Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum)

Re: United Nations Decade of Family Farming Regional Action Plan for the Near East and North Africa

In 2017 the FAO published a Study on Small-scale Family Farming (SSFF) in the Near East and North Africa (NENA) Region. The study states that its outcomes are intended as policy guidance to enhance SSFF technical and social efficiency of SSFF and to adopt environmentally friendly practices. In addition to the overarching regional study, FAO has published six additional SSFF country case studies from Egypt, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia.

Civil society organizations (CSOs) welcomed this study as the first of its kind by FAO on small-scale family farming across the NENA region. One noted feature of the SSFF study is its commitment to security of tenure of land for small-scale farmers, which CSOs encourage as a consistent feature of FAO policy and practice going forward.

In 2019 Habitat International Coalition—Housing and Land Rights Network (HIC-HLRN) undertook an analysis of the study, outlining key issues and values at stake, and identifying a number of points of concern. We take this opportunity to highlight those concerns, which we hope will be addressed in the forthcoming UNDFF Regional Action Plan:

  1. Presumed inevitability of ‘rural transformation’, rural-urban migration and a move away from agriculture as a main livelihood source: the study does not set out to challenge or mitigate the processes of these potentially devestating transformations and/or the structural factors that cause such transitions.
  2. The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) framework, to which FAO is committed, is mentioned in the preface, but the remainder of the study does not engage with the SDGs nor their indicators in a substantial way. Notable relevant SDG indicators include: security of tenure (Indicator 1.4.2), agriculture and land management (Targets 1.4, 2.3, 15.1–4, 15.b), women’s access to productive resources (Target 5a), participatory governance (Targets 16.5–7), and the pursuit of policy coherence (Targets 17.1, and 13–14).
  3. Farmer and civil society participation in and input to the study is unclear: the study mentions national briefings and discussion workshops but gives no indication of who was invited to participate, how those individuals were selected, or how the opinions expressed figured into the study. If there was such participation it was not reflected in the study, which makes no reference to farmer or civil society priorities or points of view.
  4. Given the study’s stated focus on sustainability as a priority, agroecology is noticeably absent as a sustainability model.
  5. Lack of human rights language and criteria for policy formulation and implementation: as a UN Charter-based specialized organization, human rights is the primary framework of FAO; this should be reflected in all studies and policy guidance.
  6. Lack of policy advice support to agricultural livelihoods: the study repeatedly supports the trend toward multi-activity—i.e., non-farm work in addition to farming—without acknowledging the concept as an involuntary coping mechanism to compensate for SSFF not providing a living wage. The study does not acknowledge or advocate change to the underlying and structural obstacles to viable small-scale agricultural livelihoods, or the crushing burden of small-scale farmer debt. On the contrary, the study encourages loans and indebtedness.
  7. As of 2020, neither the regional study nor the country cases are available in the Arabic language. Food producers in the NENA region, many of whom speak and understand only Arabic, should be able to access studies and policy guidance that target and impact them in a language they understand.

While we are happy to see that the 8-page pamphlet on the NENA Regional Initiative on Small-Scale Family Farming and the SDGs and the Global Action Plan on the UN Decade of Family Farming do include significant reference to human rights, SDGs and agroecology, we take this opportunity to remind the FAO of our concerns with the most comprehensive NENA publications on SSFF to date. We hope these concerns will be taken into account in the development of the UNDFF Regional Action Plan.