As the G-20 Summit in Los Cabos came to a close yesterday, various civil society observers expressed their disappointment at the lack of ambition in the leaders’ statement, particularly on food security and food price volatility. ActionAid’s Neil Watkins commented that, “With food prices swinging wildly and the planet burning, this was the moment for bold proposals from the G-20. Instead, on food security and climate change, the G-20 turned in last year’s homework, content to reaffirm old plans and commission more studies.” Others echoed these concerns, damning with faint praise the mild proposals to exchange information and support agricultural innovation, as well as criticizing the narrow focus on increasing productivity.
The problem is not only that the proposals are so lacking in ambition, but that the G-20 is evolving from an informal crisis-management confab to a rigid and undemocratic structure that serves to lock in policy changes in other multilateral forums. The minor mention of emergency reserves means that efforts by the World Food Programme or the FAO to expand beyond limited national reserves will be stymied, and the G-20’s heavy reliance on the "Business 20" (B-20) for policy guidance will likely mean that critical approaches to regulate public-private partnerships will remain off the table. G-20 recommendations effectively limit input by the other 173 U.N. member countries in these big decisions, to say nothing of the lack of channels for civil society engagement.
At what point do we stop considering the interlinked food, finance and climate crises as short-term glitches and start acknowledging the fundamental failures in these global systems? A focus on increasing productivity in agricultural production alone won’t solve the problems of growing hunger in developing countries or rising obesity rates in G-20 countries. The problem is not just how much food is produced, but how, and by whom. What’s needed is a much more ambitious and integrated approach to shift thinking on these issues.
IATP and its Mexican partner, ANEC, along with the Boell Foundation, organized a meeting in Mexico City just before the Los Cabos summit to take a deeper look at these issues. We began the meeting with a dialogue with the Mexican Secretary of Agriculture and Sub-Secretary of Foreign Affairs on concerns about the G-20 approach, but then focused more broadly on alternative proposals (link en Español) on the rights to food and land, stabilization of prices in a volatile world economy, and production alternatives that integrate nature and food sovereignty—roughly the political, economic and technical approaches to food systems. Many of the proposals issued in a statement at the close of the meeting will be familiar to advocates of food sovereignty around the world, but they are somehow off the table in official dialogues. Whether this week at Rio+20, or in local and national dialogues on transforming our economies and food systems, we need to keep working to shift the debate to support local solutions and the diversity of grassroots success stories, rather than clamping down a ceiling of business as usual approaches to the “crises.”
