Recent trends in the global governance of food and nutrition security: policy implications for the EU

Published in November 2016, this policy brief from the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), France, has also been published in French as Tendances récentes dans la gouvernance de la sécurité alimentaire et nutritionnelle: quelles implications politiques pour l'UE?

The brief considers the main aspects of the reform of the CFS. It argues that despite the fact that the CFS has been identified as the 'foremost inclusive international and intergovernmental platform dealing with food and security and nutrition (FSN), the current governance regime is still highly fragmented. It argues that this fragmentation encourages a kind of 'forum shifting' that tends to privilege the best resourced actors and to multiply (political) approaches to FSN, and hence, risks impairing the input legitimacy of governance. Against this backdrop, this policy brief concludes with two main recommendations for EU policies for FSN in global governance arenas for FSN. First, it proposes that the EU should devote as much effort as possible to strengthen the role of the CFS to reaffirm its role of  as'THE foremost inclusive […] platform dealing with FSN', and more specifically: a. continue to support the evaluation process and the setting up of monitoring mechanisms for the CFS to better understand the capacity of the CFS’ recommendations to impact on domestic policies; b. support the implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure and the Principles for Responsible Investments in Agriculture and Food Systems, especially through capacity building in Southern countries exposed to land grabbing; c. enhance relationships between the CFS and other multilateral arenas in which FSN-related issues are negotiated: SDG process, WTO, UNFCCC.

Second, it considers that the EU should contribute to strengthening the accountability framework of other political processes (both multilateral and multistakeholder ones) dealing with FSN through its support to: a. the definition of a clear normative framework, based on the human rights framework, which considers the implementation of a given project with respect to the long-term transformative pathway in which it is engaging. b. the development of monitoring systems to assess, ex-ante and ex-post the impacts of any projects developed in the course of these processes.