Hi Jen, thanks for this, very good questions, I’ll do my best.
I’ve estimated half a day a week based on how much time is involved in reading and keeping abreast of work going on through the Committee on Food Security and related correspondence between members of the Civil Society Mechanism working out how to respond collectively to that ongoing work; plus governance -style decisions for the Coordinating Committee, and skype calls scattered in there. PLUS the minimum of keeping people in our region connected as much as you can - so hooking people into particular workstreams, and disseminating more broadly essential news.
However like a lot of voluntary roles there’s a “how long is a piece of string” element to the role, particularly in terms of how much time you have and could spend trying to connect food sovereignty / right to food activists and practitioners and their orgs to the Civil Society Mechanism, and thus to the work of the Committee on Food Sovereignty. This was, to be frank, my greatest downfall, because it took me til the end of the tenure to start to figure out what were the really interesting bits of the work for our region, given our governments, are very disengaged, the work is very bureaucratic and slow, and the voluntary policy guidelines and such that are the outcomes of the Committee on Food Security are in dense language that many find really hard to connect to on-ground reality (and fair enough!).
So my intention when I started out was to do much more of the regional work and less of the international work, but the former proved really hard going, so slowly I got sucked into concentrating on the international stuff more. Plus I’m an ex- bureacrat and political hack amongst other things, so I felt one skill I could offer was to get involved in the liaison space between the Civil Society Mechanism and the UN Committee’s secretariat and help facilitate better negotiation and understanding. In hindsight the main problem with that other than taking energy away from regional connections was living in Australia plus a change in my personal job to a full-time one meant the commitment to extra trips to Rome (more than outlined above) was exhausting and a good illustration of how isolated we are. But it was also a choice, it’s not mandatory! From my perspective the best outcome I helped a bit with was trying to shift government opposition to getting a High Level Expert Report on agroecology. It’s not a won fight and we may still lose, but being able to speak the language of the NZ and AUS reps meant I could open a dialogue to break down their blank opposition. Small steps!
For me the most rewarding outcome by far is the chance to help connect food activists around the world, share knowledge, and share our region’s situation. It’s not particularly well understood. We are miles behind as a country in Aus (NZ less so) on food sovereignty and supporting local food than even big similarly industrial ag countries like Canada and USA, and our local food politics is also nascent comparatively. So that connection and sharing is gold.
I hope that helps and as I’m dashing this off in my lunch break, is not written with too much assumed knowledge.
