Small-scale family farmers and agricultural workers are critical to delivering healthy and sustainable diets. But these important and diverse rural citizens – particularly Indigenous peoples (whose food systems are vital to feeding humanity) – are often squeezed in markets and sidelined policy spaces.

Increasingly, there is recognition that to improve the sustainability and nutrition of our food and get food systems right for all, we need more than technocratic policies for efficiency; efforts must focus on transformations that make poor producers’ and consumers’ voices heard at every level of food systems governance, and the enabling conditions to pursue their own priorities.

Small-scale producers must be able to shape the policies and practices that affect their livelihoods, make informed choices about all aspects of production and the markets they sell into, and claim their rights and access justice. We know that “when citizens have the capacity to act on their own priorities… there is the potential to achieve better and more durable outcomes”.

Explicitly promoting small-scale producer agency in commercial agriculture and food systems governance could be key to ensuring the markets these critical actors trade in work for them.

An agency approach challenges the potentially misdirected actions of external ‘experts’ but it must also include bottom-up efforts to tackle the structural factors that constrain producer agency – and for this we need stronger guiding frameworks for inclusive, accountable and transparent food systems that put poor producers and consumers centre-stage.  

New guidelines, new potential for producer agency?

A newly developed set of guidelines, the Voluntary Guidelines on Food Systems and Nutrition (VGFSNs), are currently under negotiation in the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS). The guidelines, which are due to be endorsed at 47th CFS meeting in February 2021, aim to bring together a fragmented policy landscape across food, agriculture and health sectors.

Although the VGFSNs are voluntary, the multilateral process of developing and agreeing them under the CFS legitimises them as a form of soft law. With widespread endorsement, and if supported by detailed implementation guidance at the local and national levels, they can be a powerful tool for change.

For example, the 2012 Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGTs) have already proved hugely influential despite being far from fully implemented.

The VGFSNs hold the potential to resolve key food systems challenges amid the climate emergency and help advance sustainable food systems worldwide that deliver sustainable and healthy diets for all.

They deal with a wide set of issues spanning health, food and agriculture, and offer a significant opportunity to recognise the role of small-scale producers in sustainable production and supporting healthy diets across all of these areas.