From 20 to 24 October 2025, more than 100 delegates from 90 grassroots organisations representing the constituencies that produce the majority of the world’s food, including smallholder farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, Indigenous Peoples, agricultural and food workers, landless people, women, youth, consumers, urban food-insecure communities, and NGOs, travelled from different regions of the world to Rome to take part in the 53rd Plenary Session of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS 53).
Participants engaged in discussions on the mobilisation of financial resources for food security and nutrition; urban and peri-urban food systems; resilient food systems; monitoring the implementation of the CFS Framework for Action in Protracted Crises (CFS-FFA); strengthening the uptake of CFS policy documents; and enhancing collaboration and coordinated action between the CFS and other global fora.
CFS 53 took place in the context of escalating global crises, where conflict, climate change, economic instability, and environmental degradation continue to push hunger levels above pre-pandemic figures, with up to 720 million people affected in 2024, according to the SOFI Report 2025.
The voices of Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ organisations underscored the importance of guaranteeing meaningful and inclusive participation in the CFS, the foremost inclusive international and intergovernmental platform on food security and nutrition, to keep policy decision-making rooted in realities from the ground.
The Plenary Session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) is the annual decision-making body that brings together diverse voices to debate, coordinate, and align strategies aimed at achieving food security and nutrition, and the progressive realisation of the right to adequate food and nutrition.
More than a meeting, the Plenary Session is a critical platform for driving global change in food security and nutrition. The outcomes of these discussions do not stay in the room; they are reported to key spaces where agreements and debates can inform decision-making on food systems, including the FAO Council and the UN General Assembly through ECOSOC, ensuring accountability and impact at the highest levels.
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CFS 53 Takeaways
As the foremost inclusive international and intergovernmental platform for policy and coordination on food security and nutrition, the CFS must ensure the implementation of its decisions and policy documents to remain relevant in a rapidly changing global context. For this reason, this session was one of the key moments of the Plenary.
The session opened with new findings from the SOFI 2025 report, which highlights how food price inflation continues to restrict access to healthy diets, particularly for low-income populations. In a regional panel discussion on the challenges to achieving SDG 2 (End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture), the CSIPM underscored the disproportionate impact of rising food price inflation on rural women and the need for gender-sensitive policies that strengthen rural–urban linkages.
The Plenary identified concrete avenues to strengthen collaboration with spaces such as the three Rio Conventions, the Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICCARD+20) in 2026, and the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty. This debate drew on insights from the CFS Collaborative Governance Dialogues on financing and protracted crises, a space created to bring the voices of the most affected countries and constituencies to the forefront, as well as on the outcomes of the High-Level Forum on climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation.
Today, an estimated 80 per cent of acutely food-insecure people live in contexts of conflict and protracted crises, which, alongside other factors, exacerbate food insecurity. For this reason, CFS 53 strongly condemned the use of food and water as weapons of war. The Committee recalled that all actions should be in line with international humanitarian law and human rights obligations, and called for immediate, safe, and unhindered humanitarian access to food, water, and essential services in the Gaza Strip, and other occupied Palestinian territories, as well as across all Darfur States in Sudan, particularly El Fasher.
The CSIPM called for international accountability mechanisms for all actors involved in the weaponisation, exploitation, and destruction of land, water, natural resources, and local food systems. It also reiterated the urgent need to revive and fully implement the CFS Framework for Action for Food Security and Nutrition in Protracted Crises (FFA).
The CFS Policy Recommendations on Urban and Peri-Urban Food Systems are a major outcome with strong CSIPM engagement and participation. The document recognises that strengthening urban food systems requires a holistic approach: the right to food cannot be ensured without addressing issues such as housing, inequality, public services, or financing. Strengthening rural territories is essential not only for rural development, but also for food security in cities. These recommendations call for understanding urban and rural areas are interconnected.
Among other strong recommendations, the policy document encourages reinforcing the direct connections between small-scale producers and urban consumers, supporting social innovations such as producer-to-consumer platforms, community supported agriculture, community gardens, farmer field schools, family farming initiatives, cooperative models, including agricultural and food cooperatives, producer associations, and farmers’ markets.
The CSIPM launched a Vision Document of global grassroots experiences and a plenary intervention highlighting the central role of local governments and a firm call to uphold Indigenous Peoples’ rights in line with UNDRIP.
The Vision Document and the CFS Policy Recommendations now stand as key advocacy tools for advancing the right to food and the links among urban, peri-urban, and rural areas.
The High-Level Forum on Strengthening Responsible Investment and Financing for Food Security and Nutrition, brought together governments, UN agencies, civil society, and the private sector to discuss the challenges and opportunities related to mobilising sufficient and adequate financial resources for food security and nutrition. It’s outcomes reaffirmed that responsible investment for food security must be grounded in strong public financing, long-term debt sustainability, and support for small-scale producers.
The CSIPM successfully pushed for the Final Report of the Plenary to include the recognition of the central role of smallholders as key investors in sustainable, rights-based food systems, and for the need to reform the international debt architecture.
CFS 53 recognised that strengthening the implementation of the Committee’s policy products requires political commitment, adequate resources, and concrete action in territories. The CSIPM called on Member States and the Rome-based agencies (FAO, IFAD, and WFP) to invest more resources in translation, dissemination, training, and financing, so that the agreements reached in Rome can truly make their way “back home.”
H.E. Ambassador Nosipho Jezile concluded her two-year mandate as CFS Chairperson, while Professor Anas A. Al-Nabulsi of Jordan was welcomed as the new CFS Chair for the biennium 2025–2027.
The Committee also elected new Bureau Members and Alternates. The CSIPM looks forward to continued and constructive engagement with the incoming Chair and Bureau to strengthen inclusive, coordinated, and rights-based global food policies.
CFS 53 launched the policy convergence process on Building Resilient Food Systems, which will build on the new HLPE report on this topic. The report highlights the need for equitably transformative resilience, a shift from the traditional understanding of resilience. This approach places people’s agency, collective capacities, and the relationship between communities and territories at the centre of food systems. It also recommends going beyond short-term responses to tackle the structural and systemic causes that created the crisis in the first place.
In Plenary, the CSIPM called for centering the process on agroecology, food sovereignty, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and gender justice, and reiterated that political choices must confront structural inequalities, move beyond failing dominant food systems, and build people-led, territorially rooted food systems that truly protect peoples and the planet while guaranteeing the right to food.
The first CFS Open-Ended Working Group meeting will take place on 17 December 2025 to identify the policy priority areas that the document should include. Join the CSIPM Working Group to take part in the discussions!
The Multiyear Programme of Work 2024-2027 (MYPoW), endorsed during the CFS 51st Plenary Session in October 2023, underwent a mid-term review in 2025 to assess and adjust the remaining elements of the programme.
The reviewed programme includes two High-Level Forums, one on Equitable Land Governance (2027) and another on Artificial Intelligence, Digitalisation and Data (2026).
Join the CSIPM Working Groups to be part of these processes!
