International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty (IPC) warns of retrogression in FAO’s relationship with stakeholders
The (International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty) IPC is the autonomous and self-organized global platform of small-scale food producers, rural workers’ organizations, and grassroots/community-based social movements to advance the food sovereignty agenda at the global and regional levels. IPC is a space of alliance and policy dialogue for 11 global organizations and 8 regional ones, comprising more than 6,000 national organizations and 300 million small-scale producers.
In a letter addressed to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which is meeting this week, the IPC warns that the participation of CSOs and Indigenous Peoples is not structured through clear mechanisms in the FAO.
“We are witnessing a current retrogression in FAO’s relationships with stakeholders. Stakeholder participation has become increasingly unstructured, ad hoc, and at the mercy of decentralized managers unaccountable to precedents or mutually agreed principles, including Exchanges of Letters, let alone the FAO Strategy for Partnership with Civil Society. This deficit has emerged as a major shortcoming in the implementation of FAO’s policies, programs, and projects through its headquarters, regional, and country spheres of operation. FAO’s ongoing clarification of the stakeholder accreditation processes and the ‘status of engagement’ with CSOs bears the earmarks of an ambitious administrative—but institutionally, programmatically, and constitutionally unproductive—step,” the letter notes.
Read the letter