“This Feminism is Transformative, Rebellious and Autonomous”: inside struggles to shape the CFS Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment

ABSTRACT

The Women’s Working Group of the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSM) of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has long advocated for policies reflective of gender equity in agriculture and food systems rooted in agroecology, human rights, and food sovereignty. In 2021, after years of activism, a series of drafts toward a set of Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment were produced by the CFS. With contributions from members of the CSM and La Via Campesina, we provide insights into the struggles, critiques, and paths forward for continued engagement with the CFS on this heavily politicized topic.

KEYWORDS:

• agroecology
• feminism
• food sovereignty
• Committee on World Food Security
• La Via Campesina
• social movements

Introduction

“The feminism that we propose recognises our cultural diversity and the very different conditions that we face in each region, country and place. We are building it from the daily struggles which women across the planet fight. Struggles for our autonomy, social transformation, the defense and protection of peasant agriculture, and food sovereignty. From this, new men and women will emerge with new gender relationships based on equality, respect, cooperation and mutual recognition. This feminism is transformative, rebellious and autonomous. We are building it collectively through reflection and concrete actions against the capital and the patriarchy. It stands in solidarity with the struggles of all women and all those peoples who fight.” (La Via Campesina 2017)

Since La Via Campesina (LVC)¹ was first formed, women have struggled for equality within the movement. The most recent iteration of this struggle is best captured by what is referred to as “peasant and popular feminism,” deeply rooted in food sovereignty. While LVC is still debating the meaning and practice of peasant and popular feminism, it is clear that for the movement, feminism is a broad political strategy of structural transformation to eradicate gender inequality, all forms of violence, and patriarchal systems that harm both people and nature. This includes the violence perpetrated by agribusiness and the neoliberal food policies that enable concentration of power in the food system to occur (La Via Campesina 2021). The feminism of which we speak “is ‘peasant’ because it is part of the reality of the countryside and not the city, and ‘popular’ because it is a feminism of the ‘popular classes’” (Ibid 2021, p. 15). LVC now seeks to insert a peasant and popular feminist approach in all spaces where it works, including in international-level, institutional arenas.

This past year, the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) of the United Nations (UN) initiated a policy negotiation process to reevaluate the role of gender in agriculture and food systems called the CFS Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment (GEWE). In doing so, the CFS is demonstrating some recognition of what many social movements, academics, and women, LGBTIQ+, and non-binary workers globally have long been arguing: the struggle to end hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity is, at its core, a struggle for gender equality. According to the CFS, the Voluntary Guidelines will “provide concrete policy guidance to Member Countries and development partners to overcome gender-based discrimination, promote women’s and girls’ rights, and empower them as part of their efforts to eradicate hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition” (CFS n.d.). Members of the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples Mechanism (CSIPM) of the CFS – many of whom have close ties to LVC – worked hard to bring this policy process to the fore.

Yet, this commentary calls attention to what we – a collective of farmers and scholars-activists – see as some of the major limitations of the First Draft of the Voluntary Guidelines on GEWE and the concurrent struggle for peasant and popular feminism in the CFS. Notably, this commentary does not reflect the opinions of all constituencies in the CSIPM or the CSIPM’s Women’s Working Group as a whole. Instead, we present here the results of conversations between Jessie MacInnis and Nettie Wiebe – both representatives of the National Farmers Union of Canada (a founding member of LVC) who have participated in CSIPM meetings and the North American consultations on the Voluntary Guidelines – and two scholar-activists, Annette Desmarais and Maywa Montenegro de Wit, who have followed the process from afar.

With a long track record in researching and organizing the politics of agroecology and food sovereignty as farmers and scholar-activists, we responded to this salient Voluntary Guideline process with an eye to supporting the CSIPM objectives. In analyzing the First Draft of the CFS Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) in the Context of Food Security and Nutrition, released in December 2021, we are pleased to see the draft reflects some concerns raised by the CSIPM Women’s Working Group. However, a number of critical issues are remarkably absent from this policy framework. Experiences with and observations on the consultation process demonstrate an ongoing pushback against agroecology and transformative policy coupled with the rise of reformist multistakeholderism.

Decades of research highlight the persistence of asymmetrical gender relations in rural areas. Despite the fact that women produce over 50% of the world’s food, women, children, and members of the LGBTIQ+ community face disproportionately high rates of hunger (Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 2011). COVID-19 further underscored these inequities, demonstrating how gender inequality and discrimination shape global pandemics “in tangible and significant ways” (Duncan and Claeys 2020, 5) and deepening food insecurity worldwide (World Food Programme 2020). There is no doubt that a CFS process aimed at realizing gender equality is vital and that it comes at a particularly crucial time.

We do not contest the whether, but we do want to expand on the how. To that end, while in-depth research on popular and peasant feminism as it relates to global food security governance is always welcome, it is not the aim of this paper. Rather, our goal in this commentary is to highlight the current political dynamic of what we see as dangerous anti-democratic structures being reproduced in the UN system. In so doing, we seek to highlight the need for strategic and immediate action. We begin by first explaining how the Voluntary Guidelines on GEWE emerged and then discuss key concerns related to the content and process. We explain the CSIPM response to this policy process and assess how the Voluntary Guidelines on GEWE reflect a broader corporate capture of the UN. En route, we shed light on strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and lessons learned throughout the process. We also consider paths forward that might best ensure the CFS can be a space that fosters policy rooted in transformational food systems change.

As we submit this commentary, virtual negotiations for the final draft are underway at the CFS, with in-person negotiations slated to take place during Summer 2022. As anticipated, the concerns brought forward in the following pages still hold, but members of the CSIPM are now increasing pressure on member states and the private sector to focus more concretely on human rights, expand upon binary language to include gender and sexual diversities, and acknowledge intersecting forms of discrimination in the final text of the voluntary guidelines.

Establishing the voluntary guidelines on GEWE

The CFS was established in 1974 to serve as a forum within the Food and Agriculture Organization for states and non-state actors to review, negotiate, and follow up on global approaches to food security policy (CFS, n.d.). After the global food crisis of 2008, the CFS was reformed to offer a space for “discussing alternatives to the productivity paradigm,” expanding its policy processes to emphasize food accessibility, inadequate incomes, and the livelihoods of small-scale producers over questions of food availability and increasing productivity (Lambek 2019). In addition to member countries, five categories of participants were introduced: UN agencies and other UN bodies, civil society, international agricultural research institutions, international and regional financial institutions, and the private sector. Critically, civil society gained a new footing in the reformed CFS, self-organizing into the CSIPM to advocate for food sovereignty, agroecology and indivisible human rights – and thus offering a counter-narrative to the productivist, narrowly-interpreted food security and right to food paradigms that fail to interrogate power inequities common in UN processes. In this political space, CSIPM contributions are most often challenged by the Private Sector Mechanism (PSM) which represents corporate and philanthropic interests. The CSIPM is made up of social justice-oriented civil society organizations and social movements; it is divided into eleven constituencies that includes the Women’s Working Group. By way of these diverse constituencies, food sovereignty and agroecology frameworks, and a vision for radical food systems transformation, the CSIPM mounts a legitimate challenge to both the private sector and member countries of the CFS, urging them toward ground-breaking policies that eliminate food insecurity and malnutrition by radically transforming food systems. In the context of CFS policy processes, the CSIPM and PSM are limited to agenda setting and participation in deliberations along with state actors, yet neither group has voting rights. While this limits the CSIPM, the emphasis on multilateralism is a strength of the CFS: states make decisions and are held accountable rather than the increasingly popular “multistakeholder” platforms where decision-making may be more diffuse, but lacks accountability and transparency, opening the door to conflicts of interest (McMichael 2021). CSIPM participants engage regularly in bilateral talks with member states in an attempt to gain support for progressive human rights-based language and framing in policy processes.

In the case of the Voluntary Guidelines on GEWE, the CSIPM Women’s Working Group initially had high expectations for the process to create a visionary policy document on gender equality. The Women’s Working Group – with the support of many within the FAO Rome-Based Agencies (RBAs) and some governments – first worked to include GEWE in the CFS Multi Year Program of Work (MYPOW) in order to initiate the process that would lead to negotiated guidelines. A successful, well-attended Women’s Forum was organized in July 2017, with a follow-up held in September 2017 to discuss the matter, and the CFS 44th Plenary Session endorsed the workstream. The CFS acknowledged the major outcomes of the Women’s Forum, emphasizing agroecology and noting “the role of women as knowledge bearers and agents of transformation towards more sustainable production systems, including agroecology” (CFS 2017, p. 2). The official endorsement from governments, expressed by their adoption of the outcomes of the Women’s Forum during the 44th Session, was an historic breakthrough in CFS policy. The 44th Session’s acceptance of this more transformational discourse led many to hope that the initiative might actually lead to effective progressive guidelines and spur momentum to defend women’s rights and gender equality in the CFS.

Following this endorsement, Nettie Wiebe, one of the co-coordinators of the Women’s Working Group and Alberta Guerra, Action Aid member of the Women’s Working Group, distilled the outcomes of the Forum and input from CSIPM members into a CSIPM “Vision Statement” to guide this work going forward. Unlike other CFS policy guidelines, the GEWE process did not begin with a High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) report since the UN already had ample documentation of gender issues and the Women’s Forum offered a path forward. Following the 44th Session, the CFS chair appointed a consultant to draft a scoping paper that formed the basis of the Zero Draft document produced by a technical task team, which included two CSIPM members.

The Zero Draft of the Voluntary Guidelines on GEWE in the context of food security and nutrition is split into four parts: 1) background and objectives, 2) core principles that underpin the guidelines, 3) the Voluntary Guidelines split into nine subsections, and 4) implementation and monitoring of the use and application of the Voluntary Guidelines. Broadly, the objectives of the guidelines are to support “Member States, development partners and other stakeholders to advance gender equality, women’s and girls’ rights, and women’s and girls’ empowerment” (CFS, Zero Draft 4), and provide non-binding policy guidance based on “good practices and lessons learnt on gender mainstreaming, gender transformative interventions and innovative solutions” (Ibid, 5). The Draft highlighted a number of strong core principles that underpin the guidelines, such as a commitment to human rights, intersectionality and multidimensional approaches, adequate financial technical and human resources supported by political commitment, and public policies to ensure enabling environments for change (Ibid). Despite strong framing and commitments by the CFS, the Zero Draft fell short of meeting expectations for meaningful policy recommendations.

Nettie Wiebe, then co-coordinator of the Women’s Working Group, stressed that the Zero Draft guidelines were weak and misguided, noting in a May 13, 2021, e-mail to the Working Group:

Large sections of the discussion conflate realizing rights and achieving equality with becoming more viable links in the “value chain”. The emphasis on agriculture inputs to improve productivity, finances, training, and technology are all geared towards improving our access to, and use of, the instruments of industrial, intensive, high tech, commodified food and commerce “value chains”. (2021)

These sentiments were shared by her colleagues in the CSIPM Women’s Working Group who made it clear that there was “no interest in a process that will limit itself to copy-paste already existing language” (CSIPM Women’s Working Group 2021, p.1). The CSIPM Women’s Working Group was critical of the Zero Draft in that the document did not reflect any commitment to food systems transformation on the ground, a transformation that is desperately needed to improve the lives of women, children, and LGBTIQ+ people. Specifically, the importance of agroecology as a pathway to achieving global food security was not articulated. The Group also stressed that the Zero Draft reflected a binary approach to gender identity and sexual orientation, lacked grounding in human rights, and did little to challenge current market-based modes of agricultural production thus effectively reinforcing productivist approaches (Ibid 2021). It overstated the importance of technological innovations while diminishing the vital roles of traditional and Indigenous knowledges. While there was emphasis on “cultural contexts and norms” being responsible for gender injustices, there was no mention of how neoliberal, colonial, and patriarchal economic models perpetuate asymmetrical gender relations and structures (Ibid 2021). In short, the transformative approaches of food sovereignty and agroecology, addressing structural gender and power imbalances, were not adequately reflected in the Zero Draft’s policy proposals.

Analyzing the first draft from a North American perspective

Using the comments developed by the Women’s Working Group as a foundation, a group of CSIPM representatives in North America – including Nettie Wiebe and Jessie MacInnis – prepared interventions based on lived understandings of the food systems in this region for the virtual consultation sessions hosted by the CFS in November 2021. Representatives argued that the Zero Draft did not challenge structural injustices, nor did it adequately address the intersections between discrimination and gender-based violence. The North American representatives joined CSIPM regional representatives who were demanding more inclusive language beyond the gender binary, pressuring governments to stand up for gender diversity and LGBTIQ+ rights. It was important to restate that these guidelines need to go beyond reiterating previously used policy language and instead produce a ground-breaking CFS policy document on gender issues. The goal of consultation was to carefully dismantle the narrative of the Zero Draft, which remained firmly focused on women adapting successfully to dominant agribusiness production models. Participants instead sought to integrate a genuine human rights – and peasants’ rights – frame that includes agroecology.

The North American intervention also noted the importance of integrating rights articulated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). In addition to noting Article 4 of UNDROP that recognizes worker and peasant women’s rights, representatives at the consultation stressed that land access rights (Article 17) and migrant worker rights (Article 14) are of significant import in the North American context.² Access to land is increasingly difficult due to the consolidation of farms, the financialization of farmland, growing investor and corporate ownership of land, and increasing land concentration – all of which is driving up the price of land and effectively threatening the environment and small-scale farmers’ ability to gain or maintain a foothold in farming (Ashwood et al. 2020; Desmarais et al. 2017; Fairbairn et al. 2021; Qualman et al. 2020). Furthermore, migrant and seasonal farmworkers, who number more than 3 million in the United States and 50,000 in Canada, constitute a vulnerable group whose rights are constantly denied despite being vital to the functioning of current North American food systems (National Center for Farmworker Health, Inc 2012; Statistics Canada 2021). The number of farmworker women in both Canada and the United States is rising, yet in the United States, women are paid lower wages, experience sexual harassment at high rates, and are often unable to speak out because of their immigration status (SPLC 2010). In Canada, women farmworkers are part of the archaic Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, a program heavily criticized for its lack of access to permanent residency status, and recently under fire for failing to acknowledge migrant women’s reproductive rights and sexual autonomy (Cohen and Caxaj 2018). The North American representatives argued that the UNDROP provides an essential framework for the development of these guidelines, as it was written and developed by peasants, for peasants.

The second key point built upon the Women’s Working Group’s criticisms of the productivist approach of the Zero Draft, which assumes that women must be aided and “empowered” to adapt to and gain equality in the current unjust food system. The representatives argued that this “empowerment” does more harm than good, as it does not account for the fact that current dominant food systems are built on patriarchal structures of inequality that are inherently designed to exclude and marginalize women, non-binary, and LGBTIQ+ people. Further, Indigenous, Black, and people of color in the region face further discrimination across the food system than settler and/or white people. Without challenging intersectional structural injustices that perpetuate gender inequity, the Zero Draft fell short.

Analysis of the first draft

Once the consultation process was completed, the First Draft of the Voluntary Guidelines was released in December 2021. Our analysis of this version reveals integration of several of the CSIPM’s initial criticisms and recommendations, improving the guidelines in some important ways. First, agroecological production is referenced explicitly on three occasions. Notably, the first draft acknowledges that governments should “promote more sustainable gender equitable food systems such as those based on agroecological and other innovative approaches” (CFS, First Draft 2021, p.11). It also states that “agroecological and other innovative approaches could improve the sustainability and inclusiveness of agriculture, fisheries and food systems because of their holistic approach and emphasis on equity … ” (Ibid 2021, p.22). Women’s rights, agency, decision-making, knowledge, and organizations are also given space, as are references to the importance of women’s access to, and control over, productive resources. The emphasis on the importance of digital and innovative technologies was pared down, giving way to more nuanced recommendations that integrate the importance of Indigenous and traditional knowledge.

In our view, the First Draft continues to lack a broader critical frame that challenges status quo industrial farming models and agribusiness-led food systems. Civil society expectations for this and other policy processes have been routinely blocked by the reluctance of business-friendly state actors to see beyond productivist models of agriculture and food system structures. This phenomenon of corporate capture is nothing new but is being exacerbated now by the rise of multistakeholderism, defined by Harris Gleckman, as an emerging global governance system that “seeks to bring together global actors that have a potential “stake” in an issue and ask them to collaboratively sort out a solution” (Gleckman, 2018, p. iv). While states and corporations often commingle at the frontier of neoliberal practice, the UN’s charge as a multilateral body has historically been distinct from the ‘stakeholder capitalism’ envisioned by the World Economic Forum (Schwab 2021). In multilateral UN spaces, state governments, rather than private sector or civil society actors, are vested with authority to make decisions (Transnational Institute 2019). However, mounting evidence suggests that the UN is succumbing to multistakeholderism (Claeys 2021; Gleckman 2019), as can be seen in the 2019 signing of a strategic partnership framework between FAO and the World Economic Forum. Such shifts pose risks to the UN’s human-rights based approaches, imperil progress on agroecology, and pivot systemwide accountability from a broad (if diffuse) public to a concentrated elite. Global decision-making, in other words, is changing, giving actors such as transnational corporations seats at negotiation tables, “many of whom are actually causing the global problems that the UN system is tasked to fix” (Gleckman 2019).

In the context of the CFS, there is ongoing tension within civil society organizations (including within LVC) which erupts periodically in discussions of whether the governments taking decisions at the CFS Bureau meetings are so hostile to CSIPM interests and so beholden to their corporate and/ or political interests that the multilateralism we champion is not in working order. However, in the absence of accountable alternatives and threatened by even more abrasive multistakeholderism, the UN multilateral system, especially the CFS, is still deemed to be the most functional option.

An analysis of the Voluntary Guidelines on GEWE process opens a door into the limitations to the CSIPM’s discursive power and policy influence, as some member states show constant resistance to CSIPM objectives and narratives. Simultaneously, the ways in which corporate narratives are taking root across UN institutions and processes can be observed through this resistance. This phenomenon is being increasingly well documented (Anderson and Maughan 2021; de Wit, Maywa et al. 2021; Gliessman and Montenegro de Wit 2021). This alarming trend must be tackled not only by civil society, but by member states that are being undermined and co-opted by powerful corporate interests. As noted above, the primary critique of the CSIPM toward this draft is that it does not sufficiently address the intersectional structural inequities that implicate women, girls, and those in the LGBTIQ+ communities, nor is it rooted in human rights frameworks.

Given these concerns, we encourage food sovereignty and scholar activists to consider the following questions: How, as a UN body, can the CFS produce a policy document grounded in anything but human rights given the FAO’s commitment to the right to food? What does corporate influence mean for democratic processes in the UN, for multilateralism? If agroecology is being hailed as a viable and feminist approach to sustainable food systems (HLPE 2019; CSIPM Women’s Working Group 2019; Zaremba et al. 2021), why does it not feature more dominantly in the guidelines? In attempting to answer these questions, we turn first to the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) that happened in September 2021, exemplifying the subversion of UN processes by multistakeholderism, and then to a brief overview of the politics of agroecology within the CFS.

The UN food systems summit: multistakeholderism and reproducing patriarchy

The UNFSS, heralded by its protagonists as an opportunity to reset global food systems, offered more of a glimpse into the corporate capture of UN processes than anything resembling food systems transformation. It was clear from its outset that the UNFSS was being developed by the private sector in consultation with the World Economic Forum without transparency. Instead of centering the CFS and its existing multilateral processes – where discussions and policy processes surrounding food systems and nutrition are already happening – the Summit sought to set up its own, opaque hierarchies and policy processes. The Summit organizers offered civil society a seat at the table only after it had established a corporate agenda, prompting a boycott by the CSIPM accompanied by hundreds of researchers, scholars, and scientists (Agroecology Research-Action Collective 2021). Civil society organizations and social movements were enraged not only by the top-down exclusion of the Summit, but also the ways in which agroecology is now being systematically appropriated or outright dismissed by private sector interests. The Summit’s vision is a food future rooted in technological innovations and market-led solutions “which should somehow translate into growth that benefits all, belying the evidence of steadily increasing inequalities within and between countries” (McKeon 2021), and in turn, denying grassroots, rights-based, feminist demands, including those from the CSIPM. Dialogue on gender equality and women’s empowerment were included in UNFSS proceedings only insofar as they contributed to wider narratives of employment as empowerment, top-down technological advances, and status quo market-based food systems.

The corporate and philanthropic capture of the UNFSS is reflective of the ways in which the private sector seeks to dominate food systems and agriculture narratives in the CFS, keeping agroecology and feminism politically irrelevant and/or tokenized and civil society demands at arms’ length. One strategy includes fervent attempts to discount and disprove agroecology as a transformative approach to achieving global food security, food sovereignty, and gender equality. Despite the release of the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) Report, Agroecological and other innovative approaches for sustainable agriculture and food systems that enhance food security and nutrition (2019), agroecology within the CFS is treated either like an ideologically contentious movement or a production tool to be combined with other tools rather than as a whole-system approach to advance global food security. Further, despite agroecology’s alignment with feminist and gender-just principles (Zaremba et al. 2021), its detractors remain quick to highlight other agricultural “innovations” (Anderson and Maughan 2021) with no grounding in gendered analyses. The upshot is a dizzying combination of institutional cooptation (an embrace that enervates agroecology’s transformative potential) and delegitimization (a rejection that vies to undercut agroecology’s power) that combine to distract from the necessary paradigm shift to a food sovereignty centered on gender equity in agriculture and food systems. Of course, this is part of institutionalizing transformative frameworks like agroecology: the terrains of struggle between different actors around definitions, implementation, dilution, and cooptation are constantly in flux. Despite these and other challenges, civil society must look to pathways that will further the struggle toward gender equity.

Conclusion: how to move forward on future work with the CFS?

The crises of global food insecurity and malnutrition coupled with the constant reproduction of patriarchal structures cannot be addressed via voluntary mechanisms and human rights declarations alone so long as corporate narratives and productivism dominate. As food sovereignty activists, we know that progressive social movements are most successful in making states accountable when activism is rooted in localized, contextual analyses while also building international connections: without this potent grounding and international solidarity, CFS voluntary guidelines have no teeth. The widening rift between high-tech, input-heavy agriculture and farmer-led, ecological agriculture ensures that policymaking spaces will continue to be polarized along these lines. Across multiple CFS policy processes, similar struggles to uphold rights demands, principles of food sovereignty, and agroecology are unfolding. The persistence of the productivist narrative within the CFS, accompanied by the increasing corporate creep within the UN as evidenced by the UNFSS and its aftermath, is challenging many who continue pushing for just, equitable food systems through the CFS. Yet, given the ongoing dispossession, displacement, and impoverishment of rural populations now exacerbated by climate change, it is more crucial than ever that the voices of resistance rise up – loudly and clearly – and that these are heard in all policy-making spaces, from the local to the international. While some progress has been achieved in that the First Draft of the Voluntary Guidelines on GEWE incorporated many CSIPM inputs, we know the struggle does not stop here. In reflecting on the quote at the beginning of this paper, on the pursuit of a feminism that is transformative, rebellious, and autonomous, clearly there is a long way to go. With this in mind, what do experiences that we’ve discussed suggest for how to move forward in line with peasant and popular feminism? We see two possible interwoven paths.

First, we must build from the inevitably uneven outcomes of the GEWE policy process as both the positive and negative can help food sovereignty movements define pathways forward. Regardless of whether the final draft of the Voluntary Guidelines is weak or strong in the eyes of the CSIPM, many discussions about gender-related rights and demands in the context of current food systems narratives have been raised for the first time at the CFS level. These conversations are set to become louder and more frequent. The struggle at the CFS must continue because of our collective responsibility to organizations and movements to remain engaged despite – and because of – evolving political struggles. The voluntary guidelines process has and will continue to provoke discussion of the injustices faced by women and LGBITQ+ persons within deeply heteropatriarchal systems still largely viewed as ‘normal.’ Further, despite the non-binding nature of voluntary guidelines, similar to UN declarations they remain important tools to complement advocacy efforts in local and national contexts.

Next, as this struggle continues, let’s recall that the CFS is our (civil society’s) space: it is a policymaking space where transformation can take root, and this is fundamentally its intent. Though agroecology rooted in food sovereignty is systematically challenged (and in the case of food sovereignty, often deleted from policy texts entirely), only through these approaches will democratic food systems representative of civil society demands emerge. Further, it is strategically very useful for the LVC to continue emphasizing the UNDROP to clearly articulate radical alternatives based on food sovereignty. Although the declaration has some way to go toward more fully integrating women’s rights, the benefits of focusing on UNDROP are its legitimacy as an existing international human rights mechanism and its deep grounding in LVC and its allies’ experiences. It also offers rights-based approaches to addressing the issues of stakeholders. Articulating collective and individual rights as the basis for policy, it legitimizes the perspective of rights-holders (those with rights) rather than stakeholders (those with economic interests) as the primary subjects of public policy and appropriate holders of the political power wielded by the state.

The journey to arrive at the First Draft of the Voluntary Guidelines of GEWE has been dynamic, frustrating, and ultimately, hopeful. The guiding force of popular and peasant feminism grounds those of us in LVC in the continued struggle for gender equity, whether in our communities or the CFS. As the final text takes shape, the Women’s Working Group of the CSIPM continues to advocate for voluntary guidelines that challenge the status quo and assert feminism that is “transformative, rebellious, and autonomous” (La Via Campesina 2017). We invite you all to support this ongoing struggle.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This contribution was made possible with support from the Canada Research Chair program; Canada Research Chair in Human Rights, Social Justice, and Food Sovereignty.

Notes

1. LVC is a transnational agrarian social movement made up of 182 peasant and small-scale farmer organizations based in 81 countries. For more information visit www.viacampesina.org.

2. It is important to note that while UNDROP represents a significant win for LVC, it does not adequately address women’s rights as is highlighted in Martignoni and Joanna, Claeys (2022) excellent and in-depth analysis.