As we, civil society organizations (CSOs) of the Near East/North Africa promoting food sovereignty, met in Istanbul this month, Israel’s ongoing use of starvation as a tool in its genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza hovered over the agenda. As witnesses to that outrage, committed by that culpable colonial power in our region, we urge the needed corrections to the global system that enables such atrocity crime.
In this globalized and interconnected world, the CSOs discussed how the responsibilities for its remedy are shared. We pledge to do our part, to the extent of our capacities, while other parties also bear common-but-differentiated responsibility, primarily states, by fulfilling their individual, collective, domestic and extraterritorial obligations to bring an end to the illegal situation.
Israel’s genocide by denial of the Palestinian People’s means of subsistence, including deliberate obstruction of food sovereignty, is a long story. However extreme, it is only emblematic of a wider power imbalance endured by the peoples of our region for the past millennium. And we see the urgency of reforming the global food system as indispensable to the reforms proposed in this year’s UN Summit of the Future.
How things are
Our diagnosis of the current situation is guided by the six principles of food sovereignty. Applying them has helped reveal the purpose (domination) and the functioning (systematic appropriation) of the current global system operating in our region. The deviation from these norms is visible to us also in the growing day-to-day struggle for food, as well as through intensified macroeconomic crises in the region, especially in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. Much of this dynamic is perpetuated by reflexively subservient political classes in our countries that have been coopted into this unsustainable global system, whose purpose and functioning have led to some 36.7 million people facing high levels of acute food insecurity in 2023, and a similar number (at least 35 million) forcibly displaced and entitled to reparation in 2024, including the victims of conflict, occupation and war, notably in Palestine, Sudan, Syria and Western Sahara.
The most important consequence of colonialism and its continuation has been the creation of an integrated unequal world order. That historic process has killed up to 262 million people in the colonies just in the last century. Meanwhile, racism has become an overarching ideology with close links between capital, trade and powerful states.
These consequences persist, even though Europe no longer dominates the world. Despite the emergence of international courts and tribunals, as well as progressive human rights norms, with their corresponding extraterritorial obligations, many powerful states’ foreign policies have become no more or less than cross-border organized crime. The international system established after World War II also has ensures that all the former colonies are poor countries today, while the former colonial rulers belong to the group of the rich. Only a few of the former colonies have managed to rise to such status, while, as Israel as a stark reminder in our region, colonialism forms the most-relevant socioculture of the contemporary world and explains many of persistent inequalities on a global scale.
Gross inequalities also prevail internal to our region, and extend locally, not least through the function of regional investments to exploit our national resources, including labor, land, water and food systems. Therefore, we have initiated the development of needed Responsible Agricultural Investment principles for the NENA region to spotlight and correct some of the internal inequalities of our region.
Massive unemployment, perpetual wars, structural genocide, death from hunger, as well as premature morbidity and mortality disproportionately afflict our region. The current global system is expected to kill another 200 million people through such structural deprivation. Some 20 million people die annually from the effects of starvation, clean water scarcity, displacement and dispossession, environmental contamination, inadequate shelter, medicine, and consequent disease.
A deficient water supply already affects the health of the region`s population by reducing local food production, thereby interfering with people`s ability to obtain a healthy and nutritious diet from local sources. Several studies have shown that improving irrigation and local farming has resulted in significantly better nutrition, particularly among children. However, this inequitable global system manifesting in our region can only continue by suppressing labor, in particular, small-scale and indigenous food producers, upon whom our food markets largely depend.
Since 2016, FAO’s policy advice for NENA states to support small-scale family farming is a construct of measures for our food producers to “transition out of agriculture” to make way for corporate actors, while overlooking their own priorities of crushing debt, denial of their human rights to organize, and harassment by the policing organs of the state, while World Bank, OECD and FAO promote the privatization of vital water resources in our countries.
This dominant ideological approach and its consequences have made consumers in our region increasingly dependent upon corporate actors, while transforming the production of food to eat into production of food only to sell. The trend subordinates use value to exchange value, while also degrading nature, including social nature, eroding our local cultures, especially erasing traditional communities and Indigenous Peoples. All this is taking place while the conduct of forever wars, both near and far, disrupt food supply and entire price structures, making adequate food unaffordable to millions.
In their episodic biennial consultations with civil society partners, FAO policy and technical officers have been instructing us that theirs is only a technical-service agency, unconcerned with universal human rights. That stance has ossified in the agency’s corporate culture now with the FAO Director-General (DG) insisting, since 2020, that human rights issues should be raised only before remote UN mechanisms at Geneva, and security and development policies should be discussed only in New York. That is in spite of the authoritative Councils atop each of the UN Charter’s pillars (peace and security, development and human rights) handing down system-wide policy.
How things ought to be
While the FAO DG’s fractured view of the intended unitary UN System has no place in the international organization’s leadership, technology and exclusively technical approaches will not solve all our challenges today, nor in the future. We are not convinced that remedying the urgent food-related challenges in our region could be achieved solely by those who make a living by misusing technology for private gain, as our ancestors have seen over centuries.
We stress the importance of states and UN agencies finally to implement [AR] the multilateral normative instruments on the human right to food [AR], land and natural resource governance [AR], and food and nutrition in protracted crises [AR]. They contain ample specificity and alignment with existing state obligations enshrined in treaties, the backbone of the multilateral system.
We call for aligning the management of UN implementation agencies with their own UN Charter and the Treaty System to achieve the intended unitary UN, rather than fragmented vision and false dichotomies proffered by current FAO leadership to isolate human rights from development operations, despite existing normative standards. In that process, too, we call for restoration of women’s rights and gender as a constant policy priority of governments and development agencies in our region, which has progressively vanished from FAO’s regional priorities since 2014.
In the context of Israel’s apartheid, colonization and genocide in Palestine, the widening chasm between norms and behavior has never been clearer. As popular demonstrations around the world call for an urgent ceasefire and dismantling Zionism and other forms of enduring racism and colonialism, we see such fundamental change of the international system as urgent to end the weaponization of food.
While we stand at the convergence of citizens across the Global South in their awakened to the hypocrisy of global and national institutions and leaderships, those structures are losing the constituency in the Global North as well. In this context, we all identify with the Palestinians, the only Indigenous People of the land and territory historically—and still—known as Palestine, despite Zionism’s criminal means of attempted erasure. We also see the degenerative contradiction between the norms of human rights and international law, on the one hand, and actual practice, on the other. Reconciling these remains a core challenge of great urgency at this moment for us, and all the planet’s civil societies.
Photo: Participants meeting in the IPC NENA consultation at Istanbul, June 2024. Source: HLRN file photo.
