Author: Amanda Cordova Gonzales

Safeguarding the Hands That Feed Us for a Better Future for All 

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

Elisabeth Jost, FIAN Austria; Naomi Reinschmidt, ÖBV- Vía Campesina Austria; Ana María Suárez Franco, FIAN International  

Worldwide, agricultural land is controlled by the largest 1% of giant industrial-scale farms. In the EU, an estimated 1,000 farms close every day. Roughly 9.1 million people currently active in agriculture will retire within the next decade.  Wars and conflicts displace entire populations, destroy and contaminate the territories that rural communities and Indigenous Peoples dedicate to produce food, causing and exacerbating famine and starvation.  

The way land is cultivated today will determine whether tomorrow’s generations inherit healthy soil, clean water, biodiversity, and vital rural communities. The rights of peasants and Indigenous Peoples are therefore not only a matter of the present, but  are also central to intra- and intergenerational justice and the human rights of future generations.  

Young People Struggle to Farm   

Young people face major structural barriers to farming, with access to and control over land as the most critical.  Concentration and speculation push prices beyond reach, especially for those who cannot inherit. Growing competition for agricultural land – from investors, energy production, and large infrastructure projects – squeezes agriculture, particularly small-scale and family farming, out of the landscape.  Powerful retailers and corporate actors impose prices that do not cover production costs, extracting value from farmers and making full-time farming economically impossible, forcing many into precarious part-time work or debt.  Rising costs for oil and fertilizers intensified by war, land concentration and speculation further deepen existing inequalities, especially for small food producers.  

The education system makes problems worse. In many countries, agroecological training is scarce. Cooperatives and collectively run farms face administrative hurdles and lack structural support. Political participation is too often symbolic: young farmers have few meaningful channels to co-decide policy. Women and gender diverse people face oppression through patriarchal inheritance systems, structural discrimination, and the systemic invisibilisation of unpaid care work. In contexts of war, occupation or conflict, those resisting– navigating trauma and subordinated to disrupted or colonized administration- face even larger challenges and carry increased burdens of care and survival. 

Land and territories, Knowledge, and the Human Rights of Future Generations  

The consequences are intergenerational. Land, water and forests cannot be treated as speculative assets because their fertility, ecology, biodiversity and social function unfold over generations. The rights to land and water, as recognized in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), are intergenerational rights. When current oppressive systems dismantle peasant, fisher, pastoralist, and Indigenous food systems, they leave future generations with depleted soils, destroyed biodiversity, fragmented knowledge systems, and corporate-controlled seed and land markets- undermining their ability to realize their right to food. 

Agroecological farms and other local food systems, by contrast, are pioneers for climate resilience and care for nature. They store carbon, regenerate soil, enhance biodiversity, and buffer the impacts of extreme weather. Losing them is not only a social loss; it is a blow to climate adaptation and to the right of future generations to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. Protecting peasants, rural communities, and Indigenous Peoples today, means safeguarding ecological cycles, seed diversity, and knowledge that cannot be rebuilt from one generation to the next. 

The Right to Food Is the Right to Decide  

Realizing the right to food requires a political transformation to overcome injustices and redistribute power, ensuring the conditions that people need to practice agroecology and achieve food sovereignty. Ecological, social, and political dimensions are deeply intertwined: justice and peace, the right to land, seeds, a fair income and self-determination lie at the heart of any sustainable future.  

Peasant rights, as recognized in UNDROP, provide a normative compass for this transformation. They stand in opposition to violence and to the dominant industrial food regime, which concentrates power, displaces rural communities, pushes farmers into debt, and shifts responsibility for ending hunger away from States and toward corporations. Governments must fulfill their obligations to protect, respect, and fulfil the right to food and all connected rights through public policies that serve people.  

That means reshaping land governance with anti-speculative laws, capping land concentration, ensuring liability for land grabbers, and building public land funds for newcomers – guided by common-good and public interest criteria. Land should be in the hands of those who work and nurture it and feed the world.   

This means acting on these urgent issues: 

  • Fair incomes are critical. Prices must cover production costs. Public support should prioritize peasant farms and local small food producers over agribusiness and retailer dominance.  
  • Social protection must include all farmers, fishers, pastoralists, and workers, including seasonal and informal labor. Care work, predominantly carried out by women, must be made visible, recognized, valued and redistributed.  
  • Agricultural policy, like the European CAP, needs a reset. It must move away from per-hectare payments that penalize small farms and ignore newcomers and instead design policies accessible to all and reward agroecological practices and the provision of public goods.  
  • Knowledge is a public good. We need agroecological education embedded in territories, such as farmer-to-farmer learning, and mentoring that passes on the skills and wisdom built over decades.   
  • Democracy must be real. Young farmers need genuine co-decision space and women and gender-diverse people need targeted pathways into leadership free from fear and discrimination.  
  • Local markets should be strengthened to keep value in communities and reduce export dependency, while engaging globally for fair, solidarity-based trade.   
  • In situations of war and conflict, seeds and traditional knowledge must be safeguarded for the reconstruction of disrupted food systems. Weaponization of food, water, and land must end! …Wars must stop!  

Listen to and protect the growing youth movement in farming and in other rural constituencies. Their message is clear: defend land and territories as a common good, invest in agroecology, and open doors for those who want to farm.  The rights of future generations begin with the rights of rural communities and Indigenous Peoples today. Respect their life!  

For more information, please contact FIAN International Secretary General Ana Maria Suarez Franco suarez-franco@fian.org, Elisabeth Jost, FIAN Austria elisabeth.jost@fian.at; or Naomi Reinschmidt, ÖBV- Vía Campesina Austria.  naomi.reinschmidt@viacampesina.at 

Nyéléni Process: Rethinking global trade in a time of geopolitical tensions

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

For much of this century, the multilateral system established after World War II has been corrupted and hijacked by a cohort of wealthy, powerful nations that are reshaping the (so-called) global rules-based order and redefining what cooperation, justice, shared prosperity and stability are. Leading the charge is the United States of America, which, through the combined power of capital and military might, is bypassing collective rules and imposing unilateral decisions that are fundamentally reshaping global politics and trade. This has led to a fragile international system where all rules are changeable and brute power determines outcomes.

This is not to say that the besieged international/multilateral system is fair, equitable or democratic. Its foremost bodies—the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO)—have long been instruments to advance the interests of former colonial powers. The bitter irony nowadays is that even the rules imposed by these institutions are in disarray.

Global trade and investment—whether negotiated through WTO agreements, bilateral Free Trade Agreements or Strategic Economic Partnerships—have morphed into weapons in geopolitical conflicts. Tariffs, sanctions, and financial restrictions are wielded not to correct trade imbalances but to exert ruthless political pressure and vanquish nations and peoples. Economic measures target those who dare to chart any alternate path to global capitalism and fascist ideologies.

As the latest war in West Asia shows, these actions ripple far beyond the nations involved. For developing countries, the consequences are devastating. Fluctuating tariffs, aggressive sanctions, and volatile commodity prices threaten working-class livelihoods, strain food systems, and deepen dependence on increasingly unreliable external markets.

Small-scale producers and workers—the backbone of local economies—find themselves caught in a vice of global price swings, escalating production costs and decreasing incomes.

When economic policies are driven by imperial and settler colonial ambitions, the expectation of fair and equitable trade evaporates. Cuba, Palestine, and Venezuela illustrate how trade weaponization combined with colonial assertions leads to the collective punishment of peoples.

However, this moment of crisis also offers a critical opportunity. As faith in existing systems wanes, countries and social movements are rising to demand a renewal of genuine multilateralism—one based on cooperation rather than oppression, and on participatory democracy rather than opaque representation.   

Focus on the Global South, La Via Campesina

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Public food programmes are a powerful tool for food sovereignty, if done right

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

Every year, governments spend more than US$84 billion on national school meal programmes, with 99% of this funding coming directly from domestic budgets. Such public food procurement and distribution schemes, which buy and provide food to schools, public hospitals, care homes or prisons, represent a significant portion of the overall market for food sales.

By sourcing from agroecological farms, local food hubs, and small enterprises, public food programmes can support community kitchens while ensuring decent livelihoods for small-scale producers and distributors, including street and market vendors, and other marginalised groups. They can also provide people, particularly those most in need, with fresh, culturally appropriate, nutritious food. These initiatives can greatly improve public health and uplift the local economy. Plus, they can create a space for community involvement, bringing together parents, students, local producers, officials, and health professionals to co-design programmes.

Public food sourcing also has the potential to positively influence eating practices while sustaining local food cultures. Through thoughtful menu designs, schools and other institutions can procure local fruits and vegetables without blowing their budgets, all while creating a space for collective learning on why short distance food supply matters. The programmes can even address supply chain issues, for example, working with food providers to use plant-based materials, like banana leaf, instead of plastic packaging.

Unfortunately, the potential benefits of public food programmes are often stifled by the way they are designed and implemented. Top-down, centralised public food programmes lead to corruption and nepotism and favour powerful agri-food companies. Public food programmes often rely on pre-made, ultra-processed foods because of convenience, which suppresses the demand for fresh, local ingredients. Furthermore, public tender contracts involve extensive paperwork and strict audits to prove accountability, which can make it difficult for smaller local suppliers to participate.

To unlock the true potential of public food programmes, we must view food as a vital public good, building on already existing local food sourcing networks–from small-scale producers, to informal food vendors, to consumers. A decentralised procurement system is key – one where local governments play a central role and beneficiary communities have a direct say in the programme’s design and implementation.

Some public food programmes are leading the way in this direction. In Brazil, civil society successfully pushed for the passage of a recently enacted law that increases from 30 to 45 percent the amount of the national school meal budget that has to be spent on family farms practising agroecological methods, prioritising Indigenous, Quilombola, agrarian reform settlement, and women producers. In May 2025, the Philippines’ municipality of Nueva Vizcaya launched the Healthy Public Food Procurement Ordinance, which promotes whole, nutritious foods by partnering with local fishers and farmers.

In this edition, we look at the importance of involving street and market vendors in public procurement and at the challenges faced by two public food programmes that underline the importance of decentralisation and diversity: Indonesia’s free meals programme for children and India’s public procurement system.

Read here

Banner: Quezon City, Philippines. 28th July, 2018. Children queue during a feeding program community service event. Alamy

Seeing Everything from Nowhere: A Human Rights Assessment of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Data Governance

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

The case study, Seeing Everything from Nowhere: A Human Rights Assessment of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Data Governance, evaluates whether FAO’s digital initiatives, particularly its digital public goods (DPGs) and digital public infrastructure (DPI), uphold equity, transparency, and participatory decision-making in agri-food systems. The analysis reveals significant gaps in FAO’s current data governance model.

A central concern is FAO’s growing dependence on US-based technology corporations for cloud services and digital infrastructure. The research also highlights how FAO’s DPGs and DPIs fail to meet key public interest criteria. The study concludes with concrete recommendations to align FAO’s digital transformation with human rights and public interest principles and food sovereignty.

Read the executive summary here.

Read the full case study here.

Time to act: Securing a sustainable future through corporate accountability

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

In spite of an increasingly robust international human rights and environmental legal framework, when it comes to trade and investment agreements, transnational corporations are often granted rights that are stronger than local communities’ tenure and human rights, without including any corporate obligations, especially their obligations to respect and comply with remedies.

In the briefing paper “Time to Act: Securing a Sustainable Future through Corporate Accountability” FIAN and other organisations address the challenge to ensure that growing recognition of the RtHE across governance spaces is translated into enforceable and coherent obligations for states and corporations alike. The paper outlines how the UN legally binding instrument on transnational corporations (TNCs) and human rights can contribute to close that gap with binding regulation of corporate conduct to prevent harm and secure access to justice and remedy in transnational contexts.


“The Treaty on TNCs and Human Rights can play a pivotal role in operationalizing states’ obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, for example by reinforcing meaningful participation, Free, Prior and Informed Consent, and robust environmental, gender and human rights impact assessments” says Ayushi Kalyan, corporate accountability coordinator at FIAN International. ”Such provisions would enable and require States to take timely action to modify, suspend, halt or refrain from trade, investment, or concession agreements that threaten livelihoods, contaminate land and water, undermine biodiversity, or contribute to climate change.”

The paper highlights multiple examples how corporate operations are causing severe environmental pollution in water, air, and soil, damage to local agriculture, expropriation and displacement of communities, etc. It  refers to recent developments in international jurisprudence which have clarified States’ duties to regulate private actors, enforce compliance, and ensure effective remedies – especially the Advisory Opinion (AO) of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the obligations of states in respect to climate change  and the Advisory Opinion (AO) of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) on climate emergency and human rights.

It concludes with a set of recommendations

  • to States:

-Constructively participate and strengthen the Updated Draft of the legally binding instrument on transnational corporations and human rights by ensuring that it establishes clear obligations for corporations and states, liability across jurisdictions, and effective remedies for affected communities; 
-Integrate into domestic law stringent human rights due diligence, liability and other prevention mechanisms grounded in the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment

  • to intergovernmental and UN bodies

-ensure that environmental policies genuinely reflect and serve the needs and priorities of those most impacted by environmental degradation and ensure coordination between human rights and environmental governance processes in line with the most progressive standards for protection.  

  • to civil society including trade unions

-Center the voices of grassroots communities and social movements as essential actors and promote community-led and people-centered solutions to the ecological crisis;
-Leverage the language of the legally binding instrument and jurisprudence on the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in environmental justice advocacy, and share information about this instrument in relevant spaces.

For more information, please contact Sabine Pabst pabst@fian.org