When I was a child, my father, who had witnessed the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, told me how common ground was sought around shared principles in a world fractured by the Cold War. The declaration, adopted in 1948, upheld a series of basic rights, including to adequate food. States have the duty to protect, respect and fulfill such rights and can be called to account if they fail to do so.
UN membership grew rapidly in the 1960s, when many former colonies gained independence and subsequently pushed for greater equity in global governance. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966, called on signatories to ensure an equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need.
The oil-supply shocks and stagflation of the mid-1970s shifted the momentum away from state-led, rights-based governance to neoliberalism as the dominant policymaking paradigm. This approach was based on the misguided beliefs that unfettered markets allocate resources most efficiently, economic globalization benefits all countries, and the private sector provides goods and services more effectively than the public sector.
From the 1980s, the neoliberal structural-adjustment programs imposed by the World Bank and the IMF on cash-strapped countries, coupled with the advent of the WTO, restricted the policy space of governments in the Global South. The adjustment programs called for governments to roll back regulations — including labor and environmental protections — that were deemed a hindrance to free trade and to open their markets to imports of subsidized food products.
The resulting globalized, corporate-led industrial food system, which promised to improve food security worldwide, has been a dismal failure. Citizens have been left to pay the price for neoliberal policies: fragile supply chains, workers without rights, a worsening climate crisis, severely diminished biodiversity, reduced access to healthy food, unsustainable diets and extreme economic inequality. With hunger and malnutrition on the rise, it is time for a radical course correction.
Reforming the global industrial food system would be difficult, in part because it is characterized by an extremely high concentration of power in the hands of a few multinational agribusiness companies. Only a handful of firms dominate the global grain and fertilizer markets, a position that has enabled profiteering when supply chains break down, as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic and following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Backed by powerful commodity-exporting countries, neoliberal policies have promoted industrial production of export crops at the expense of domestic food production by smallholders, transforming Global South countries into food importers vulnerable to price spikes. Financial power also buys narrative power, which can be used to praise the latest food tech. No one should care that pesticides are devastating bee populations if corporations can turn tiny drones into artificial pollinators (all for a price, of course).
The latest manifestation of this concentrated corporate power is multinationals’ attempts to gain control of global food governance from the rights-based intergovernmental system. In 2010, the World Economic Forum launched what has come to be called a multi-stakeholder approach to governance in which everyone has a seat at the table. This framework is far less inclusive than it sounds. When the roles, responsibilities and interests of different actors are ignored, and power imbalances are disregarded, corporations inevitably prevail over the less powerful, and government accountability and human rights are set aside.
Inviting corporations to join the decisionmaking process tips the scales in favor of industrial, chemical-heavy monoculture — a move justified by the neoliberal narrative that we desperately need to harness corporate investment and innovation to increase food production. In reality, the world produces more than enough to feed everyone. The problem is unequal access, which requires political, not technical, solutions.
Supporting small family farmers, who produce a significant proportion of the world’s food and reach consumers through local markets rather than global supply chains, requires an entirely different policy framework.
However, why would multinational corporations advocate an approach that goes against their interests?
The UN Food Systems Summit in September 2021 was the apotheosis of “multi-stakeholderism.” Organized without a mandate from governments, and with strong participation by agrifood corporations and the Gates Foundation, the summit did not address the right to food and — in the words of UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri — was disconnected from “people’s real needs.” The summit’s “Stocktaking Moment,” which started yesterday, is the first global follow-up to this nonevent.
Many civil-society organizations that fight for people’s right to choose the structure of their food systems have contested the events. These groups prefer platforms such as the UN Committee on World Food Security, which includes constituencies most affected by food insecurity, focuses on the structural causes of hunger and inequality, and promotes accountability by reserving voting for governments. The People’s Autonomous Response to the UN Food Systems Summit — a coalition of such groups — held public events earlier this month to highlight power imbalances that challenge democratic food governance and to consider the future of multilateralism.
Determining how to achieve adequate food for all is the right of citizens and the duty of governments. Those concerned with making profits should have no place at the table.
Nora McKeon, a former chief of civil society relations at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, teaches at Roma Tre University and the International University College of Turin. She is the author, most recently, of Food Security Governance: Empowering Communities, Regulating Corporations.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has a good reason to avoid a split vote against the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in next month’s presidential election. It has been here before and last time things did not go well. Taiwan had its second direct presidential election in 2000 and the nation’s first ever transition of political power, with the KMT in opposition for the first time. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) was ushered in with less than 40 percent of the vote, only marginally ahead of James Soong (宋楚瑜), the candidate of the then-newly formed People First Party (PFP), who got almost 37
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate and New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) has called on his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) counterpart, William Lai (賴清德), to abandon his party’s Taiwanese independence platform. Hou’s remarks follow an article published in the Nov. 30 issue of Foreign Affairs by three US-China relations academics: Bonnie Glaser, Jessica Chen Weiss and Thomas Christensen. They suggested that the US emphasize opposition to any unilateral changes in the “status quo” across the Taiwan Strait, and that if Lai wins the election, he should consider freezing the Taiwanese independence clause. The concept of de jure independence was first
Many news reports about the Israel-Hamas war highlight casualties, deaths, and destruction. Journalists rarely delve into how either society has responded and mobilized to deal with the war. This article provides a brief view of how Israel and Israelis have reacted to the war as individuals, groups, and as a nation. A useful template for Taiwan to prepare for a potential future conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is how Israelis self-organized to deal with this crisis. Prior to the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, Israelis were even more polarized about public policy than the US or Taiwan.
Following the failure of the proposed “blue-white alliance,” New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi named Broadcasting Corp of China (BCC) chairman Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康) as his running mate on the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential ticket, while the other prospective half of the alliance, Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), named TPP Legislator Cynthia Wu (吳欣盈). The result is a three-horse race, which is getting tighter. Hou and Ko are likely to put all their focus on being seen as the top challenger to Vice President William Lai (賴清德), the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) candidate, to
RSS