Designing Global Governance for Agricultural Development and Food and Nutriti...

杨利霞

Designing Global Governance for Agricultural

Development and Food and Nutrition Security

We point to defificits in current global institutional arrangements in support of agricultural development
and food and nutrition security. A framework for global institutional arrangements proposed here is the
set of essential international public goods for a well-functioning world food system. These public goods
include international natural resource management; trade and transboundary competition policy; research
and innovation; handling large scale food emergencies; and transboundary food safety. Based on the
framework, and institutional economics considerations, causes of current malfunctioning of global food
governance are analyzed. It is proposed to redesign global food governance by establishing an
international platform with policy clusters mapped along the set of global public goods. To support the
platform with needed research-based evidence an International Panel on Food, Nutrition and Agriculture
(IPFNA) is suggested, partly following the design of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC). Existing organizations and mechanisms would form building blocks of the strengthened and
redesigned governance system. A gradual approach toward redesign is proposed. Some redesign in the
suggested direction was triggered by the food crisis of 2008, as demonstrated by the reform of the
Committee on Food Security (CFS) with its high level panel of experts, but more is needed.