The Committee on World Food Security and the 'invisible' markets of food sovereignty

While agro-ecological peasant production is well-researched within the food sovereignty movement and increasingly in academic circles, there has been far less reflection about territorial-rooted trade systems, alternative to the dominant global food supply chains. Yet the production models espoused by food sovereignty practitioners require markets that are appropriate to their characteristics, that decentralize the encounter between food supply and demand and are embedded in social relations and cultural identities. Issues of market power and of who controls the value chain, production costs, and producers’ prices need to be addressed. Such trade systems and local markets have to be supported by specific and differentiated public policies, rules and instruments such as appropriate infrastructure and public procurement. Food safety provisions need to be adapted to small-scale producers’ production methods, the techniques artisanal processing, and the conditions of local marketing, rather than to the industrial food chain. There is vast local experience of different kinds of markets that perform functions and provide benefits beyond the purely economic, but it has not been thoroughly documented and theorized. Marketing arrangements that reconnect producers and consumers are springing up throughout the Global North. In many countries of the Global South markets that operate on logics different than that of the capitalist economy are dominant. In Africa village markets account for most of the food consumed in the continent but are ignored by official statistics and penalized by public policies and development programs. They are “invisible”. This paper will discuss the way in which the Committee on World Food Security is being used by small-scale producers’ organizations and other civil society constituencies as a forum in which to document these “invisible” markets, discuss the negative impacts of global trade and investment rules on peoples’ food systems, and identify the kinds of public policies that are required to support them. In doing so, it will analyse the modalities of functioning of the CFS as a multi-actor forum and the conditions under which vulnerable actors can challenge the power of the corporate private sector and obtain discursive and normative outcomes that can support their advocacy at other levels.