Malnutrition, including both micronutrient deficiencies or so-called “hidden hunger” as well as overweight and obesity now plague ~3.4 billion people worldwide ( HLPE, 2020).
The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated hunger and is anticipated to add between 83 and 132 million more people to the number in chronic undernourishment 1. According to the most recent State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, 746 million people were suffering from severe food insecurity in 2019 and an additional 1.25 billion people experienced moderate food insecurity ( FAO et al., 2020). Despite global commitments to end hunger by 2030 in Sustainable Development Goal 2, the number of people who are food-insecure has risen since 2014. The Lancet Commission on the Double Burden of Malnutrition describes the current state of food and agricultural systems as a “triple crisis” in which obesity, undernutrition, and climate change are decimating human and planetary health ( Swinburn et al., 2019). As the world is increasingly cognizant of social and environmental problems caused by the industrial food system, the UNFSS has emerged as an elaborate process to undermine more democratic arenas of global food governance, while reinforcing corporate control over food systems.įew people will dispute that global food systems need transformation.
SUMMIT CFS DRIVERS
In the ensuing months, once Guterres appointed a Special Envoy and the structure of the Summit was announced, the drivers behind the Summit became clear. In its efforts to promote the interests of the world's largest corporations, the WEF has pursued a “Great Reset” intended to allay opposition to neoliberal globalization through a new vision of “stakeholder capitalism” and multistakeholder global governance ( Schwab, 2021). Just a few months earlier, Amina Mohammed (Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations and Chair of the United Nations Sustainable Development Group) had signed a strategic partnership with the WEF. However, the Secretary-General did provide a few clues to identify the key partners of the Summit-the Rome-Based Agencies of the UN and the World Economic Forum (WEF). It was unclear who would organize the Summit, where it would be held, or where the call for the Summit had originated. Although the CFS is the primary international and intergovernmental platform for food security and nutrition policy, the call for the Summit neither emerged from the CFS, nor even the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The announcement took many in the room by surprise. On World Food Day in 2019, UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced to the Plenary of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) that he was organizing a high-level UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) as part of the Decade of Action to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals. However, the authors suggest that the UNFSS instead seems to follow a trajectory in which efforts to govern global food systems in the public interest has been subverted to maintain colonial and corporate forms of control. As the COVID-19 pandemic illuminates the structural vulnerabilities of the neoliberal model of food systems and the consequences of climate change for food production, a high-level commitment to equitable and sustainable food systems is needed now more than ever. It elaborates how the current structure and forms of participant recruitment and public engagement lack basic transparency and accountability, fail to address significant conflicts of interest, and ignore human rights.
Although few people will dispute that global food systems need transformation, it has become clear that the Summit is instead an effort by a powerful alliance of multinational corporations, philanthropies, and export-oriented countries to subvert multilateral institutions of food governance and capture the global narrative of “food systems transformation.” This article places the upcoming Summit in the context of previous world food summits and analyzes concerns that have been voiced by many within civil society. This article analyzes the development and organization of the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), which is being convened by UN Secretary General António Guterres in late 2021. 3Department of Global Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States.
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