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

This chapter explores young people’s participation in global food policy discussions – particularly that of young small-scale farmers, peasants and Indigenous Peoples. These groups have long contended with the dispossession of their traditional foods, knowledge, culture, and livelihoods while being excluded from political discussions that affect their lives. After decades of self-organising in territories and building coalitions across sectors and regions, rural and Indigenous Peoples’ organisations and social movements successfully advocated for the right to participate in policy discussions held by the United Nations (UN) committee on World Food Security (CFS), through an autonomous platform known as the International Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples Mechanism (CSIPM). The CSIPM gathers national, regional, and global movements and organisations from 11 global ‘constituencies’: small-scale farmers, fisherfolk, pastoralists, women, young people, urban food insecure people, landless peoples, consumer groups, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), Indigenous Peoples, and food and agricultural workers from 17 subregions across the world. Together, they collectively represent more than 300 million small-scale, peasant and Indigenous food producers and workers globally.