What does resilience mean for those who feed us?
Testimonies from rightsholders across regions showing how resilient food systems have long been built in territories, well before resilience became a buzzword.
Resilience is not simply about recovering from shocks. Across regions, smallholders, peasants, fishers, pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples, food workers, peoples living in protracted crises, youth, and women share a common message: resilience means transforming the conditions that generate vulnerability in the first place.
For the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM) resilience is inseparable from the right to food, justice, and the recognition of territorial rights, and requires addressing structural inequalities rooted in historical and ongoing forms of violence, such as dispossession, conflict, land and resource grabbing, as well as the concentration of power over food systems.
The CSIPM Resilient Food Systems Working Group has over 100 participants from 82 organisations that belong to, or facilitate the participation of smallholder farmers, women, Indigenous Peoples, youth, pastoralists, urban food insecure, fisherfolks, consumers and NGOs. Participants bring the perspectives from a wide range of regions, including the Andean region, Australasia, Central Africa, Central America and the Caribbean, Central Asia, East Africa, East Europe, West Europe, North Africa, North America, South America, South Asia, South East Asia, South Africa, South Asia and West Asia.
Based on the depth of contributions from the working group over the last 6 months, 5 thematics have been identified as central, in addition to two cross-cutting themes that are relevant more broadly within the Committee on World Food Security (CFS ) and global food governance landscape. These priorities will be brought to the CFS negotiations on Building Resilient Food Systems which will develop a set of Policy Recommendations to guide decision and policy makers.
- Restore explicit rights-holder language rather than generic “stakeholder” terminology.
- Reaffirm States’ obligations under the Right to Food, UNDROP, and UNDRIP.
- Recognise Indigenous Peoples as distinct rights-holders with FPIC, territorial, seed, and governance rights.
- Ensure accountability and participation mechanisms are grounded in legal rights, not voluntary consultation.
- Build resilience by strengthening people’s rights and autonomy, not by managing inequality.
- Explicitly recognise starvation and hunger as weapons of war.
- Address the impacts of occupation, siege, blockades, and destruction of food systems.
- Recognise attacks on land, water, food production, and food sovereignty as drivers of food crises.
- Prioritise reconstruction of local food systems alongside humanitarian assistance.
- Strengthen accountability, compliance with international law, and extraterritorial obligations.
- – Position agroecology as the foundation of resilient food systems, not one option among many.
- – Recognise agroecology as a transformative framework rooted in Indigenous and peasant knowledge.
- – Avoid diluting agroecology by conflating it with “other innovative approaches”
- – Frame resilience as systemic transformation rather than adaptation within existing systems.
- Ensure digitalisation and AI support farmers’ rights and agroecological principles rather than deepen inequalities.
- – Strengthen safeguards against corporate capture and concentration of power.
- – Reinforce corporate accountability through human rights frameworks and binding obligations.
- – Address structural inequalities embedded in global trade systems.
- – Protect policy space for local food production, public procurement, and support for small-scale producers.
- Establish participatory monitoring mechanisms led by rights-holders, including Indigenous Peoples and farmers’ organisations.
- – Recognise territorial food systems as the foundation of resilience.
- – Protect farmers’ rights, Indigenous seeds, and community-controlled seed systems.
- – Support land rights, territorial markets, public procurement, and community food reserves.
- – Strengthen social and solidarity economies as alternatives to dependency on global markets.
- – Reduce reliance on intellectual property regimes and volatile global value chains that undermine food sovereignty.
Voices from the ground
Rightsholders are actively shaping resilient food systems on the ground. Their reflections highlight that resilience depends on social participation, agroecology, and knowledge systems rooted in territories .
Resilience is...
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CSIPM prioties for building resilient food systems
- CSIPM Contribution to the v0 Draft of the HLPE Report (March 2025)
- CSIPM intervention in Plenary during CFS 53 (October 2025)
- CSIPM inputs into initial stakeholder consultation (01 December 2025)
- CSIPM interventions during the OEWG (17 December 2025)
- CSIPM Written analysis of the Zero Draft of the Policy Recommendations (February)
- CSIPM interventions during the OEWG (March 19 2026)
- CSIPM 5 Priority Themes from WG for Draft 1 (06 June 2026)
- CSIPM Text Submission to Draft 1 (06 June 2026)