Development (Society for International Development)最新文献

Resetting international agricultural governance requires a collective commitment to changing the economic rules of production. This article reports on the challenging questions raised by the Disparity to Parity project, led by a group of farmer-activists, farmer organizations, and scholar-activists in the US. How can parity policies be updated, expanded, redesigned with and for Black, Indigenous, immigrant, cooperative, female and gender diverse farmers and would-be farmers? How does the parity movement join in global solidarity to reset the international agricultural economic and trade rules to reverse the globalization of agriculture that dumps surplus and undermines food sovereignty?

This article focuses on the Farmer Input Subsidy Program (FISP) in Southern Africa. The FISPs are part of agricultural support by governments providing input subsidies to small-scale farmers from public resources. FISPs are intended to reduce the production costs of small-scale farmers. Rural women members of the Rural Women's Assembly (RWA) in Southern Africa argue that the FISP is captured by the global agro-industry and that the FISP, far from providing real support to farmers, advances a green-revolution agenda and has become a tool of the political elites and MNCs.

To address the most pressing issues of our day, the United Nations must be redesigned to transform global social relations in ways that reduce corporate power and empower civil society and local authorities as global actors. People's movements have made deliberate efforts to advance what I have called human rights globalization, building foundations for an alternative global order from the ground up. These emerging transformative projects can end corporate impunity and foster global norms and identities that contest corporate governance and the monopoly authority of states.

Twenty years after the WSIS, even as multi-stakeholder governance models in the domain have been stripped of any claim to their democratic potential, global digital governance is in shambles. Norm-building for the digital paradigm is increasingly shifting to plurilateral spaces and private sector-led rule-making in the guise of technical standards development. The UN Secretary-General's Roadmap for Digital Cooperation (2020) has failed to address this crisis. The paper argues for how in its 75th year, the UN needs to make a clean break from its historical soft-pedalling of corporatized rule-making for the digital by embracing the radical agenda of a transformative global constitutionalism, and proceeds to outline its constituent elements.

Based on analysis of documentation associated with the UN Food Systems Summit process, we identify three main ways in which the Summit failed to address the problem of corporate power in food systems in a meaningful way. First, the Summit was 'strategically silent' on the problem of corporate power, mentioning the problem only very infrequently and in a way that failed to identify corporations as holding disproportionate power in food systems. Second, it advanced technology and innovation-based solutions that benefit large agrifood companies rather than seeking structural transformation of food systems. Third, it gave corporations a priority seat at the table by engaging them in various settings in the lead up to the Summit.

This article argues that the United Nations Committee on World Food Security can and must serve as a space for catalyzing and strengthening public interest-oriented food systems governance grounded in the human rights framework. This would necessarily entail confronting the fragmentation of governance and erasure of accountability promoted by corporate designed multi-stakeholderism, and democratizing multilateralism through genuine participation of rights holders, public scrutiny and participatory science. Pivotal to this endeavor is arresting the growing corporate influence in governance mechanisms and reorienting them towards reinvigorating relationships among people, communities and governments.

In the second year of the pandemic, the malaise of global health governance has come to the fore at the intersection of the trajectories of global crises that have converged in 2020: the soaring inequalities, the climate disaster and the effects of a globalization that takes our breath away. COVID-19 puts into question most of the global health assumptions and reaffirms the political intuitions of the 1978 Alma Ata Declaration on primary health care, which positioned health at the centre of a public sector-led project for economic transformation and human dignity, based on human rights. The new coronavirus imposes a new sense of purpose to health policymaking, which is not yet captured in the current failed global response to the pandemic. This is also an opportunity for the international community that believes in public health and the role of public institutions, to re-imagine itself and project new creative ways to engage beyond classical models, so as to reconquer some ground for a healthier future.

Peasants and fisherfolk around the world, supported by academic and NGO allies, have denounced the UN Food Systems Summit for its overt corporate capture instead of what should have been a democratic process with strong grassroots participation from social movements. Across the globe, food sovereignty activists and allies have organized autonomous counter-mobilizations, including in Asia and the Pacific, to share what a radical transformation of our food and agriculture systems should really look like. This article shares the peoples' proposals and current grassroots activities towards radical food systems transformation that were shared at the Asia Pacific peoples' regional dialogue.