Advocating for food sovereignty in the UN Committee on World Food Security: facilitating young people’s participation in policy making

Young people around the world are mobilising for food sovereignty: the rights of peoples to define and control their own food and agricultural systems and the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food. While food sovereignty movements are emergent and take multiple forms, they share a common frustration with the failure of established political institutions to address the needs of people and communities. This chapter shows how young people are self-organising as political actors to change global food policy discourse and practice through an autonomous International Civil Society and Indigenous People’s Mechanism (CSIPM). The CSIPM is an inclusive space that supports the participation of transnational, continental and national peasant and social movements, Indigenous Peoples and civil society organisations in food policy discussions with governments at the United Nations Committee on World Food Security, hosted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome, Italy. Drawing on the author’s activist research as a co-facilitator of the CSIPM Youth Working Group, this chapter demonstrates that young participants in UN food policy discussions are politically informed, engaged, and creative. This empirically-informed account offers a counterpoint to simplistic representations of youth as either precarious and politically disengaged or dangerous, or as agri-preneurial champions who embrace politics-as-usual. Young Indigenous People, peasants and others are challenging these representations in global food policy spaces via the CSIPM’s core principle and practice of facilitation. Facilitation is a methodological approach to participation that seeks to address the marginalisation of peasant and Indigenous people -particularly women and youth - in policy dialogues, by elevating their political protagonism. Highlighting the possibilities of facilitation as a tool for transforming power dynamics and building solidarities, this chapter extends research in social movement and agrarian studies on young people’s efforts to regenerate democracy