Global policy response to food crises

When COVID-19 erupted it was evident to CSIPM constituencies that the pandemic was unveiling and aggravating existing, structural vulnerabilities and inequalities embedded in the global market-led, industrial food system and exposing the risks inherent in the neoliberal policies that prop this system up. Years later, these issues and risks have not been addressed. The consultations that the CSIPM conducted in 2022, reaching out to communities in all regions, confirmed that peoples’ existing conditions of inequality and injustice determined how acutely they were affected by COVID-19 and governmental lock-down measures, with women, youth, refugees and migrants, workers, small-scale food producers, landless peoples, urban food insecure and Indigenous Peoples on the front lines. But evidence from the ground also demonstrated the strength and resilience of peoples’ responses to the multiple crises affecting them.  

The 2020 report, ‘Voices from the Ground: From Covid-19 to Radical Transformation of Food Systems’, demanded breaking away from neoliberal policy orientation, respecting all human rights, putting food sovereignty into practice, reaffirming the primacy of the public sphere, and strengthening human rights-based global food governance with the United Nations Committee on World Food Security (CFS) at the center. 

In 2022, to refresh our evidence, the CSIPM reached out to its base again with a popular consultation on the impacts of the multiple layers of the crisis affecting them -the crisis of public health, of food prices, and of climate-, their impacts on the ground, and peoples’ responses and proposals. A questionnaire was launched along with virtual consultations in all regions which directly involved hundreds of civil society and Indigenous Peoples’ organisations and indirectly reached many more. As a result of these consultations, the report ‘Voices from the ground 2: transformative solutions to the global systemic food crises’ was published. The publication synthesized the rich analysis and recommendations which emerged from the consultation process and provided summaries of the regional processes.

Grounded in this evidence and allied with a number of CFS member states, participants, and UN agencies, the CSIPM advocated in the CFS plenaries 48, 49, and 50 for the Committee to implement its role as a space for developing globally coordinated policy guidance to address the multiple dimensions of these recurring food crises and prevent future calamities. The proposal was repeatedly crushed by a coalition of powerful commodity-exporting countries. The war in Ukraine brought yet another confirmation of the fragility of the global food system and added a new layer to the existing crisis.

Now is the time to respond to the voices from the ground by addressing the structural causes and multiple dimensions of today’s food crises in a globally coordinated way, and the CFS is the place to do it!