As rain poured on Rome, representatives from United Nations member states converged at the Food and Agriculture Organization’s headquarters. Inside its plenary room, the atmosphere was much friendlier, as for the first time in U.N. history, civil society delegates joined the Committee on World Food Security not as observers but as full members.

CFS’s new makeup, prompted by 2009 reforms implemented at the committee’s 36th annual session last week, offers nonprofit organizations, food producers and consumer groups a unique opportunity to influence U.N. food security policies – and perhaps even funding – around the world. The challenge for these stakeholders will be speaking with one voice to leverage their negotiating strength.

The CFS reform initiative

CFS was established in 1974 not as a mere FAO committee but an intergovernmental body that was to act as a United Nations system-wide forum for reviewing and following up on global food security policies. But prior to the 2009 reforms, the committee had a reputation that was less than glowing.

“In the [last] decades, the committee turned into nothing, the most useless committee of FAO,” said Antonio Onorati, president of Italian nonprofit Crocevia and international focal point person of the International NGO/CSOs Planning Committee, or IPC. “At least in the Committee on Fisheries, discussions were about fishery. Nobody knew what the discussions at CFS were about.”

CFS’s 2009 reforms are seen as a major step toward realizing its mission. The committee is now the most inclusive intergovernmental platform for global food security stakeholders – and civil society leaders like Andrea Ferrante have high expectations for its work.

“CFS is a place of great democracy, a place where maybe at last – if well supported – also the weaker states can make their voice heard,” said Ferrante, IPC technical coordinator and president of AIAB, the Italian Association for Organic Agriculture, referring to the panel’s “one head, one vote” policy.

Oxfam spokesperson Chris Leather, who is also an ad interim member of theCFS Advisory Group, noted that it “is very important that CFS is not a body of FAO, but it is a U.N. system-wide body that is hosted by FAO.”

“Obviously, FAO plays a very crucial, critical role in CFS, but together with other key U.N. agencies as well,” he said, adding: “One of the things CFS should do is to promote better coordination and cohesion among the U.N. agencies based in Rome, but, of course, not only among the Rome-based agencies, but also among other global institutions and forums [such as] the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and so on.”

The new CFS focuses not only on agriculture but also nutrition. It aims to define global strategies on food security, develop a global strategic framework, ensure the coordination of all stakeholders, promote best practices and policy convergence, and support countries and regions in the development, implementation and monitoring of their own actions plans.

Civil society’s new role

Civil society groups are relishing the new powers given to them as a result of the CFS reform process.

“It is quite a unique example of where civil society organizations can have direct access to member states, where they can participate in discussion on an equal level,” said Leather. “One of the great advantages of the CFS reform [is that] it opened up the policy space for civil society participation, and not only civil society but also the broad range of stakeholders that have a role to play in promoting food security.”

He added: “It is a great achievement to really ensure the involvement of civil society, particularly organizations coming from developing countries and organizations that consist of people most affected by hunger and food insecurity. And that’s a real opportunity for civil society – generally to influence policy discussion and policy agreement.”

But not all organizations can become CFS participants. According to the proposed mechanism for civil society’s representation, these are limited to civil society groups, non-governmental organizations and social movements active in the area of food and nutrition at any level, particularly those representing food producers and consumers.

“The criterion is that all these organizations are fundamental in any public discussion or concrete action or project to address the issue of food security,” Onorati said.

Governments and civil society groups have the same privileges, including the right to intervene, join breakout discussions, and submit and present documents and formal proposals – except for the right to vote. But at this point, it appears, civil society groups are not insisting on voting rights.

“The reason is that we recognize governments have the absolute responsibility for deciding the policies,” Onorati said. “We’ll have a part in the decision-making process, the right to present proposals. … We can intervene as the governments do, and there isn’t anymore the ‘rule’ that governments speak first.”

The reformed CFS convenes annually in the decision-making Plenary, and also organizes inter-sessional meetings. The committee is supported by an executive body with an advisory group, a secretariat, and a high-level panel of experts.

Aside from the advisory group, where representatives of civil society organizations sit as members, the high-level panel of experts offers these organizations more avenues of participation. And although FAO and other U.N. agencies have consulted external experts for years, the new CFS gives civil society groups the chance to nominate experts of their choice.

For civil society organizations, the CFS reform initiative can serve as a model for other international bodies.

“I believe that to open up the democratic dialogue to stakeholders and social organizations must become common practice, at the national and international levels,” said Luca Colombo, research manager at the Genetic Rights Foundation, calling the new CFS a “pilot experiment” that should be watched closely. “It could be repeated in other bodies. Why can’t we think about a reform of the Kyoto treaty or about a big consultation on climate [change] with a real participation of who is more affected by climate change, in terms of sectors and geographical areas?”

He added: “We will see how much influence civil society organizations will gain in the committee, how much governments listen, and how much the chairpersons recognize the right to speak, but also how much the organizations will be able to coordinate among themselves.”

How civil society representatives are chosen

The 2009 reform allowed civil society to define the rules governing their CFS participation. A yearlong process involving consultations, meetings, forums and networking among organizations around the globe led to a proposal creating a civil society mechanism for the committee’s 36th annual session, held Oct. 10-14 and Oct. 16 in Italy’s capital.

“This is the first time civil society organizations have the possibility to choose their representatives,” Onorati said. “The principles are autonomy and self-organization. We decide how we are to be represented.”

The civil society mechanism aims to both facilitate participation at CFS and provide a space for dialogue among organizations. It envisions a yearly civil society forum and a coordination committee including constituency and sub-regional focal points, each of whom will decide how to select members for the coordination committee. Members of the coordination committee will elect civil society’s representatives to the CFS advisory group, ensuring that each of these seats and speaking slots during CFS meetings are distributed among the committee’s constituencies and subregions.

Constituencies include smallholder family farmers, artisanal fisherfolk, herders or pastoralists, the landless, urban poor, agricultural and food workers, women, youth, consumers, indigenous peoples, and international and national non-governmental organizations and NGO platforms.

Two web spaces – for the Civil Society for the Committee of Food Securityand the Global Food Security Nutrition Dialogue – were created in conjunction with the process. According to Leather, the websites allow for sharing of the latest CFS news, the civil society participation process and other issues.

The current process for civil society participation may not be permanent, after all.

“We’ll try it for one year,” Ferrante said. “This is a game civil society has never played before. And we are all here, and this is an extraordinary thing.”

Continuing the dialogue as envisioned by the mechanism would require resources, especially to encourage sustained participation by small organizations in developing countries. According to Colombo, it is necessary for international organizations such as FAO to set aside a portion of their budgets for civil society’s participation in CFS.

Although the mechanism can bring about stronger representation of civil society groups at CFS, some civil society leaders recognize that making their voices heard will require honing one skill they may not be adept in: lobbying.

Said Ferrante: “Civil society can play a role to support, strengthen the governments that vote. This means [for us] to develop lobbying capacities. CFS is a place quite complicated for us because it is a space of negotiations. Moreover, these negotiations are multi-year. This is very stressful for social organizations used to having dialogues on very concrete themes to find rapid solutions. It is also hard for that part of the civil society less used to lobbying activities.”

But lobbying capacities rely also on how much organizations will agree on common rules and on a common agenda.

“For civil society, it is very hard to organize itself because we don’t have elective systems like governments do,” Ferrante argued. “There is an internal dynamic among the food producer organizations, between food producer organizations and big international NGOs, and also an internal dynamic among the NGOs.”

These relationships are in flux. And as the political commitment of food producer organizations increases, nonprofit groups may refocus their work on helping “build synergies,” as Leather calls it, or on helping farmers, fishers or pastoralists fully take part in the political discussions happening on the global stage.

“We can help these organizations to really build their own capacity and their ability to really participate and influence the decisions at country level, and also, then, to assist them to bring their experiences, the lessons learned, their point of view into regional and international-level policy dialogue,” he said. “Critically, civil society organizations can draw upon practical experiences at very local level, because many civil society organizations are made up of people from communities affected by food insecurity. So, that’s a significant change that those people who are most affected have the solutions. For an organization like Oxfam, this means shifting our approach, actually supporting those people’s organizations, those community organizations, to lobby on their [own] behalf. That’s a significant implication for a big international NGO like Oxfam.”

Although hopes for the new CFS are high, there is at the same time a sort of sobriety about the momentous task of improving access to food around the world.

“We don’t deceive ourselves that [the new CFS] will change things from one day to next,” Onorati said, “but this is the last chance for FAO to keep a useful role and the last chance for governments to address the harsher crisis – the food crisis – before it will explode. The bread riots don’t have borders.”

Influencing food security funding

With its stronger stature within CFS, some civil society representatives have their eye on enabling the committee to gain a bigger say in funding decisions by U.N. food agencies and donor nations.

Onorati noted that FAO trust funds exceed the agency’s budget, but the resources of these trust funds depend on direct negotiations between donor nations and the U.N. organization.

“That means I give you the money, but I say also where you must buy the gift,” he said. “We hope CFS will change this shopping list.”

Civil society groups see the “one head, one vote” rule and their growing lobbying power as keys to this change.

“Here, there is the clash,” Onorati explained. “CFS will not decide on whether to fund water projects in Tanzania, but it can say: At the core of our interventions must be … family agriculture. And that way, it may shift resources.”

Ferrante said changing the way resources are allocated hinges on policies, a view Colombo agreed with.

“If CFS shows it is able to impact policies, it is plausible U.N. agencies will shift their action a little,” he said.

Leather, however, stressed that the ability for CFS to impact policies will require civil society to effectively organize itself. Nonetheless, he is confident that things are changing.

“The given fact is the civil society has … more than a foot” in CFS’s door, he said. “It is inside the door.”