This institutional support for agroecology, however limited, has spurred backlash from states and multinational corporations that continue to promote agro-industrial production practices.
Donald Trump's Ambassador to the Rome-Based Agencies of the United Nations, Kip Tom, attacked the institutions that have supported agroecology in early , lambasting the FAO for deviating from the narrative of the Green Revolution and claiming that agroecology is ideological and unscientific Employing a myriad of strategies, the governing powers of food and agriculture have again sought to undermine the public vision of food once promoted by the FAO.
While it is not yet clear what form the Summit will now take, the Summit is currently in its preparatory stages of information gathering.
Initially, participants of the CSM initially welcomed the announcement of the Summit, which promised to elevate the political significance of food systems; but they were cautious about who was organizing the Summit and why. They worry that the Summit is aimed at undermining the authority of the CFS, motivated by WEF's effort to capture the narrative of food system transformation, as the HLPE report on agroecology had given such a positive prognosis of agroecology as key to transformation HLPE, The designation of the Summit as a food systems summit is significant.
The concept of food systems was developed as a holistic, systems-based approach to account for all the ecological and social activities through which food is produced, distributed, and consumed Kneen, ; Ericksen et al. Members of the CSM promote the concept of food systems to emphasize the multifunctional role of agriculture and its environmental and social impacts. Components of food systems are often bracketed by different actors in pursuit of their interests and the concept of sustainability is mobilized vaguely and inconsistently Foran et al.
In analyzing the formation and structure of the Summit, we identify three dimensions of the Summit's current processes that raise significant concerns about the UNFSS's fidelity to its own commitments to transparency, accountability, and human rights. These are: its structure and recruitment of leaders and participants, its multistakeholder approach to inclusivity and normative basis, and its failure to address conflicts of interest and corporate influence.
The initial step in planning the Summit, the appointment of a Special Envoy to lead the Summit, offered the first indication of how the Summit would proceed. With support from agribusiness corporations, the WEF, global philanthropies, and development agencies of several governments in the Global North, AGRA has emerged at the front line of efforts to impose the agro-industrial model onto postcolonial rural populations that have resisted incorporation into global markets.
The letter of March explained that civil society concerns were rooted in the expansion of corporate influence on food systems and AGRA's approach to agricultural investment.
The Summit launch and its subsequent development have been non-transparent and chaotic, even according to its supporters. This has been apparent in the selection and recruitment of participants and leaders of different components of the Summit and its confusing structure, with a proliferating expansion of tracks, sub-tracks and committees. The degree of confusion generated by the well-seasoned bureaucrats who seem to be in charge has led some people to speculate that the convoluted structure of the Summit is intentional to allow takeover by corporate participants, or at least frustrate social movements' attempts to stop this.
What was perhaps most surprising about the Summit is its elaborate structure, which replicates already existing bodies in the CFS and reconstitutes them as experts and advisors hand-picked by the Special Envoy.
The Action Tracks are:. Nearly 2 months after announcing the Tracks, the Special Envoy appointed leaders for each one. Starter Discussion Papers were prepared for each Action Track and posted on the Summit's website sometimes with a revision.
Each Action Track also contains a public forum on the Summit's website with announcements of upcoming events, but the leadership within each track other than the Chair, Vice-Chair s , and supporting UN agency is not publicly available. How leaders were recruited and how the Action Tracks were developed has raised several concerns. Decision-making processes are quite non-transparent in the UNFSS and crucial information is not publicly available.
There is almost no overlap with the membership of the HLPE. Some key expertise seems to be missing from the Scientific Group, such as agroecology and global food governance. Perhaps because of this lack of expertise, there are discontinuities with previous interpretations of key concepts.
This represents a clear divergence from agroecological frameworks, which include all of these components as part of the food system. Additionally, the budget for the Summit has not been made public. It is neither public where funding is coming from nor how money is being spent. Without this basic transparency, it is unclear how donations are being leveraged to influence the Summit.
The person who was invited responded that she would need time to consult with the Panel and its Secretariat, and eventually decided that she couldn't accept the invitation. But why weren't the co-Coordinators of IPES-Food consulted originally and why were the organizers making an invitation without clarifying what work was involved or why that person's participation was vital?
One of the co-Coordinators has agreed subsequently to co-lead a sub-topic of this Action Track. Although the CSM has chosen not to participate in the Summit, many civil society organizations including some that also are part of CSM are engaging in various Action Tracks.
In fact, representatives from non-governmental organizations are Chairs or Vice-Chairs of most of the Action Tracks. Civil society, like the private sector, is diverse; many organizations have decided that the opportunities opened to them by participating in the Summit exceed any risks. Just as the invitations bypassed established fora and mechanisms for civil society engagement, the UNFSS' framing disregards much of the previous international work on food system framing and pathways to solutions.
The Action Tracks, while being worthwhile goals in themselves, ignore previous international agreements that are vital to finding more systemic solutions. In addition, numerous UN institutions have developed frameworks to guide global food governance through a rights-based framework, including the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, which was passed by the General Assembly in , as well as General Recommendation 34, issued by the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in , which elaborates the rights of rural women.
Over the past few years, several powerful governments have sought to actively weaken the CFS by slowing down policy-making processes and reducing the CFS's program of work, then criticizing it for moving at a slow pace. Yet the UNFSS is not showing any signs of being able to overcome the underlying barriers to an effective CFS; if anything, it will exacerbate them see below section on Conflicts of Interest.
Taken altogether, the structure of the UNFSS and its recruitment of leadership has failed to meet basic standards of accountability and transparency that even the organizers claim to espouse. Instead, leaders, experts, and participants have been cherry-picked from organizations that are either unaware of already existing institutions, amenable to the reframing of food systems through the Green Revolution framework, or ignorant of the history and dangers of multistakeholder partnerships undermining multilateral governance.
Perhaps most problematically, many of those selected as leaders are unaccountable to constituencies that are at the front lines of food systems. Without prioritizing those constituencies, as required by human rights-based approaches, the most powerful and well-resourced participants will inevitably dominate.
Sign up to join discussions across all communities. Join a community, respond to ongoing discussions, or start one. Connect with members, and grow your network and community. Share links, videos, photos, and tell your story in any of the communities. It is unclear how any of the elaborate forms of participation—from the online discussion boards to the virtual dialogues to the other UNFSS events—contribute to the outcomes of the Summit. That is, the website seems to be absorbing any and all events that touch on food systems governance and portraying them as part of the UNFSS.
These problems stem from the fact that inclusivity in the UNFSS is primarily interpreted through the paradigm of multistakeholderism, a form of governance that has been imported from the corporate sector into the public domain Pigman, Multistakeholderism seeks to incorporate all those affected by a given issue into policy-making processes on an imaginary level playing field.
As a paper posted on the WEF website notes,. The danger in this development is that skepticism over the value of geostrategic institutions, and even of multilateralism itself, risks eroding the global community's ability to properly manage the primary economic, environmental and technological risks facing the world today For the WEF, multistakeholderism is a strategic approach to maintaining liberal trade agreements and open markets, while reducing risks from environmental degradation and popular resistance.
The promotion of multistakeholder platforms is part of a broader vision of stakeholder capitalism that seeks to embed corporations within systems of governance without compromising regulatory control Schwab, Since inequalities of power are not accounted for in these processes, multistakeholderism has been critiqued as a mode of governance that serves to reproduce existing power structures under the guise of inclusivity. A recent report by the CFS High Level Panel of Experts warns that addressing power differentials is critical for the success of any multistakeholder platform.
In their report, the HLPE clearly states that,. There is a risk for MSPs to reproduce existing power asymmetries and to strengthen the position of more powerful actors. One of the challenges for MSPs in the field of FSN [food security and nutrition] is to acknowledge and address these power asymmetries.
Inclusiveness, transparency and accountability are keys to address this challenge. Full and effective participation of the most marginalized and vulnerable groups, directly affected by food insecurity and malnutrition, will be ensured if weaker partners have the right and capacity to speak, to be heard and influence the decisions.
This requires time and resources to participate in discussion, including in physical meetings, as well as information, expertise, and communication skills HLPE, , p. Multistakeholder platforms undermine the clear responsibilities of governments and replace political participation with a model that lacks clear rules of participation, subverts traditional means of political representation and erases mechanisms of accountability.
The consistent failure of multistakeholder platforms to address asymmetries in the context of food and agricultural initiatives has led many scholars to be skeptical of their ability to do more than promote the interests of the powerful Muller, ; Cheyns and Riisgaard, ; McKeon, ; Gleckman, Similarly, the HLPE notes that there is little evidence of the effectiveness of multistakeholder processes.
Scientists and other actors question the potential benefits and limitations, the performance and even the relevance of MSPs as a suitable institutional mechanism to finance and improve FSN.
Research on multistakeholderism has shown again and again not only that multistakeholder initiatives are ineffective, but also that when there is not an agreed-upon frame, initiatives are bound to fail Fung and Wright, ; Gray, This is certainly the case for the UNFSS: exactly what is the problem that the Summit is designed to fix, and how will it help?
The adoption of a multistakeholder approach raises questions about the normative basis of the Summit. As described earlier, previous Summits have been organized through the multilateral institutions of the United Nations. In this framework, states are the primary actors and duty-bearers for human rights obligations.
With the embrace of multistakeholderism in the UNFSS, it is an open question whether human rights remain the primary normative framework. Kalibata As he noted in a recent analysis of the review on Action Tracks, only Action Track four emphasizes the right to food as a core framework, and three of the action tracks do not mention the right to food at all Moreover, the rights-based institutions of the United Nations, such as the CFS, the International Labor Organization, and the Geneva-based human rights bodies are not well-represented in the Summit's Leadership.
This may help to explain why food system actors, who suffer from consistent rights violations, including food-workers, farmworkers, peasants, and Indigenous peoples, are very poorly represented in the UNFSS. Grounding the Summit in human rights is critical because it is a framework for ensuring meaningful participation of those most marginalized and vulnerable. The Voluntary Guidelines to support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security describe several procedural principles to guide policy-making processes that address food and nutrition security.
Commonly known as the PANTHER framework, these include participation, accountability, non-discrimination, transparency, human dignity, empowerment and the rule of law This rights-based approach emphasizes that those most affected by food insecurity should not only be able to participate meaningfully, but that governments must be accountable for these rights.
This has important implications for the outcome of the Summit. In addition to the multistakeholder design of the UNFSS, the Summit's failure to safeguard against conflicts of interest risks further enabling corporate influence in the Summit. By conflicts of interest, we mean financial and non-financial interests or commitments either through fiduciary obligations or duties of loyalty that risk impairing non-partial judgment and decision-making.
A corporation that is obliged to maximize profits for its shareholders or which depends for its existence on increasing sales of agrifood system inputs or products has a conflict of interest in the UNFSS because private financial interest should never be allowed to usurp the public interest in food security and nutrition.
Such conflicts must be disclosed routinely in scientific or medical research and publications, and they should be equally obligatory in work on food systems. In part, a key problem is that multistakeholder initiatives are designed to promote diverse interests and inclusivity, rather than manage the risks of conflicts of interests. However, failing to guard against the dominance of commercial interests risks undermining the UN's own values of independence, impartiality, and integrity on which it depends for public legitimacy.
By appointing the current President of AGRA as Special Envoy, the UN not only signaled support for AGRA's market-led, technology-driven approach, it invited the rescaling of a corporate-philanthropic alliance developed on the African continent onto the global scale. Participation of large numbers of people with AGRA connections, and funding through philanthrocapitalists and agribusinesses that belong to the WEF, signal an ongoing revolving door between corporate and public decision-making.
However, the WEF partnership is just one of multiple corporate partnerships developed recently by the UN. This is worrisome because as the world's largest private foundation [Bill Gates is also the largest owner of US farmland O'Keefe, ], the Gates Foundation's approach to social change serves to enrich the very same corporations and countries that have been the cause of economic inequalities and environmental degradation McGoey, ; Schwab, Gates provides extensive global funding to promote private-sector driven technological innovation as the solution to social and environmental problems and promotes policy changes to incentivize this approach through public subsides and intellectual property protections.
He is explicit that companies in the Global North should see global problems as opportunities for profit. In his book on climate change—Gates's newest area of advocacy—he explains,. Rich countries are best suited to develop innovative climate solutions; they're the ones with government funding, research universities, national labs, and start-up companies that draw talent from all over the world, so they'll need to lead the way.
Whoever makes big energy breakthroughs and shows they can work on a global scale and be affordable, will find many willing customers in emerging economies Gates, , p.
Gates's projects epitomize conflicts of interest. Yet he is successfully re-organizing global governance across the sectors in which the Foundation works in the image of multistakeholderism.
COVAX was developed to pool resources for equitable vaccine procurement and distribution. Not only is COVAX failing to provide equitable distribution as a result of vaccine nationalism, it has defended patent rights for pharmaceutical corporations in opposition to the world's poorest nations and has been unwelcoming of civil society participation Amnesty International, ; Patnaik, As a result of its embrace of corporations and philanthrocapitalists the United Nations is facing creeping corporate influence.
Seitz and Martens point to a promotional UNESCO brochure that clearly describes the benefits for multinational corporations in partnering i. As it explains, donors will:. As the brochure makes plain, UN agencies were inviting companies to draw on the legitimacy once extended to the UN as a democratic one-country, one vote intergovernmental body.
What's new in this example is that UN agencies were also advertising the possibility of directly participating in UN decision-making through multistakeholder initiatives, which as described above raise concerns over corporate control, especially insofar as intergovernmental and UN partnerships with corporations have relaxed control in extending license to private initiatives via multistakeholderism. This is exemplified in two significant ventures early in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
France has since withdrawn from the project, on grounds that it undermines farming livelihoods of theproducers concerned. This public-private partnership PPP model now infuses food governance initiatives underway in the UNFSS, where the WEF represents itself as a global platform for public-private cooperation 30 , and corporations as serving the public trust.
This injunction ultimately serves the interests of transnational corporations that control this food supply chain, not local and regional food systems and territorial markets that were much more resilient than global companies in providing healthy food during the pandemic. Corporations have made no secret of the fact that they see these partnerships with the UN as good for business.
As one corporate executive has put it:. As the paragraphs above make clear, the UNFSS is rife with actual and potential conflicts of interest, which are neither disclosed nor even recognized as problematic. This means that the very corporations that are responsible for promoting food that contributes to unhealthy diets, engaging in practices destructive of producers' livelihoods, violating human rights, overpaying CEOs, and creating gross inequity in food systems are playing prominent roles in the UNFSS.
Are we to think that they have realized the error of their ways, and are seeking wide input in order to do better? Or perhaps the idea is that significant change in food systems won't result without the participation of the largest food corporations. But participation under what terms? In this sense, she expressed support for a proposed multilateral agreement that would establish a minimum global rate for corporate income tax that would ensure taxes are paid where the value is added and that would help close spaces for tax evasion and avoidance by multinational corporations, improving the equity and transparency of the global tax system.
To address inequality, she advocated for a wealth tax and other taxes on property, which would contribute to improving the distribution of wealth and reducing inequality gaps, while at the same time providing additional revenue.
At the event, participants also discussed the negotiations taking place at an international level this week in the framework of the G7 and G20 to agree to improved tax cooperation and thereby promote fairer competition worldwide. Economic development. The opportunity As we enter a unique window of opportunity to shape the recovery, this initiative will offer insights to help inform all those determining the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons.
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