas, reduces policy fragmentation, and strengthens collective action while ensuring the primacy of the right to food within global food governance.
The first meeting of the CFS exposed contrasting views on what building resilience actually means. While some States and actors agreed on the need for a rights-based approach, agroecology and the central role of food producers, others prioritised international trade, digitalisation and agricultural and rural modernisation as key responses to the crises.
Proposals for “universal” policies also surfaced, a vision that usually advocates for “one-size fits all” policies, which overlooks structural inequalities and the lived realities of the most affected populations. These contrasts suggest that the debate on resilience requires, first and foremost, a common understanding of what resilience is, for whom on under what model the CFS should approach it. In this context, the CSIPM will continue to advocate for inclusive participation by civil society and Indigenous Peoples, bringing forward the experience and demands of those who sustain food systems on the ground.
Coming next
The CFS policy recommendations will be developed through a participatory process that includes the publication of two drafts, extensive consultations and two rounds of in-person negotiations at the FAO in June and July 2026. Civil society and Indigenous Peoples’ organisations interested in participating can join the CSIPM working group on resilient food systems.
Read and download the CSIPM input on policy priorities
Thank you, Chair.
My name is Lisa Shahin. I am a Coordination Committee member facilitating for the West Asia region within CSIPM, and a coordinator of the CSIPM Working Group on Building Resilient Food Systems.
This intervention shares the priority areas collectively identified in CSIPM’s input that we believe must be addressed through the policy recommendations on building resilient food systems.
I want to start by stressing a fundamental point: resilience cannot be reduced to the ability to absorb or adapt to shocks. For CSIPM, resilience must mean addressing the structural and systemic conditions that create vulnerability in the first place – including colonial legacies, wars and occupation, dispossession, and inequalities embedded in food systems.
This requires a human rights–based approach, grounded in the right to food and its indivisibility from other rights, including the right to seeds and the right to access, control, and use over land and natural resources, particularly for peasants and other people working in rural areas, as recognized by UNDROP. This also includes the rights of Indigenous Peoples under UNDRIP, notably their rights to land, territories, cultural heritage, and traditional knowledge. We call on states to explicitly constitutionalize the right to food, align national legislation with UNDROP and UNDRIP, strengthen land, fisheries and forest governance in line with the CFS VGGTs, and repeal laws that criminalize seed exchange and land struggles.
Second, rights-holders must be recognized as agents, not beneficiaries. Policies must establish co-decision-making mechanisms, participatory budgets, and governance structures where rights-holders hold a majority as they are active agents in defining and implementing food system resilience rather than passive recipients. Their knowledge systems and biocultural relationships with territories must be integral to decision-making. Building resilience also requires addressing differential vulnerabilities, including those shaped by poverty, socioeconomic exclusion, and gender.
Third, policies must confront historical oppressive and capitalist processes and ongoing colonial policies that continue to shape food systems. CSIPM denounces land, water and ocean grabbing, land-based carbon trading, the private enclosure of seeds through patents, GMOs and exclusive breeders’ rights, and the financialization of food and agriculture. Free trade agreements, sovereign debt, real estate investment funds, and agricultural special economic zones must be explicitly recognized as drivers of dispossession and food system fragility.
This connects directly to the importance of local governance and food sovereignty. Strengthening local food policy councils, territorial markets, and local governance systems is essential for achieving equitable transformative resilience. Local authorities must be recognized as key actors in territorial food governance, as they are best positioned to design context-specific, place-based solutions, as also highlighted by the HLPE.
In contexts of conflict and occupation, resilience means confronting root causes that perpetuate and normalize the status quo. The use of hunger as a weapon of war must be recognized as a serious crime. Policy priorities must shift from short-term humanitarian responses to long-term rebuilding of local food systems, and we appreciate the HLPE’s emphasis on the Framework for Action on Food Security and Nutrition in Protracted Crises and the need to reform the IPC system to better prevent famine.
We also stress the need to address corporate capture and privatization. Policy recommendations must include binding mechanisms to curb the power of multinational corporations over land, water, seeds, fisheries, data, finance, infrastructure and markets. Deconcentration, decentralization, localization of technologies, grassroots innovations and the decommodification of land, water and food are essential for resilience.
Labor rights and social protection must be integral to resilience strategies. This includes workers in commercial agriculture, industrial fishing and aquaculture, plantation economies, and especially informal, migrant and seasonal workers. Fair wages, safe working conditions and social security stabilize households and communities.
On food system financing, policies must reduce harmful debt pressures and reject false solutions related to finance, climate and biodiversity that enable new forms of extraction and grabbing. Financing must support equitable transformative resilience, not deepen dependency.
Finally, CSIPM emphasizes that agroecology is a pathway to equitable transformative resilience. Agroecology is not only a production system—it is a holistic socio-ecological framework rooted in local knowledge, food sovereignty, biodiversity, animal welfare, and diverse livelihoods, including small-scale fisheries and pastoralism. Supporting agroecology strengthens ecological, economic and social resilience across food systems.
Chair, in conclusion, building resilient food systems requires political courage: to confront power, address historical injustices, and center the people who feed the world. CSIPM look forward to working with the CFS, Member States, and relevant mechanisms to ensure that these priorities are meaningfully reflected in the policy recommendations,
Thank you.
Good afternoon, and thank you, Ambassador, for the opportunity to build on my CSIPM colleagues’ intervention by sharing complementary considerations for the Building Resilient Food Systems workstream. My name is Robert Arcidiacono, and I am the focal point for the Australasian Region within CSIPM. Before I commence, I acknowledge the traditional owners, the Turrabul and Yaggera Peoples of the lands on which I come, and pay my respects to their ancestors past, present, and emerging. As custodians of Country for over 60,000 years, First Peoples in Australia have sustained resilient food systems grounded in care for Country, knowledge, and collective responsibility across generations.
Recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems across diverse cultural contexts is critical to resilient food systems. Indigenous Peoples’ rights must be central to food system policies, including guarantees of Free, Prior and Informed Consent under UNDRIP, and recognition of grassroots knowledge as a right under UNDROP Article 26. Research on Indigenous knowledge systems must also be decolonised and be participatory, co-created with Indigenous Peoples, and reflective of the depth and diversity of their knowledge.
Linked with Indigenous relational systems, are also broader conceptions of care economies. Food security and nutrition policies should recognise how care work manifests within food systems, as these principles are central to resilience and the promotion of decent work. As highlighted in ILO Resolution V, the care economy must support inclusive, rights-based approaches, while recognising that care work disproportionately falls on women. Equally, social and solidarity economies should also be centred as human rights-based models, as outlined in the 2004 UNGA resolution on Promoting the social and solidarity economy for sustainable development. These approaches prioritise people over profit and enable collective ownership of land, seeds, water, and food, evident worldwide through community-supported agriculture, food cooperatives, and community farms.
Social security and social protection policies also play a critical role in equitably transforming food systems. CSIPM supports approaches that integrate the right to food as a core pillar of social protection, drawing on models such as Brazil’s Fome Zero and Bolsa Família, as well as various European Social Food Security funds, to strengthen universal access to healthy food and build resilience for producers and consumers alike. To achieve equitably transformative resilience, social protection measures should be aligned with accountability mechanisms across climate, nutrition, and labour policies.
Ensuring resilience and equity in food systems also depends on how these agendas are advanced beyond the CFS and across other global fora. Given the interconnected nature of food systems, resilience must be addressed coherently across institutions to reduce fragmentation and strengthen collective action. CFS policy instruments, grounded in the right to food, should therefore inform and align with processes such as WHO, ILO, UNFCCC, UNCBD, and UNCCD, while maintaining the primacy of the right to food in engagements with the WTO, IMF, and World Bank. As such, CFS’s coordination role in guiding resilience-related policy initiatives across the international multilateral system must be strengthened.
In closing, we invite those present to reflect on the many examples of food systems resilience demonstrated by CSIPM constituencies in our submission to the CFS. We share a collective responsibility to advance equitably transformative resilience by aligning rights-based food system policies, Indigenous knowledge, and social protections across global governance processes. We look forward to working with the CFS, Member States, and other mechanisms to ensure that those on the front lines of food system transformation can not only be resilient but thrive into the future.