This relates to the consultations on the GSF that took place yesterday  (June 27) at FAO in Rome. If you have not been following the CFS or the GSF, this...

Jennifer Clapp and C. Stuart Clark, two top Canadian thinkers on food policy issues have co-written a very good blog post for Triple Crisis about the new Food Assistance Convention.  The article...

The negotiated and approved Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security are now online. You can find them here: http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/nr/land_tenure/pdf/VG_en_Final_March_2012.pdf  ...

Academic resources can often be hard to access, especially if you are not associated with a university.  The Journal of Peasant Studies is remedying this by releasing three new articles...

A new informative, practical, and easy-to-understand, booklet for civil society organizations interested is getting involved with the Committee on World Food Security has been released today. I hope you find it helpful...

The Voluntary Guidelines on the Tenure of Land Fisheries and Forests are complete

Last Friday, 9th of March in the evening, the Committee on Word Food Security (CFS) completed the intergovernmental negotiations of the FAO Voluntary Guidelines on theTenure of Land Fisheries and Forests in the context of National Food Security. With the successful completion of these negotiations after a participatory process lasting nearly 3 years, the CFS has shown clearly that it has the capacity to bring a wide variety of social actors to the debate

and to seek solutions to one of the most difficult and delicate issues we face today, that of access to natural resources for food production/provision. More than 45 persons representing 20 civil society organizations attended the final round of negotiations.

In preparing a lecture for Monday, I was reviewing my notes on the G20 and their food security programmes and I was reminded of an article written by Professor Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (those of you who read this blog, will know I am a fan). In this particular article, published in advance of the Agriculture Ministerial Meeting, he proposed 5 priorities for the G20 so that we may start to seriously address the political problems that lead to hunger. He notes that:
It will take courage from G20 leaders to put the global food system back on track. They will have to break the "myth" of hunger as being reducible to a technical issue or to a failure of food systems to produce sufficient volumes. The French presidency appears determined to act decisively on the issue of speculation on the agricultural commodities market. But beyond that, the G20 members remain deeply divided over agricultural policy for the 21st century. The outcome of this debate will have real consequences for all humanity.
Unfortunately, the G20 failed to meaningfully incorporate his recommendations into their Agriculture Action Plan (check out a good summary here, or download the Plan here) but these 5 principles serve as a good reminder for all of us working in this field: