Tag: right to food

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

Read complete here, or downlad here

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

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

Posted on by Tom

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.

Download here

On the International Human Rights Day, we demand a transformation of the UN that strengthens accountability and serves peoples not budgets

Posted on by Tom

In our work with communities affected by human rights violations, people often tell us that visits and recommendations by the Human Rights Council’s Special Procedures – such as the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food – and recommendations by Treaty Bodies bring visibility to the risks and harms they face, guide states in preventing or redressing those harms, and ensure accountability for obligations under the UN Human Rights treaties.

While the Human Rights System has failed to stop genocides and other grave atrocities, the work of Special Procedures and Treaty Bodies- carried out by independent experts serving without pay – has played out a decisive role in correcting injustices, and stands out as one of the most important parts of the system for human rights holders.

Despite this reality, the UN80 reform (UN80 Initiative) threatens to reduce budgets essential to ensure the work of the human rights mandates, including by cutting the technical support provided by the OHCHR that is necessary to respond to letters of allegations from rights holders, prepare affidavits, and conduct other critical monitoring work. The UN human rights pillar is already severely underfunded, receiving only about 1% of the total UN budget, and the proposed cuts would once again disproportionately impact human rights work – further weakening protection for those most at risk. We are concerned because mergers of mandates that are essential have already begun and the reduced number of country visits introduced in 2025 has been announced to continue unchanged in 2026, with only one visit planned. Furthermore, while the work of these mandates is mainly based in Geneva, the decisions are taken by the UN General Assembly in New York, through a very opaque process, without due consultation with a diverse group of civil society and affected communities or even the concerned human rights mandate holders.

“The UN’s credibility and legitimacy have already been seriously questioned due to its failure to stop the genocide in Gaza, the many abuses by transnational corporations and the destruction of our nature. Further weakening the human rights mandates would deepen the crisis of legitimacy. We need a transformation of the UN that puts people and planet at the center and strengthens those mechanisms that serve the people, not a rushed, cost-cutting reform that superficially treats the symptoms while leaving the structural causes untouched” says Sibyle Dirren, permanent representative of FIAN in Geneva.

We call on all UN member states to pay their contributions to the UN and to actively defend the full and uninterrupted functioning of Special Procedures and Treaty Bodies. Members who have committed to respect, protect and fulfill human rights, shall ensure that any reform guarantees accountability, access to justice, and effective remedy. A reform that is done with the people serving the system without pay, the Special Rapporteurs and the members of treaty bodies, and those they are mandated to defend, the human rights holders. We call on civil society to unite and raise their voices for a real transformation of the UN.

Contact person: Sibylle Dirren, dirren@fian.org

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

Posted on by Tom

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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The health and nutritional costs of supermarkets

Posted on by Tom

As supermarkets expand, traditional food systems shrink, endangering heritage diets and the benefits they offer to human health. This is the focus of our September bulletin.

Research carried out in Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro region found that the shift to a Western diet resulted in negative health outcomes like elevated inflammation, poorer immune function, and weight gain, while a return to traditional foods produced anti-inflammatory benefits and reduced markers of metabolic disease. The push for supermarkets across the world is causing an exponential rise in highly processed and refined foods that have a long shelf life and a rapid decline in the availability of nutritious, fresh and more perishable foods particularly fruits and vegetables.

These ultra-processed foods are associated with an increased risk of obesity and other chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, and even malnutrition among children. They are mostly composed of ingredients derived from industrial agriculture and global trade chains, leading to excessive chemical pollution of water, air and soil. On the other hand, local circuits of food distribution, with local markets and small-scale food vendors, provide more access to a diverse variety of fresh healthy foods that are affordable and easily accessible. Street food vendors play a critical role in many of these traditional food systems.

An estimated 2.5 billion people eat street food every day.  Most of these street food vendors do not have large storage capacities, so they often have to buy small quantities of fresh ingredients from traditional retail markets or directly from local farmers.  Food quality is assured by strong social ties and trust between producers, food vendors and consumers. The food is then prepared using simple processing facilities. In contrast, ultra-processed foods are commonly referred to as “junk food”, due to their high levels of free sugars, refined starches, sodium, saturated and trans-fats derived from substances or additives that make these products more appealing and enhance their shelf life.  In places where communities have a strong food culture, one of the marketing strategies of food corporations and retail chains is to mimic and recreate traditional foods using industrial food ingredients to expand their markets.    

This month, the third global Nyéléni Forum will be held in Sri Lanka.  The Nyéléni process emphasises the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods.  Food production, distribution and access form a cohesive socio-cultural fabric that supports people’s nutritional and mental wellbeing, and people’s food sovereignty. In this edition, we highlight how local food systems should be the entry point for addressing issues like nutrition, labour conditions, and community strengthening, and we look at examples from a healthy food procurement policy in Brazil’s school networks and the ways in which Africa is resisting supermarket expansion.

Read Supermarket Watch here

For more information contact Laura Michéle michele@fian.org