At some point during the negotiations on principles for "Responsible Agricultural Investment" in the Green Room of the FAO building in Rome I had enough. I got up from my seat, went over to the representative of the European Union and told her flat out that her refusal to acknowledge the right of farmers to reseed from their harvested crop was irresponsible. I was thus breaking diplomatic etiquette and fieldwork ethics. There is indeed an unresolved methodological question: How to write about a governance process if one is engaged with / enraged by the matter at hand?

Massive investments in land and agricultural technologies have reconfigured land ownership and agricultural patterns at the global level over the last decade. This led to expulsions of small farmers, environmental disasters and to a call to regulate land grabbing and the associated agricultural practices by private investors and foreign states to make them more accountable. In the international negotiations to formulate principles for responsible agricultural investments, two modalities of global governance confronted each other: the idea of corporate self-governance promoted by the World Bank and governance through human rights based on multilateral processes in the Committee for Food Security of the United Nations. The negotiations around agricultural investments seem unspectacular and "technical" but following them closely through different forums of the United Nations, reveals one of the central problems of international governance today: the weakening of the role of the multilateral institutions of the United Nations Organization bound by the mandate of advancing and promoting human rights and at the same time the rise of autonomous instruments promoted by groups of states and international bodies without multilateral legitimacy. These ways of governing have a direct impact on soil depletion and intoxication, agrobiodiversity and the rise of global hunger.