Towards food sovereignty: interrogating peasant voice in the United Nations Committee on World Food Security

Abstract

The goal of the direct participation of food producer constituencies – and other citizens – is a key component of food sovereignty, the policy framework first launched by La Vía Campesina and engendering the much wider food sovereignty movement. In this paper, I outline the reasons why the reform of the United Nations Committee on World Food Security (CFS) can be regarded as historically significant to this goal. Focusing upon the CFS's aspirations for inclusivity, I outline a framework for interrogating the experiences of social movement activists representing food producer constituencies seeking to convert their formal right to participate in the CFS into substantive participation. Going beyond the capturing of their experiences, the framework also reveals the different ways in which their challenges in attaining substantive participation can be overcome, with a particular emphasis upon adjustments within the arena itself. The paper concludes with an overview of the research agenda suggested by Raj Patel (2009), amongst others, and alluded to further in the content of this paper.

Keywords:

• La Vía Campesina
• UN Committee on World Food Security
• food sovereignty
• requisites of effective participation
• discursive power

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nora McKeon and three anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions that have greatly improved this contribution. I would also like to express my gratitude to Jun Borras and the organisers of Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue, International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, 24 January 2014, for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

¹For example, the Nyéléni 2007 – Forum for food sovereignty, held 23–27 February 2007 in Sélingué, Mali, and the People's food sovereignty civil society forum, held in Rome, Italy, 13–17 November 2009. The later of these two events was timed to coincide with the World Food Summit being held at the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) at the same time.

²In this contribution, when discussing the challenges that they face seeking to convert their formal right to participate in the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) into substantive participation, I refer alternately to food producers, activists from the food sovereignty movement and rural constituencies. This shifting reflects the fact that (a) the number of food-insecure Civil Society Organisation (CSO) constituencies now formally entitled to participate in the CFS extends beyond the core smallholder food producer constituency of La Vía Campesina, and (b) La Vía Campesina activists themselves are very conscious of trying to mobilise across civil society more generally, to offer a ‘citizen perspective’ – an aspiration embodied in the movement's strong commitment to alliance building (interview with Paul Nicholson, two-time member of La Vía Campesina's International Coordination Committee, 19 August 2011).

³In this regard, Patel echoes the viewpoint of critical theorists such as Nancy Fraser (1990) – who posits social equality as a precondition of participatory equality – and reinforces the convergence I have identified elsewhere between scholars and activists working within the context of Habermasian, public sphere theory, and the food sovereignty agenda (Brem-Wilson 2012).

⁴The degree to which the aspirant participant is able to attain the conditions of effective participation within policy-making arenas and processes is but one of at least three other sets of dynamics, attention to which is necessary to determine if the formal right to participate has translated into substantive participation. Others are (a) the degree to which the area has the capacity and competence to manage a policy debate (e.g. can provide meaningful participation opportunities; can recognise what is being contested – i.e. norms, values, foundational definitions; can translate inputs into outputs; can recognise and accommodate dissent); (b) the degree to which decisional outcomes in the arena are connected to discursive processes (and not backroom deals or influence ‘in the corridors'); and (c) the degree to which decisional outcomes are translated into concrete action/influence (i.e. influence over the behaviour of agrifood system actors). If, for example, an interlocutor has fully attained the conditions of effective participation in the arena, but the arena's outputs don't translate into concrete influence, or if the arena's outputs translate into concrete influence but the process managers can't manage a policy debate of this scale, then it is reasonable to anticipate that politically meaningful participation will be absent (Habermas 1992, 1996; Fraser 2007; McKeon 2011).

⁵This paper and the framework it articulates are based upon doctoral research conducted between May 2008 and October 2011. The research consisted of a political ethnography focusing upon La Vía Campesina's articulation with UN food and agricultural activity, during which time I conducted research for La Vía Campesina (disseminated via reports and a training session), observed their participation in a range of fora, both intergovernmental and civil society, and interviewed (N = 70) a range of embedded actors, including diplomats, UN officials and representatives from civil society (Brem-Wilson 2012).

⁶‘The CFS enjoyed revived fortunes in 1995–1996 when it became the principal forum for inter-state negotiation in preparation for the 1996 World Food Summit’ (Margulis 2012, 237).

⁷As stated within the Summit Declaration. The final of the seven commitments made by member states within this document asserts: ‘We will implement, monitor, and follow-up this Plan of Action at all levels in cooperation with the international community.’ Sub-objective 7.3 g adds that, ‘to monitor actively the implementation of the World Food Summit Plan of Action', member states will ‘[e]ncourage the effective participation of relevant actors of civil society in the CFS monitoring process, recognizing their critical role in enhancing food security’ (World Food Summit 1996).

⁸This perspective was communicated to me both in interviews and through the comments of member states I observed intervening at various intergovernmentals, particularly the 37th Session of the CFS.

⁹Interview, Beatriz Gasco, International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) Secretariat, 23–24 March 2011.

¹⁰For example, the Independent External Evaluation of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) – the Committee on World Food Security's host institution – stated in 2007 in its summary report that the CFS was ‘losing some of its momentum’ and ‘questions have arisen as to whether it meets for too long and too frequently’ (IEE 2007, 178). The CFS itself recognised that prior to its reform it was ‘weak performing’ (CFS 2009, Paragraph 2).

¹¹This was the view articulated, for instance, in Rome at the January 2009 annual meeting of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, an international network of food sovereignty-oriented social movements and NGOs.

¹²For example, in April 2008, the UN Secretary-General launched a High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Price Crisis (HLTF), designed to improve interagency coordination between 20 UN entities deemed to have mandates of relevance to food security. The issue of global food security also featured very prominently on the agendas of the July 2008 meeting of the Group of Eight industrialised nations (G8), in Hokkaido, Japan, and again next year at L'Aquila, Italy (G8 2008, 2009).

¹³Not only are the Committee on World Food Security and its host institution the FAO based in Rome, but so also are the World Food Programme, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and Bioversity, a member of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Rome therefore has four multilateral food and agricultural bodies. Throughout the summer and autumn of 2009, I interviewed a range of actors from both outside and inside these institutions – member state representatives, UN officials and CSOs – and the fear that the Global Partnership represented a covert attempt to relocate the locus of food security from Rome to another location was widely entertained amongst them.

¹⁴Central amongst the considerations of La Vía Campesina analysts and the IPC network was the contrast between the decision-making modes of UN institutions (one member, one vote) and that of IFIs (one dollar, one vote), the former regarded by them as providing a minimum democratic safeguard, and so they seek for food and agricultural governance and policy-making to remain within that framework.

¹⁵The relevance of FAO dynamics for the performance of the CFS is rooted in the fact that states participate in the CFS for the main part through their Permanent Representatives at the FAO, and the Secretariat functions of the CFS are predominantly provided by FAO officials.

¹⁶A dynamic captured by the Independent External Evaluation of FAO (IEE 2007).

¹⁷This insight was obtained through interviews with diplomats who participated in this committee, including its process managers.

¹⁸Though its roots stretch back to frustrations emerging out of participation within various different UN spaces in the preceding years, it was in 2001 that the proposal to establish an autonomous civil society group to interface with FAO in the preparations for the World Food Summit: Five Years Later (scheduled for 2001 but rescheduled to 2002 following 9/11) and the World Summit on Sustainable Development, 2002 was first made (McKeon 2009a, 54). La Vía Campesina representatives participated in the CFS reform process in tight coordination with their allies in the IPC.

¹⁹Civil society was not, for example, invited to participate in the prior FAO reform process.

²⁰For example, there were several hundred people assembled in the final meeting at which the CFS reform blueprint was formally adopted, on 17 October 2009. Most of these were representatives of CFS member states, with about 20–30 civil society participants present. At the moment of adoption, spontaneous applause and cheers broke out amongst the CSOs and a significant minority of member state representatives.

²¹See, for example, Brem-Wilson (2010, 12–13) and La Vía Campesina (2012) for a somewhat fuller list of IPC achievements in the CFS reform process.

²²The drivers of this fragmentation are debatable. Whilst more institutionalised analysts tend to explain it within a relatively de-politicised narrative, focusing upon issues of institutional ‘performance’, for others, power and interests come to the fore. For instance, a communiqué issued in January 2008 by the Ottawa-based Action group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC) – in whose ranks are included globally respected long-term agri-food governance watchers (and participants) such as Pat Mooney – explaining the fragmentation of the multilateral food and agricultural system assigned more explanatory power to the desire of the OECD countries to insulate the areas through which they advanced their interests in the face of a changing geopolitical reality heralded by the post-colonial era, and the rise of the New International Economic Order. In the one-country, one-vote context of the FAO, the increased voting power of the developing countries meant a politicisation of FAO's agenda, and so ‘[d]uring the 1970s and ‘80s, the OECD took away the highly-political management of food aid, agricultural and rural finance, and responsibility for the science and technology necessary to advance industrial agriculture’ (ETC 2008, 8).

²³The full list of HLTF members includes: the FAO, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), International Labour Organization (ILO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), United Nations Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States (OHRLLS), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), World Bank, World Food Programme (WFP), World Health Organization (WHO), World Trade Organization (WTO), Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), Department of Political Affairs (DPA), Department of Public Information (DPI) and Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). This list also excludes other important bodies such as those working on food and agricultural genetic resources, including the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) and the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD).

²⁴The challenge of participating in the work of even just one body – the Codex Alimentarius – is illustrative. An international food standards body whose ‘semi-binding’ authority derives from its links to the WTO – through the latter body's agreements on Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) (Smythe 2009, 95, referencing Victor 1997) – between mid-October 2011 and March 2012, eight of its sub-committees met in no less than seven different countries (Codex Alimentarius 2011).

²⁵As noted above, the CFS reform was initiated in the context of competing views about the location of multilateral food security decision-making and action. The positions of some member states within the reform process and articulated later within CFS policy processes, and the emergence of initiates such as the G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (Feed the Future 2014), communicate that this is still the case. At the time, however, for the civil society participants in the CFS reform process, the strengths of the CFS's aspirations for political centrality attained in the context of these alternate perspectives were part of a range of outcomes that enabled them to claim a ‘food battle won’ (McKeon 2009b).

²⁶This shift in the transnational policy environment is also signalled by the growing importance attached by TNCs to ‘discursive power’, which augments the ‘structural’ and ‘instrumental’ power through which they defend and strengthen their influence over the direction of agrifood policy-making (See: Clapp and Fuchs 2009, 8–10).

²⁷‘To date, in all the global debates on agrarian policy, the peasant movement has been absent; we have not had a voice. The main reason for the existence of the Vía Campesina is to be that voice … ’ (Paul Nicholson, founding member of La Vía Campesina and two-term member of the ICC, quoted in Desmarais 2007, 77).

²⁸The five categories are: (I) representatives of UN agencies and bodies with a specific mandate in the field of food security and nutrition; (II) civil society and NGOs and their networks with strong relevance to issues of food security and nutrition; (III) international agricultural research systems; (IV) international and regional financial institutions, regional development banks and the WTO; (V) representatives of private-sector associations and private philanthropic foundations active in the areas of concern to the Committee (CFS 2009, Paragraph 11).

²⁹The analysis and anticipation of which constituted a major focus of my doctoral thesis (Brem-Wilson 2012).

³⁰The full name of which is the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests.

³¹As communicated in a reflection distributed through the IPC by Sofia Monsalve, Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN), who performed a key role in the International Facilitation Group that organised civil society participation in the Guidelines consultation.

³²‘Discursive power can be witnessed only through analysis of those processes of influence and exclusion that take place once particular actors, issues and modes of speaking have secured their place in the political forum under scrutiny’ (Holzscheiter 2005, 734).

³³It is important to note, however, that there are other meanings to the participation of social movement activists representing rural peoples within global food and agricultural policy processes. For instance, participation in such spaces can be regarded as providing a kind of training ground for confronting political elites, the value of which is felt when the participant returns, with increased confidence, to their local or national setting (interview, Antonio Onorati, International Focal Point, International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty, Rome, 17 January 2009).

³⁴The FAO itself has indeed previously noted an informal tendency, within the various different fora of its work, to default to English, with arising issues of inclusion and exclusion (FAO 2002, 20–25).

³⁵As noted above, rural constituency participants gaining entry to the CFS and its related policy processes are very much conscious of ‘speaking differently’. Given the almost infinite range of analytical units via which speech and text can be differentiated (van Dijk 2001, 99), empirical research is necessary to identify the exact basis of this sense of distinction, as I discuss in the conclusion.

³⁶‘Citizens' voice efforts are more effective when informed by an excellent understanding of the obstacles to effective service delivery. This includes developing a sound grasp of technical matters’ (Goetz and Gaventa 2001, 47).

³⁷I have witnessed, for example, newly appointed FAO member state representatives struggling to work out in FAO governing bodies how to signal a request to speak to the Chair (flipping their country's nameplate on its side).

³⁸Capacity in one arena may indeed be incompetence in another.

³⁹‘[I]nternalized forms of powerlessness (for example, long established forms of deference based on class, gender, education, or other hierarchy) may affect the ability of community leaders to exercise their voice effectively even when they do enter new participatory spaces’ (Gaventa 2004, 24).

⁴⁰Facilitation can be regarded as a sub-set of what Piper and von Lieres have labelled ‘democratic mediation’ (Piper and von Lieres 2011).

⁴¹‘Forum design’ can be regarded as one instance of adjustment of the requisites of effective participation (see Dryzek, Bächtiger, and Milewicz 2011, 36).

⁴²In this paper I differentiate between ‘institutional process managers’ and ‘civil society process managers’. This is a ‘thin descriptive’ distinction, and is not intended to communicate anything other than location.

⁴³The significance and dynamics of the interlocutor's status as regarded by other interlocutors within the arena need to be more fully elaborated than I am able to do here. Going forward, such an elaboration needs also to incorporate the idea of ‘communicate freedom’. This, as outlined by Habermas, is defined as ‘the possibility – mutually presupposed by participants engaged in the effort to reach understanding – of responding to the utterances of one's counterpart and to the concomitantly raised validity claims, which aim at intersubjective recognition’ (Habermas 1996, 119). This idea speaks to the necessity of a willingness – amongst decision-making elites – to rationally defend their decisions in response to the validity claims raised by social movement and civil society actors mobilising on a food sovereignty platform. Such a posture involves ‘illocutionary obligations’ (Habermas 1996, 119) – that is, a willingness to hear, and to respond to counterarguments, denouncements, critiques and so on.

⁴⁴For instance, Duncan and Barling have observed: ‘the CFS is an established and formal governance space that operates under formal UN procedures. Thus, while the CFS is in favour of including those most affected by food security, the organization structure, financial mechanisms and the political culture have yet to fully adapt to facilitate their involvement’ (Duncan and Barling 2012, 157).

⁴⁵The emphasis of La Vía Campesina upon the democratic participation of its members within key decision-making means that arriving at an informed view for the movement can be a slow process (Desmarais 2007). Institutional elites, naturalising certain modes of participation, have struggled in the past to understand the rationale for this slow pace, arguing for more ‘effective’ representation by the movement (interview, Division Director, FAO, Rome, 14 September 2009).

⁴⁶This involves in part denaturalising the modes of participation adopted by policy elites.

⁴⁷When talking about the project of ‘peasant voice’ at the transnational level, a final note has to be made about representation. In the context of the problematic that I am addressing – representatives of small-scale food producers (and other CSO non-elites) seeking to attain the REPs of the CFS – representation has at least a double meaning. On the one hand, it refers to the degree to which an individual or organisation is connected to and articulates with the positions, interests, views, etc. of a (much) wider membership/constituency outside of the space into which the representation is being made. And, on the other, it refers to the degree to which the challenges and opportunities to attain the REPs available to and confronting this actor are typical of, again, a (much) wider range of actors at the grassroots. If the research that I anticipate in this paper is going to contribute substantively to the democratisation of transnational agrifood governance – then it will be fundamentally important, though politically very sensitive, to determine the degree to which those participating in the CFS under the banner of small-scale food producers or rural constituencies are indeed representative in both senses.

Additional information

Josh Brem-Wilson is a Research Associate at the International Centre for Participation Studies, University of Bradford, England. His work focuses upon the struggle of non-elite actors to gain voice in (transnational) policy processes and the new democratic potentials that this entails. He attaches a high priority to collaborative research in which the knowingness and interests of the research partner are integrated into the project from the outset. He also tutors various food-related courses for the Open University of Catalonia.