ERC/24/5 Rev.1 Financing to end hunger for today and tomorrow (SDG 2)
My name is Ceyhan Temürcü, from Turkey and I am a member of URGENCI – the International Network of Community Supported Agriculture.
I am speaking as a representative of the Nyéléni Europe and Central Asia Food Sovereignty Network.
The background paper focuses on financing private sector investments on food and agriculture, either by the private sector itself or by public bodies, and it misses the urgent need to strengthen local and territorial food systems based on agroecological principles.
For a real transformation of our food systems towards sustainability, there is an urgent need to move from the narrative of “feeding people” to one about allowing and encouraging communities to produce their own food and deciding about their food systems. And this can only be achieved by recognizing the profound differences between the industrial food system and agroecological, human-scale, territorial food systems.
In our region, as in the rest of the world, the industrial food system not only depletes natural resources, but also generates hunger and all forms of malnutrition, which also makes people vulnerable to all kinds of health problems and pandemics.
On the contrary; peasants, small-scale food producers and Indigenous Peoples; despite the ever-increasing pressure and hostility from the corporate-driven industrial food system, continue to feed the majority of the planet's population. They have proven that they are the key actors for resilience in times of crisis like the hard COVID pandemic period and the war in Ukraine. They can expand their solutions once they are supported by public policies, improved access to markets, and fair legislation. What is missing or utterly backgrounded in the paper is how to use financial mechanisms for a transition to a food system based on agroecology, human-scale family farming, farmers' markets, other short-supply chains and social solidarity economy principles. Local and territorial food systems provide the framework for a systemic change for eliminating hunger and malnutrition, reducing rural poverty, ensuring resilient production and fair livelihoods.
Thus, if we will talk about financing, we should primarily talk about financing such a transition, rather than about financial instruments that continue to support an inherently unsustainable food system.
We hence invite FAO to promote and scale up local and territorial markets as endorsed by the Policy Recommendations of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) on Connecting Smallholders to Markets. It is also essential that the member states adopt all the necessary measures to ensure that national legislations, standards and international trade agreements are consistent with the human rights of people involved in food production and all people’s right to access healthy food.
In order to end hunger and malnutrition, to tackle the climate crisis, to reduce ecosystem destruction, biodiversity loss and inequalities, we have to put land and territories under the control and management of people and communities. This requires comprehensive public policies and programmes. Civil Society around the world has been calling for a new International Conference for the Right to Land, Territories and Agrarian Reform, as a multilateral framework to coordinate a global response to land and resource grabbing, and the increasing and unsustainable concentration of land and natural resources in the hands of corporations, financial actors and elites. Therefore, we seek the support of the member states in our region to support the initiative taken by the government of Colombia and supported by Brazil, to host a second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development in 2026 (ICARRD+20), as announced during the International Conference on Global Land Grabbing in March 2024. And we raise your attention to the significant and unique role of FAO in this matter.