Agribiz and small farmers battle for control of our food systems in Rome
Date: 15 October 2015
It’s not often that Monsanto executives are forced to confront smallholder famers from South India in negotiating rooms. But that’s what happened in Rome this week at the 42nd session of the UN’s Committee on Food Security.
70% of the world’s food comes from small-scale farmers. Farmers such as Kunnaiyan, a smallholder vegetable farmer from Southern India, who I met this week in Rome. Kunnaiyan has come to Rome with a clear purpose, he plans to “fight the mighty, and speak truth to the powerful”. As a representative of a South Indian farmers group and a member of La Via Campesina, he is here in Rome joining hundreds of other representatives of small scale farmers, fisherfolk, land workers, peasant groups and other food producers from every region of the world. Together with NGOs, unions and other social movements these groups form what is known as the Civil Society Mechanism (CSM). The CSM is a platform which gives a voice to civil society groups and individuals involved in all areas of the food system – ordinary people like Kunnaiyan – at the Committee on Food Security (CFS), which is the global authority on issues of food security.
The force of the private sector
Looking at the list of corporations who attend the CFS is enough to understand why Kunnaiyan and other small scale food producers are so keen to ensure their voices are heard. From Coca-Cola and Monsanto’s contributions to sessions on water security and Mars chipping in to conversations about nutrition, to a Gates Foundation session on food security and Cargill’s on public-private partnerships to end hunger, the growing role of the private sector in our food systems was clearer than ever at this year’s CSF.
These contributions from the private sector happen via the parallel Private Sector Mechanism (PSM), which is all part of the ‘multi-stakeholder’ approach that allows both civil society and the private sector to contribute to the CFS. While there is much to celebrate in this uniquely inclusive approach to global policy, there are however concerns from some civil society delegates around how level this playing field really is given the CFS receives funds from the likes of the Gates foundation. There were strong opinions voiced by participants in the CSM that in order to maintain this unique forum that the CFS must resist private funds.
Power talks
As the debates unfolded in Rome, it quickly became apparent that it was not only the private sector delegates who were there defending the interests of corporations. At Monday’s opening session, which focused on the Sustainable Development Goals that were recently agreed upon in New York, we were told by senior world figures and heads of UN agencies that the involvement of the private sector is essential to reaching the goal of food security and zero hunger. Market-led, technical solutions to ensuring the world’s population is nutritiously fed emerged as the dominant approach from the intergovernmental bodies present. Meanwhile it was striking to see the dominance of neo-liberal language embedded in the interventions from many member states. The past few days has seen a constant litany of the importance of improving farmers’ efficiency, connecting them to global markets, increasing productivity of their seeds, the vital role of Public-Private-Partnerships, and so on and on. Barely a keynote speech passed without praise for the crucial role of the private sector in our global food system, which seems odd given how small a role they actually play in feeding the world As I witnessed the realpolitk of global decision making play out in Rome, Kunniyan joked that it wouldn’t really matter if the private sector representatives stayed home because after all, most of the powerful member states and multinational bodies are here to speak on behalf of them.
The CSM resistance!
Any corporate agenda that emerges at the CFS will be loudly and vocally resisted by civil society representatives. One focus of this year’s discussions was water security, where representatives from the dairy industry and agri-businesses spoke to the plenary session about improving water’s efficiency, and the EU delegation talked about the economic value of water. This market orientated approach was countered by an Argentine representative of La Via Campesina, who reminded the packed room of delegates that water is a public good, and access to water is a human right that cannot be privatised for profit. As Kunniyan later reflected “people have been accessing water from time immemorial, so why now do corporations think we need to turn it into a commodity for us to continue accessing it”.
In a later plenary on nutrition I witnessed a similar scenario when Gabriella – a delegate from Ecuador who was there representing Ecuadorian small scale fisherfolk – made an impassioned intervention from the floor to tell of her concerns that including the private sector creates a bias towards solutions that only deal with the symptoms of malnutrition and not the structural root causes. She reminded states that it is their responsibility to ensure citizens the right to nutritious food, and asked why, if corporations were so keen to work on hunger and nutrition, were they so rapidly exploiting the very resources – land and water – that are crucial to producing nutritious food.
Talking to corporates
While the CFS can at time feel like a battle Kunniyan, along with the other civil society delegates I spoke to, told me that they recognised the importance of having powerful corporations at the table. Not only is this opportunity to engage, challenge and debate with the private sector a valuable opportunity in itself, but their presence at the CFS show that it’s a credible platform and means it is taken seriously by those involved in the global food system. The feeling I got from the civil society representatives towards the private sector involvement was summed up well by one intervention in the plenary from a CSM delegate from India: “as long as the private sector have a seat at the table, we need to make sure they don’t EAT the table”
The fight continues.
Asked if it is all worth it, Kunniyan told me that “even if it’s a fight we don’t always win, we won’t stop coming here to keep fighting” and he reminds me that as producers of 70% of the world’s food, small-scale food producers are many, while the corporations are few. So as the world marks world food day this Friday we should celebrate the continued work of Kunniyan and those millions of people across the world who are producing it, despite the efforts of big agribusiness to control all of the world’s food systems.
