The United States Government welcomes the opportunity to comment on the Zero Draft of the CFS Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s and Girl’s Empowerment in the Context of Food Security and Nutrition.
As the Voluntary Guidelines continue to develop, the United States believes it is important for the workstream to remain focused on its intended scope. The GEWE has the potential to support CFS’s stakeholders in developing policies and implementing practices that promote gender equality and empower women and girls, accelerating progress toward the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Remaining aligned with this goal is essential for producing policy guidance that is useful for policy makers and implementers. It was with this goal in mind that the CFS Plenary defined the scope of the GEWE in the Multi-Year-Program of Work (MYPoW) 2020-2023 as:
“Through the VGs, CFS will address specific gaps and problems in promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment in the food and agriculture sector, and identify transformative interventions that can eliminate structural discrimination against women and girls and lead to improved food security and nutrition.”
The Scope of the GEWE was further defined by CFS 47 in the Terms of Reference (ToR) for the GEWE. The ToRs focus the GEWE on the “use of transformative approaches that are able to tackle both the symptoms and the structural causes of general inequalities with the aim of achieving lasting change in terms of the power and choice women have over their own lives.” This targeted approach agreed by the CFS Plenary would exclude a number of food security and nutrition related topics including trade, agricultural production methods, and economic sanctions. Not only would discussion on these topics distract from the central focus of the GEWE, but many of these subjects have already been discussed at length during the policy convergence process for the Voluntary Guidelines on Food Security and Nutrition (VGFSyN) and the Policy Recommendations on Agroecological and Other Innovative Approaches (AOIA). There is no need to repeat those discussions in the GEWE.
Finally, it is outside CFS’s mandate to redefine internationally agreed human rights language. The United States emphasizes the need to use internationally agreed language on human rights and suggests that the CFS Secretariat make use of the relevant human rights language in prior CFS policy products including the VGFSyN and the AOIA in the GEWE.
Additional comments per section can be found in the attached document.
Sincerely
Aslihan Kes
Ms. Aslihan Kes