Category: environment

IPC releases its position paper on agrarian reform ahead ICARRD+20

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Twenty years after the first ICARRD, land, water, forests and oceans are increasingly concentrated in the hands of corporations and financial actors, driving dispossession, inequality and ecological collapse. Small-scale food producers, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, fishers, rural women and workers continue to be excluded from their territories and decision-making spaces.

The IPC urges governments to move beyond voluntary commitments and adopt binding, measurable actions to ensure redistributive land reform, equitable access to natural resources, democratic governance, and agroecological rural development. Without secure collective rights to land and territories, there can be no food sovereignty, no just transition, and no lasting peace. At ICARRD+20, IPC brings forward a clear political vision to reclaim land and dignity worldwide.

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Rural women, care and agrochemicals: A Call for Action 

Posted on by Tom

In rural communities worldwide, women are the backbone of food production and care. However, they are also on the frontlines of a growing health and environmental crisis caused by the widespread use of agrochemicals. Pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, central to the industrial corporate food system and production model, play a central role in the triple planetary crises: the intensification of climate change, the degradation of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity, and environmental pollution.  

Our new briefing paper “Rural women, care and agrochemicals” shows that women face exposure in every dimension of life. In Ecuador’s banana and floriculture industries, women work amid fumigation and chemical residues, often without protection. Many bring pesticide-use practices into family greenhouses near their homes, extending contamination into the domestic sphere. Women are exposed to toxics during care work, when they are washing contaminated clothes, preparing food, and fetching water. Toxics also increase their already heavy care work when they nurse sick family members. 

“We are in a constant struggle. We seek to produce food that is healthy and agrodiverse […] bananas, cocoa, cassava, coffee, citrus fruits, avocados […]. However, in our surroundings […] we find large areas of banana monocultures. Through fumigation, using light aircraft or drones, extensive production contaminates nature, our production and ourselves.” Evelyn Yánez and Daisy Chávez, rural woman from Ecuador. 

Care as resistance and transformation 

Despite these injustices, rural women are building transformative alternatives rooted in care. They are leading the resistance against a food system centred on extraction and pollution that accumulates wealth in the hands of a few while externalising harms to communities and the environment. In Ecuador, the Rural Women’s Network has embarked on an agroecological transition that includes diversified production, seed protection, women-led agroecology schools, territorial food reserves free of agrochemicals, and community markets. 

Similarly, in Honduras, women fishers are defending their coastal territories, which are being polluted and privatized by industrial shrimp farming. The destruction of mangroves and marine biodiversity has made it increasingly difficult for these women to feed their families or make a living while compounding the impacts of climate change on coastal communities. Yet, they continue to take care of the marine ecosystems and their communities, demanding co-governance of marine resources, restoring mangroves and advocating for sustainable fishing practices.  

“We are full of shrimp laboratories; they took our beaches and left us only rubble and pollution. They did not fulfil their promises to provide employment for the community.” Leader of the Cedeño community. 

These efforts are not only about ensuring food security; they are about reclaiming control over the natural resources that sustain life and over the way food is produced and families are fed. By embracing agroecology, women are showing that care within food systems, care for the land, water, and forests, and communities, is a key force for social and environmental justice. They are advocating for ways of producing, collecting and exchanging food that are based on care and solidarity, not on toxic inputs and corporate greed. 

The challenges rural women face are compounded by gender inequalities. While they provide most of the unpaid care work, they receive little to no support from the state, and their work is often undervalued and invisibilized. As noted by Marcos Orellana, UN Special Rapporteur on Toxic Substances and Human Rights, women face a “double injustice”—they are responsible for shielding their families from invisible toxics but are often denied the resources and information necessary to protect themselves and their communities. 

Rural women’s leadership and transformative practices offer a roadmap for a just and toxic-free world. To support and amplify their efforts it is essential that states: 

  • Recognize food care as essential: Acknowledge the critical role of women’s care work in sustaining life and food systems. 
  • Redistribute care responsibilities: Implement policies that share care work equitably across families, communities, and the state.. 
  • Support agroecology: Invest in sustainable, women-led agroecological practices, providing training, resources, and market access. 
  • Enforce protective measures: Enact strong, gender-responsive regulations to protect rural women from agrochemicals and other toxic substances. 

If we are serious about just, healthy, and sustainable food systems, we must place care—and the women who provide it—at the center of policy and action. Protecting their rights is not only a matter of justice; it is essential for the future of food and the health of our planet. 

Newsletter process: Rooted in resistance, territories for climate justice

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For Indigenous Peoples, peasants, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, forest dwellers, workers and other rural communities, land, waters, forests, and ecosystems are the foundation of life. Indigenous Peoples understand their territories as the total habitat they occupy or use, where culture, identity, and livelihoods are rooted. Beyond food production, these territories sustain essential social, cultural, spiritual, and ecological roles. Yet, land and natural goods are deeply contested, with their unequal distribution reflecting structural discrimination and historical injustices. Across centuries, processes of enclosure, colonialism, and dispossession have concentrated control in the hands of powerful actors, reinforcing oppression and exclusion.

Today, climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and environmental injustice – driven by neoliberal economies rooted in financialization, patriarchy and colonialism – intensify these struggles. Communities’ access to, use of, and control over land and territories remain essential for advancing systemic transformations envisioned by the food sovereignty movement. Territories are sites of resistance against extractive projects that endanger health, livelihoods, and ecosystems, but also spaces where communities build alternatives based on agroecology. These models promote food sovereignty, dignity, and justice – social, climate, environmental, gender, and intergenerational.

As social movements mobilize toward Climate COP 30 and the Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, this edition of the Nyéléni Newsletter highlights the centrality of land and territories in shaping just and sustainable futures.

FIAN International, Friends of the Earth International, ETC Group, La Via Campesina

Illustration created for the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum: Cultivate or Die, Chardonnoir
Nyéléni Virtual Gallery – Axes – Nyéléni Global Forum

Read it directly on the website!          

For any further information, contact info@nyeleni.org – www.nyeleni.org
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No profit without accountability: recognizing the right to a healthy environment

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Communities around the world are affected by unchecked and unregulated transnational corporate power, leading to poisoned water supplies, lost farmland, destroyed food systems and lost livelihoods. Yet, too often, corporations escape accountability while communities are left without remedy or justice, as outlined in a new study focusing on environmental issues, No Profit Without Accountability – For People and the Planet, aimed at shaping UN discussions.

The upcoming session of the Human Rights Council’s open-ended intergovernmental working group in October 2025 – the eleventh annual round of discussions – has enormous potential for curbing excessive corporate power and protecting communities and the environment. States will be negotiating the final articles of the updated draft of the legally binding instrument(LBI) to regulate transnational corporations in international human rights law. FIAN and other international civil society groups insist that the LBI must include an explicit recognition of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment and integrate this right – along with broader environmental and climate change considerations – throughout its substantive provisions.

“It’s very simple. If the LBI does not include strong environmental protections, it will fail the very communities it is meant to protect,” says Ayushi Kalyan, corporate accountability coordinator at FIAN International.

Enforceable international standards

Communities and human rights and environmental defenders have long campaigned for this addition to international human rights law.

In Latin America, families are still fighting for justice decades after Sweden’s Boliden Mineral dumped toxic waste in Arica, Chile, causing widespread health problems for people living near the dump site. In Palestine, corporations like Heidelberg Materials are alleged to have contributed to the pillaging of natural resources from occupied land. Across Africa and Asia, extractive projects are dispossessing Indigenous Peoples and rural communities of their territories and food systems. Each case highlights the urgent need for clear, enforceable international standards that prioritize human rights and environmental protection over corporate profit.

The International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have both affirmed states’ obligations to regulate private actors and prevent transboundary environmental harm. More than 80 percent of UN member states already legally recognize the right to a healthy environment.

“The LBI must explicitly recognize the right to a healthy environment, protect defenders from reprisals, and ensure that victims have real access to justice,” says Stephan Backes, extraterritorial obligations coordinator at FIAN International. 

Close the gap

Negotiators now have the responsibility to close the gap at the global level by embedding this right in the heart of the LBI.

The study released today proposes concrete legal texts to states to strengthen the provisions in the LBI, ensuring, among other things, that it includes environmental due diligence, precautionary measures, and the primacy of human rights and environmental obligations over trade and investment agreements. States should carefully consider and integrate these recommendations in their submissions during the next round of negotiations in October and continue leveraging these proposals in their ongoing advocacy in relevant national, regional and international spaces and processes.

As the world edges closer to climate collapse, this LBI process is a critical opportunity to hold corporations accountable. States must not squander it.

For more information, please contact Ayushi Kalyan Kalyan@fian.org or Stephan Backes Backes@fian.org,

UN experts express concerns over Serbia copper mining

Posted on by Tom

In a letter published today, UN Special Rapporteur on Toxics and Human Rights Dr. Marcos A. Orellana and UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues Pr. Nicolas Levrat express serious concerns over alleged pollution levels in the Bor region, which has been described as a “sacrifice zone”. 

The letter highlights concerns regarding alleged environmental pollution, including the presence of heavy metals and other hazardous substances in water, air, and soil, as well as excessive noise levels, causing health problems for surrounding residents. It also highlights damage to local agriculture, expropriation and displacement of communities, and a lack of adequate response from government institutions.

International scrutiny

“An international response is more critical than ever“ says Hristina Vojvodić, senior legal advisor at Serbian environmental organisation RERI which works with the affected communities,” adding that “it not only affirms the legitimacy of the community’s ongoing struggle but also sends a strong message to both state and corporate actors that environmental and human rights violations are under international scrutiny and must be urgently addressed.”

The letter was sent on August 8 to the Serbian government and Serbia Zijin Copper, a subsidiary of China’s Zijin Mining Group, who were given 60 days to respond before it was made public. There was no response from any of the recipients.

Previously, residents of the villages Krivelj and Slatina in the Bor region, together with the Association of Young Researchers Bor,  RERI and FIAN International submitted a communication to the UN Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights, raising concerns over severe environmental pollution and human rights violations in the Bor region.

The release of the letter coincides with the first official country visit of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights to Serbia, with an aim “to identify, prevent and address adverse impacts of business activities on people and the environment, including in the context of mining”. Bor is one of the areas the Working Group will be visiting.

Impact assessments

Explaining his decision to seek help from the United Nations, Milan Ćosić a resident of Krivelj village, emphasized that “our own country has failed to protect us.” The villagers, he added, are not asking for privileges, only “the right to a normal and dignified life, just like all other citizens.”

The UN Special Rapporteurs have called on the Serbian government to clarify whether social and environmental impact assessments were conducted for the activities of Serbia Zijin Copper and Serbia Zijin Mining, and to share their results. They also asked for information on measures taken to prevent and remedy human rights impacts, including issues of displacement, access to resources, and exposure to hazardous substances, as well as details on grievance mechanisms for affected communities and steps taken to protect the local Wallachian minority.

The rapporteurs emphasized that the situation “requires a human rights-based approach, including strong preventive measures and effective accountability mechanisms, and the provision of adequate compensation and rehabilitation for affected communities.“

Unchecked extractive industries

“The situation in Krivelj is a stark reminder that environmental destruction is a human rights crisis. It shows how unchecked extractive industries can devastate entire communities – poisoning land and water, displacing families, and eroding cultural identity,” says Ana Maria Suarez-Franco, Secretary General of FIAN International.

“The UN experts’ letter is an important step toward accountability for the human rights violations by corporations toward ensuring that affected communities, particularly the Wallachian minority, can live in dignity, safety, and a healthy environment.”

Families in the Bor region now live under the permanent threat of demolition, deprived of safety, stability, and dignity, as mining operations advance relentlessly toward their homes. For rural residents, forced relocation is not merely the loss of property, it is the uprooting of their entire lives, and the erasure of their heritage, memory, and sense of belonging.

For media enquiries please contact Milica Sušić milica.susic@reri.org.rsor Yifang Slot-Tang Slot-Tang@fian.org