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On World Food Day, over 100 civil society and Indigenous Peoples’ organisations from across the globe have come together to release the Peoples’ Manifesto on the Right to Adequate Food and Nutrition. The Manifesto calls for urgent political action to end the use of starvation as a weapon of war, address food insecurity, combat inequality, and transform global food systems. The signatories urge a shift towards food sovereignty, agroecology, and the protection of natural commons to realise the Right to Adequate Food and Nutrition, while achieving stronger social participation and accountability in global decision-making.
2024 also marks the 20th anniversary of the Right to Food Guidelines – a milestone global consensus document, negotiated by the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) and endorsed by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in November 2004. This document guides states in fulfilling their legal obligations under the Right to Adequate Food and Nutrition, as outlined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
In the past 20 years, the world has seen both a series of achievements and increasing obstacles to the realisation of the Right to Food. The Guidelines have become a crucial cornerstone of struggles linked to food, climate, debt, trade, conflict, gender, and biodiversity, and have shaped several national policies and legal reforms to realise the right to food.
Over the past two decades citizens have witnessed how corporate interests have exacerbated inequality, worsened the climate crisis, and turned food into both a commodity and a weapon. In 2023, 135 million people in 20 countries faced food crises due to war and protracted conflicts, which are rooted in combined factors of occupation, insurgency, disasters, climate change, inequality, inequity, pervasive poverty, and inadequate governance.
The signatories of the Peoples’ Manifesto condemn the weaponisation of food and starvation, as in Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, among other countries where food is used as a tool to punish and control, resulting in widespread famine and food insecurity. They urge states to recommit to the human rights framework and to fulfil their obligations also in contexts of protracted crises.
Members of the World March of Women in Lebanon, the Gaza Urban & Peri-urban Agriculture Platform (GUPAP), and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) in Palestine stress that the forced displacement of communities acts as an intentional tool of starvation by threatening their access to food and blocking the delivery of aid and food to Gaza.
Recognising civilian communities suffer the most in zones of wars, occupation and protracted crises, they stress that in the case of occupation, it is the responsibility of the occupier to ensure that the disenfranchised communities have access to basic rights, including access to food.
We find it crucial that the lives of civilians in Palestine and Lebanon are spared, along with their homes, lands and livelihoods. Burning agricultural lands and forests, displacing rural communities, preventing peasants from accessing their lands, and the fisherpeople from going into the sea, can only result in the deterioration of the communities’ livelihoods and food sovereignty – Jana Nakhal, World March of Women
The Manifesto demands an end to agro-industrial agriculture and corporate control over food systems, which exacerbate inequality and environmental degradation. It calls for agrarian reform, land redistribution, support for agroecology, and control over, access to and preservation of land, seeds, water, biodiversity and other natural commons.
Resource grabbing and the increasing concentration of land and wealth are both expressions and causes of the current interconnected food, economic, ecological, health, social and political crises, which require a profound transformation of our societies and economies. Signatories of the Manifesto emphasize that land and territories for Indigenous Peoples and small-scale food producers are key for the realisation of the right to food. They call on states to support the convening of the second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development in 2026 (ICARRD+20), as recently proposed by the Colombian government. Placing land rights and the protection of Indigenous Peoples’ territories at the centre would contribute to finding real solutions to the crises we are experiencing.
The Right to Food Manifesto advocates for a radical transformation of food systems through five specific demands, namely a shift to agroecology and climate-resilient food systems, prioritisation of territorial markets, gender justice, land redistribution and peace. It emphasises the key role of grassroots voices, Indigenous Peoples, and social movements in decision-making on food and nutrition while calling for stronger accountability frameworks to prevent corporate influence, foster democratic decision-making, and ensure human rights-based global food governance.
The UN Committee on World Food Security, which commemorates its 50th anniversary this year, was reformed in 2007-2008. The Manifesto notes that the Right to Food Guidelines were instrumental in this reform, enacted during one of the most significant global food price crises, which led to the creation of the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM). It claims that, to date, the CFS remains the only multilateral space that guarantees those most affected by food insecurity the right to autonomously participate in its policy processes.. Therefore, the signatories call for the creation of participatory structures for affected groups within all UN agencies, modeled on the inclusive approach of the CFS.
They also urge the UN, particularly the Rome-based agencies FAO, IFAD, and WFP, to contribute to policy coherence and refrain from fragmenting global food governance by promoting platforms such as the World Food Forum or the controversial UN Food Systems Summit, which fail to respect democratic participatory conditions and are heavily influenced by corporate interests. Instead, they call for strengthening the convening power of the CFS to ensure it remains the central platform for addressing the structural causes and multiple dimensions of global food crises.
These measures, the Manifesto affirms, could pave the way towards coherent, rights-based food governance that supports food sovereignty, climate justice, and the well-being of all people.
Ensuring social participation of young people and Indigenous Peoples in decision-making on food issues is like preparing the land for new crops, with organic seeds, a favorable climate, and fertile soil. A good harvest is sure to come. In celebrating 20 years of RtFG, we need to guarantee the full, continuous and effective participation of children, youth and Indigenous Peoples in their implementation and in the development of and access to public food policies, guaranteeing fair agrarian reform with healthy territories that respect the specificities and cultural diversities of the peoples. – Taily Terena, International Indian Treaty Council
The Manifesto gathers the voices and demands from small-scale food producers, family farmers, peasants, Indigenous Peoples, agricultural and food workers, women, gender diverse people, youth, elders, consumers, the urban food insecure, health and human rights advocates, civilians affected by armed conflict and occupation, and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) from around the world.
Footnotes:
1. HLPE-FSN (2024). Issues paper on Conflict-induced acute food crises: potential policy responses in light of current emergencies. Available at: https://www.fao.org/docs/devhlpelibraries/default-document-library/hlpe-fsn-issues-papers_conflicts-and-fsn.pdf?sfvrsn=823378b6_4
2. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (2024). Starvation and the right to food, with emphasis on Palestinian peoples’ food sovereignty. https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n24/212/30/pdf/n2421230.pdf
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Media Contact
Betsy Díaz betsy.diaz.millan@csm4cfs.org – CSIPM Secretariat
About the he Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM)
The People’s Manifesto on the Right to Food was drafted by civil society and Indigenous Peoples organizations that participate in the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM) for relations with the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) Global Food Governance Working Group, in consultation with participants from different constituencies and regions. The CSIPM is the world’s largest platform of civil society and Indigenous Peoples’ organisations working on the right to food, food sovereignty and food security and nutrition. The participating organizations of the CSIPM have more than 380 million affiliated members.