As a UN Youth Representative, Ida Simonsen witnessed how in many cases, youth participation in global food governance only serves to reproduce policymaking mechanisms that legitimise oppression, co-optation and exclusion. In this contribution, she analyses what goes wrong and proposes ways to build better participation structures for young people.
It is October 2023 and I am sitting on the floor of a conference room at the headquarters of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome. The building, labyrinthine, imposing and originally commissioned by the Mussolini government, seems designed to overwhelm. Delegates and organisers hurry past one another to get in and out of the room on their way to various side events related to the World Food Forum.
Around me, young people from all over the world wait their turn to deliver three-minute statements on climate action and food systems on behalf of their ‘delegations’, ranging from student groups to youth wings of Indigenous Peoples’ or civil society organisations. Many have travelled long distances, taken time away from studies, farms, families, movements. They are here hoping to be heard by decision makers whose choices shape global food systems.
As statement follows statement, each articulating urgent demands and visions of habitable futures, I begin to notice none of those people are in the room. The institutional power we are meant to influence is absent. Youth addressing youth, until the cows come home. A quiet unease creeps in. Why are we here?
This question represents structural doubts about how youth participation is organised, valued and instrumentalised in global food governance spaces. How can we make ourselves heard and strengthen our collective agency?
Why youth participation matters
Nearly half of the world’s population is under the age of 30, and in Africa this is even true for 70% of the population. Those of us who are lucky will inherit a future shaped by climate chaos, ecological collapse, conflict and hunger. Those who are less fortunate are already living it. If there is any chance of transforming food systems away from the exploitative and extractive economic and political arrangements that produce these crises, it will depend on the minds, hands, hearts and collective power of young people. The fate of our food futures does not rest with youth as a distant ‘next generation of leaders’, but with youth as present-day forces of transformation.
The fate of the world’s food futures rests with youth as present-day forces of transformation
Youth participation in food systems governance is therefore not a courtesy, a branding strategy, or a box to tick for institutional legitimacy. Young people have a right to co-determine the policies that shape the conditions we will live with for decades and eventually pass on to human and non-human descendants alike.
As world leaders have also come to this realisation, over the past decade, youth participation has become an almost indispensable feature of international food governance. From the FAO and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, to an expanding ecosystem of multi-stakeholder platforms, young people are increasingly visible as advisors, negotiators, advocates, educators, rapporteurs and ‘ambition drivers’.
Many young people have worked these spaces tirelessly. They have leveraged their institutional powerlessness into moral authority, amplified the most ambitious government positions, brought marginalised perspectives into negotiations, built transnational alliances, and translated complex policy processes into tools for local organising. The youth constituency within the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism of the CFS for example, has pushed for youth-led agroecological visions that challenge the growing influence of agribusiness within FAO processes and national governments alike.
Resisting youthwashing
And yet, for all this labour, a tension between meaningful participation and performativity persists. The question is no longer whether we as young people are present in global food governance spaces, but who is being invited, what we are asked to do there, on whose terms, and at what cost. The more empowered we are to reflect on these questions together and consciously choose our strategies, inside and outside negotiation rooms, the more meaningful our participation becomes and the less vulnerable we are to ‘youthwashing’. This term refers to a co-optation practice where institutions abuse the naivety, hard work, uplifting images and charismatic power of young people to serve aims they did not willingly consent to.
I met an Indigenous youth activist who was very active in the (little) space accorded to Indigenous peoples and civil society but also very adamant about how her participation should and shouldn’t be used by negotiation parties. After every hearing, she would state loudly and clearly: “You have not consulted me. You do not have consent to use my words or pictures without my approval.” In a private conversation she explained that to her, being heard means that the voices of her community are not just listened to, but used and acted on, in ways that honour their intention. Anything less, she said, is not just useless but harmful considering how easily her presence could be abused to legitimise interests and views she had no stake in.
Strengthening access and accountability
The truth is, youth participation is highly conditional and therefore conditioning. Access to global decision-making spaces and influential stages depends on availability of money, language abilities, visa policies, credentials, and connections. It rarely depends on lived experience or grassroots organising. Hefty travel costs alone mean young small-scale farmers and grassroots organisers, especially from the Majority World, are usually underrepresented, if not entirely absent, in international political processes.
Access to global decision-making spaces rarely depends on lived experience or grassroots organising
During my term as Youth Representative, I spent thousands of hours on voluntary work to engage young people in biodiversity and food related conversations and translate our realities to policymakers and negotiators. During conferences, however, my meals and stays were completely covered with nights, albeit short, spent in the nearby luxury hotels paid by the Dutch government. During the days at UN compounds, I would be confronted with peers who didn’t have the privilege of a government-supported youth representative programme. They were staying in dodgy hostels with four hours of daily travel time and relying on free snacks served at side-events to sustain them through 12+ hour work days.
Among these motivated people, there were rarely any young people who were farming on a regular basis. Sometimes, our youth meeting spaces echoed with the silence of all our peers who couldn’t afford to leave their land, whether it be for the care of cattle, crops and family or the costs of travel, or whose visa applications had been rejected. Sometimes the lack of representation was even noticed by UN staff or Member States and used to delegitimise us when we offered uncomfortable policy recommendations or critical views.
Amid the theatre of youth participation, there are already tactics, small acts of refusal and reimagination, that young people are developing to connect movements and resist tokenism and performativity. Though not nearly at the funding capacity that is needed, the Global Youth Biodiversity Network (GYBN) is an example of how multi-year financial support can facilitate both guaranteed negotiation participation and the secretarial and coordination capacity needed to organise collective consultation and learning. The results have not just included formal diplomatic engagement but also extensive trainings, exchanges and input gathering on the intersection of biodiversity and food systems governance with grassroots youth and guiding documents. The latter can and have been used by many working on the Convention on Biological Diversity and related processes.
The need to structurally fund youth with requirements for more collective approaches to support inclusion, and no strings attached with regards to the policy input that may result from that, is also pivotal for another reason. In the absence of public efforts for inclusive and autonomous youth participation structures, private sector actors can swoop in and fill funding gaps with ambiguous consequences. Consider for example ‘NextGen Ag Impact Network’ (NGIN), which has financed dozens of ‘ambassadors’ from all over the world to participate in food systems and seeds conferences, and is co-founded and co-financed by multinational pharmaceutical and agrichemical conglomerate Bayer.
Ultimately, these practices threaten to reproduce an elitist globalist political class and governance mechanisms that legitimise oppression, co-optation and exclusionary developments pathways for our food systems.
Embracing a diversity of strategies
Luckily, there are many ways of resistance to youthwashing and building better participation structures. They all start with young people cultivating the capacity to ask difficult questions and reflect with mentors and peers. When young people are learning to work in pressuring policy spaces, we need to be supported through funding but also by providing us the space to co-determine strategies that support our grassroots practices and communities and that therefore transcend immediate negotiation and policy targets.
When we receive invitations, we have to consider whose needs or interests we are answering to
When we receive invitations to a table, we have to consider what and whose needs or interests we are answering to and whether our efforts are best spent taking a seat, or recuperating our energies towards alternative strategies. It requires us to undertake sustained capacity building with respect to critical analysis of the international food, nutrition and agricultural policymaking landscapes and to consider how to strengthen the agency of young people practicing agroecology. It requires intergenerational knowledge transfers and learning how to envision futures, across our lifetimes and beyond, outside of reformist repertoires and hegemonic narratives.
It requires confronting the power structures that reproduce inequality. It requires that we ensure youth are involved in entire decision-making cycles, from problem analysis to implementation and review, and that we learn to consider and embrace a diversity of strategies and tactics.
There is much to learn from the practices of La Via Campesina, which exemplify not only combined strategies of formal negotiations and grassroots activism such as farmer assemblies, transnational mobilisations and direct action, but also extensive political training for young people.
Looking back, the most empowering experiences I’ve had in international negotiation and policymaking spaces were always about building capacity for solidary and synergising strategies with other youth and allies. The times where we could exchange on who could do what in their capacities, resulting in some youth delivering statements other youth constituents wanted to but weren’t allowed to, and at other times, finding ways to pass the mic to youth that otherwise would have been silenced.
Or occasions where we made time to confront our doubts around different forms of youth participation. This happened for example, during an honest conversation on youth participation in international food governance facilitated by the CSIPM, the findings of which were shared with the FAO Office on Youth and Women.
These efforts remind us that we do make change, even when spaces are designed to exclude, exhaust and divide us. What more could young people do if we dared to look into the gift horse’s mouth? What if we started being honest with one another about what forms of participation actually feel meaningful? The kinds of agroecological decision making we dream of? We have learned to beg for crumbs because that’s what we’ve been told we deserve. This will no longer do. We want our part of the bread, the mill, the seed, the land and the negotiating table.
Author: Ida Simonsen (28) is a CSA-farmer and a coordinating member of Dutch La Via Campesina organisation Toekomstboeren (‘Future Farmers’). In 2023 and 2024, she fulfilled a two-year mandate as United Nations Youth Representative on Biodiversity and Food for the Netherlands. Contact: ida@toekomstboeren.nl
This article is part of Issue 4-2026: Youth leading the way in agroecology.
