VSF-Suisse contribution:
VSF-Suisse as a member of the VSF International network and of an Alliance of Swiss NGOs engaged for Sustainable Food Systems, Sufosec, appreciates the elaboration of such a guidance tool which could make visible linkages to existing guidelines and approaches (such as the FFS and PFS approach as means to strengthen capacities of producers), while ensuring that "the great diversity of small-scale production systems" as you say is addressed. Just to share our experiences in this regard: while improving small-scale production systems in peri-urban contexts (e.g. in poultry) requires linking market system thinking to an efficient use of inputs/ feeds and recycling of nutrients, helping producers in fragile and/ or disaster-affected contexts such as pastoral dropouts means working on their livelihoods and the source of conflicts, e.g. by reorienting them from a pastoral mode to more diversified livelihoods (e.g. introducing fodder production).
Across the objectives stated by you, sustainably increasing productivity while ensuring that the produce (ASFs) find high-value markets to create incomes in vulnerable communities is transversal and will be key, and it may help in this context to emphasise on the key role of (agro-) pastoralism and livestock for making agroecological transition work (e.g. synergies, or use of local and indigenous knowledge and practices for preserving and sustaining land and naturalresources for climate resilience, cf. link) or not (e.g. when livestock is not being properly managed: rangeland degradation etc.). Therefore, when you are asking for potential themes for the guidelines, we would welcome if the guidance tool could link up to agroecology and also, to the right to food, right to land, acknowledging that smallholders, peasants, indigenous peoples etc. are often confronted with challenges in their access to and ownership of means of production, land and resources, which is actually questioning their capacity to produce food and inherently, their right to food. As you state, the guidance tool should focus on farmers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples who, at the national level have either lost or have limited access to land and natural resource endowments. In this regard, the UNDROP declaration together with further relevant guidelines in the area of RTF (such as the voluntary guidelines on the right to food and the ones on tenure) provide for interesting linkages.
VSF-Suisse and its partners would be keen to contribute to such guidelines in the frame of the foreseen inclusive and participatory process. One of our projects, the RAISE project, is trying to push for the implementation of the RTF and of agroecological transition in the area of livestock (read pastoralism), and VSF-Suisse and its partners are bringing into the RTF and the agroecology debate, the voice of pastoralists.
Christian Wirz