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On International Women's Day, who cares for the caregivers?

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Care work consists of essential activities to guarantee the life of people, living beings and the planet. It has been historically carried out by women, based on the sexual division of labor in a framework of patriarchal power relations, which also meant that it has been largely invisible or low status. Paid and unpaid care work has led to and reproduced discrimination, gender inequalities and violence.

Privilege and oppression are power dynamics that intersect in caregiving contexts and relationships. Race, class, ethnicity, and other social identities intersect with gender to shape experiences of caregiving. To craft genuinely caring politics, we must acknowledge that care work includes many aspects of life from the individual perspective of self-care to the care of households and communities.

What is Food Care?

Care work includes food care: for what we eat, how we eat, who eats and when.  

Food systems, like care work, also rely on interdependent relations. Rural women’s care work is crucial to food production, processing, distribution and access. This interdependence also raises questions around redistribution, autonomy, sovereignty over bodies, love, relations, resources and life itself. Food is an act of love. And so is care.

The corporate food system anchors this interdependence in unequal power relations, with harmful consequences such as the homogenization of diets, the loss of biodiversity and the exploitation of unpaid care work done by the vast majority of black, indigenous, peasant, fisherwomen and rural women.

Why should we care?

The current system of production, distribution and consumption of food and other goods overexploits the productive and reproductive work of women, causing deep inequalities and sickening human beings and the planet.  

Rural women represent one third of the global population but 36% of the agricultural labor force yet earn 20% less than men. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, more than 20% of agricultural employees in Latin America and the Caribbean are women. Also in that region, women spend three times as much time on domestic work and unpaid care compared to men. In addition, there is a significant gap between women in urban and rural areas, with the latter spending three to ten hours more on daily care work than women in urban areas. 

Hegemonic narratives around care in food systems fail to look beyond recognition of these facts and leave aside the redistribution and representation of the agency of rural and indigenous women who produce food. Likewise, food systems see food only as the act of distribution and supply, ignoring all the care work that is behind real peasant-produced food.

There is a strong link between informal labor and the marginalization and impoverishment of rural and indigenous women. They are considered the most vulnerable group in society, as they mainly work as unpaid laborers on family farms with low pay, hazardous conditions, and without social security coverage. They face multiple obstacles to independence and economic autonomy. In contexts of crises, rural and indigenous women are most affected by poor access to resources, services and information, as well as by the heavy burden of care work and discriminatory traditional social norms.

In the current context of multiple and interrelated crises, a radical transformation of industrial food systems and the urgency of a transition to just, healthy, sustainable, and violence-free food systems is crucial. The feminist agenda and the right to food and food sovereignty agenda need each other more than ever to face the magnitude of current challenges. Reciprocity and cross-pollination should be the hallmarks of the strategy ahead for both living beings and the planet. Food, care, self-care and community care must be at the core of a much needed paradigm shift.

How can we care?

Social movements and civil society can help to push forward the care paradigm by:

  • Putting the human rights of caregivers at the center of the global care agenda.

  • Raising awareness of care work around food by peasant, indigenous and rural women. 

  • Collectively building action tools to position care in the political agenda.

  • Generating processes of mutual care and self-care relationships.

  • Advocate for the recognition and redistribution of care and domestic work, as well as remuneration and representation of care workers or caregivers.

For more information or media interviews please contact Amanda Cordova Gonzales at cordova-gonzales@fian.org 

Nyéléni Process: How multilateral and other international platforms affect food sovereignty

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For many governments and policymakers, food has come to be viewed as a commodity rather than a right. Global food governance increasingly serves corporate interests through market- and business-friendly agreements which are normalised in a wide range of multilateral institutions. People’s livelihoods and nature are being traded away via economic and financial deals that benefit corporations and elites in different sectors and countries, but threaten the conditions necessary for peoples’ food sovereignty. This threat is now being compounded by corporate techno-fix approaches to climate change and biodiversity crises.

In this issue of the Nyéléni newsletter, we describe how trends in multilateral and other international platforms are impacting food sovereignty in ways that will be decisive for the future of food and peoples’ self-determination. We unpack the different processes in which unfair exchanges are being perpetuated and opaque concepts promoted.

As trade and investment fora continue to advance industrial food systems and global supply chains, the proliferation of so-called ‘Nature-based Solutions’ (NBS) is masking new ways of commodifying nature, territories and livelihoods.  By assigning land, soil, water, forests and biodiversity the impossible task of making up for the pollution caused by industries elsewhere in exchange for monetary remuneration, a new front of commons enclosure is opening up, which is being enabled, measured and monitored through new technologies. Corporate capture of political and economic agendas is a common factor in all these scenarios; spreading out and embedding in multilateral institutions through multistakeholderism. A glaring example of this is the 2021 Food Systems Summit and the subsequent establishment of a UN Food Systems Coordination Hub, which seeks to hijack the ongoing food governance conversation.  A further example is the discussion on Data for Food Security and Nutrition in the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), driven by none other than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

It is clear that we need to collectively mobilise and resist on an even larger and more coordinated scale than ever before to challenge and reverse these trends across a range of multilateral and other ‘negotiating’ arenas.

ETC Group, FIAN International, Focus on the Global South

Read the newsletter or download it here. 

Illustration by Andrea Medina for the ETC Group.

Digital agriculture: A new frontier for data rights

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One morning in 2019, the inhabitants of Naya Toli, a village in eastern India, woke to find that they had become landless overnight. This time, it was not bulldozers or armed gangs driving them from their land but a state government program to digitize land records. The new digital registry attributed 108 acres in their area to the previous owner, who had sold the land to 19 families in 1973. 

What might appear to be a simple technical glitch reveals a fundamental problem with the rapid deployment of digital technologies: it risks entrenching existing exclusion and increasing inequalities.

Power imbalances embedded in digital technologies

The promise we so often hear about the future of food is that digital technologies will make food systems more productive, sustainable, and efficient, as well as help to address rising world hunger. In reality, the digitalization of agriculture is set to benefit mainly large corporations, while small-scale food producers, Indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups risk losing out. Smallholder farmers fear that their data will be extracted and used without their consent to create products and services that will then be sold to them for profit—deepening their dependence on external actors while lining the pockets of corporations. After all, there are enormous power imbalances between rural communities and multinational technology conglomerates.

The Indian government began digitizing land records in the 1990s and launched its ambitious Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme (DILRMP) in 2008. By 2019, the state of Jharkhand had digitized more than 99% of its land registry records. However, with only 2.3% of land physically surveyed in the fast-paced process, the land rights and claims of many communities, such as those in Naya Toli, disappeared in the newly digitized registries. When villagers there tried to pay their land taxes, officials refused, claiming that they could not pay taxes for land they did not own, according to DILRMP records. The villagers have since tried, with great difficulty, to correct the information in the registry.

Communities across India relate similar experiences, especially smallholder farmers and Indigenous peoples, who possess traditional claims to common lands or collective forms of land ownership. The new digital registries have proved unable to document the diversity of tenure types, further disenfranchising marginalized groups. Indian communities are not alone: from Brazil to Rwanda and Georgia to Indonesia, people face similar challenges.

The pitfalls of “digital agriculture”

The digitization of land records is one part of a rapid and far-reaching transformation of food systems, sometimes referred to as “digital agriculture.” The Indian government announced in 2021 that newly digitized land records would be included in Agri Stack, a government-backed data exchange that enables the integration of land data with farmer profiles and other non-human sourced agricultural data (weather, soil health, hydrology, etc.). The stated goal is to create a pool of aggregated data to create customized products and services for farmers.

But as in other sectors of the economy, there is a race underway for profitable data and data collecting and processing technologies—including artificial intelligence. In recent years, several of the world’s leading agribusiness companies have partnered with large technology companies such as Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon. These provide the technical infrastructure, such as cloud-based systems and artificial intelligence, that underlies a range of new applications and services that agribusinesses sell to farmers. In India, massive farmers’ protests challenged new agricultural laws adopted by parliament in September 2020, which opened up the country’s agricultural sector to corporations. The new laws coincided with the launch of Agri Stack, reinforcing farmers’ fears of a new wave of data-driven land grabs. 

Just digitalisation 

Two important lessons can be drawn from the experiences of communities in India and other countries. First, the development and use of digital technologies are firmly embedded in a given socioeconomic context. Technology does not develop in a bubble but is shaped by money and power, both of which are highly concentrated in a few large companies. Second, the implications of digitalization go beyond data protection and privacy. More specifically, digitalization impacts equity and the distribution of resources and wealth. It must be shaped proactively to make our societies more just rather than reproducing patterns of exclusion and discrimination. There is an urgent need for strong human rights–based governance frameworks that establish principles and standards for the use of digital technologies in the context of food and agriculture.

Governments and the United Nations appear to be finally rising to this challenge. The UN Human Rights Council recently adopted a resolution on “new and emerging digital technologies and human rights.” While highlighting the potential of these technologies, the resolution also recognizes the risks they may pose to human rights, including the economic, social, and cultural rights of marginalized groups such as Indigenous peoples and people living in rural areas. In addition, it calls on states to establish governance frameworks to prevent, mitigate, and remedy the adverse effects of digital technologies on human rights, including regulating the activities of technology companies.

The UN’s Committee on World Food Security also recently agreed on a set of policy recommendations on the collection and use of data in the context of food security and nutrition. This document includes the first formal attempt to describe how data and related technologies are affecting food systems and to propose guidance on how to manage the associated opportunities and risks. Significantly, the recommendations, to be adopted in October 2023, recognize farmers, Indigenous peoples, and other small-scale food producers as rights holders over their data and related knowledge, with the right to an equitable share of any benefits generated from that data. 

Whether these global initiatives will help to shape the use of digital technologies in food and agriculture in a way that supports human rights remains to be seen. However, they clearly demonstrate that the issues raised by digitalization are inherently political. We cannot leave it to technicians and corporations to shape the future of our societies. 

As seen with the massive farmers’ mobilizations in India, food producers’ organizations are putting forward an alternative vision in which technologies are at the service of people and the planet, not financial interests.

Philip Seufert is a FIAN international policy officer working with small-scale food producers to support the realization of their right to food in the context of land, biodiversity, and digital technologies.

This article was originally published in OpenGlobalRights on September 22, 2023.

For more information or media interviews please contact Tom Sullivan, FIAN International Communications and Campaigns: sullivan@fian.org

Emerging diseases and factory farming. What makes food safe?

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Within the industrial food system, “safety” is all about managing the high risks created by this model of food production. Food is produced on monoculture fields or factory farms, with uniform breeds of plants and animals that are highly vulnerable to pests and diseases. In this context, diseases can grow or mutate into more lethal forms, and, in the case of animals, transfer to humans and spread through corporate supply chains. To deal with their vulnerabilities, crops are genetically modified or doused with toxic pesticides, and animals are fed antibiotics and drugs, creating more health dangers. Then much of the food gets highly processed and sold through supermarkets, causing harms like diabetes and cancer.
 
More and more regulations and standards are imposed by governments and corporations to deal with these risks. But they typically only curtail the most serious excesses, without threatening corporate profits, and are alien to food systems based on traditional animal husbandry, markets and agroecology, where risks are low because of diversity, local knowledge, trust and small scale circuits. Those regulations have become a tool to expand corporate control and undermine the healthy food systems that continue to feed the majority of the world's people and that are the only real solution to the harms of the industrial food system.

Read the Nyeleni Newsletter No.53 here or download

Illustration: Rini Templeton

Guarani and Kaiowá leaders call on EU and UN to support their struggle

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In Brazil, 62% of existing indigenous lands and territorial claims are pending administrative regularization or demarcation. The resulting tenure insecurity is at the heart of multiple human rights violations and a brutal land conflict which has seen 795 indigenous people murdered and 535 cases of suicide within the past four years. The Guarani and Kaiowá Peoples of Mato Grosso do Sul are among the main victims.

Human rights violations and abuses, socio-territorial conflicts and insecurities against the Guarani and Kaiowá (GK) are largely driven by incursions into their traditional territories by agro-industrial corporations, landowners, luxury condominiums, illegal prisons and the expansion of infrastructure megaprojects to transport commodities. Conflicts have occurred between armed militias formed by farmers and their rural unions and paramilitary actions and military operations by state security forces lacking judicial authorization. 

Exploitation of natural resources 

Widespread violations of the Guarani and Kaiowá’s right to adequate food and nutrition have their origin in historical and ongoing dispossession of their ancestral lands. This predatory exploitation of their natural resources has resulted in water, land and air contamination by pesticides and the denial of practically all their human rights. From the difficulty of accessing documentation and public services, to the psychological and physical violence resulting from generalised racism, to the dependence on irregularly delivered food baskets, all these violations culminate in alarming rates of food insecurity and hunger. The already dire situation worsened considerably during the Bolsonaro regime which saw a systematic dismantling of social policies, programmes, and structures, and the promotion of anti-indigenous policies and sentiments. 

In a recent study by FIAN Brasil and the University of Grande Dourados, carried out in five Guarani and Kaiowa communities, it was found that 77% of households live with some level of food insecurity, while 33.6% of households have insufficient food to feed their families. 

During the advocacy tour, the indigenous leaders will meet members of the European Parliament, the European Commission’s External Action Service, as well as representatives of human rights bodies and diplomatic missions in Geneva. They will also be participating in the 54th Human Rights Council session and the examination of Brazil by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. FIAN Brazil together with other civil society organizations has submitted a report on the situation of ESC rights in the country.  

‘We are being murdered’ 

“We came to Europe to demand the demarcation of our lands, the recognition of traditional lands, the homologation of lands… to give a voice to youth, women, elders. To clamor for the world to know how we live … how we are being murdered, how we are being violated, massacred… by the very powers of the Brazilian state…,” said Inaye Gomes Lopes, a counselor in the municipality of Antônio João, in Mato Grosso do Sul and one of the representatives advocating in Europe this week.  

“I hope that the UN/European Union officials will notify the Brazilian authorities so that they implement our territorial rights, which are stipulated in the Brazilian Constitution, and denounce how our rights are being violated, continue to be violated, and (how we) are being massacred…”

Their central demands also include effective protection of Indigenous Peoples from violent attacks in the context of reoccupations of their ancestral lands, the completion of the demarcation processes, and rejection of the “temporal framework” thesis and Bill 2.903/23.  

Moreover, European policy makers and legislators are urged to ensure that existing and currently negotiated trade deals, as well as investments and actions by the companies based in or with ties to EU and its member states, do not further fuel the land conflict or otherwise contribute to violations of the rights of the GK people. The banning of exports of harmful agrotoxics, prohibited in the EU, to Brazil and other countries is another key demand.

FIAN Brazil and FIAN International have been accompanying the Guarani and Kaiowa since 2005. Together with Aty Guasu, CIMI, and Justicia Global they have a petition pending at the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights. 

For more information or media interviews please contact Amanda Cordova Gonzales cordova-gonzales@fian.org  
 

Photo Credits: Ruy Sposati/CIM

Governments must halt coal power ecocide and make amends in Western Balkans

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The Western Balkans has some of Europe‘s highest air pollution levels. Both countries source most of their energy from fossil fuels, especially domestically produced coal, with little regard for its impact on local communities.  

A recent expansion has been funded by controversial Chinese-backed investments, often without environmental impact assessments and despite China’s commitment to cease funding coal power. 

Lost land and livelihoods

This has exposed local communities and farmers to pollution, land erosion and loss of livelihood.

Many have fought for years to be re-located or fairly compensated. They have lost their land and livelihoods, seen their houses and farm buildings crumble around them and their health deteriorate. 

“It is high time the authorities take actions to protect the interest of the population, rather than those of the polluters,” says Denis Žiško from Aarhus Center in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In a new report published today Coal Power Ecological Destruction in the Western Balkans FIAN International and local civil society groups highlight the harm inflicted by coal power and call for justice for affected communities and for Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to phase out coal power in line with their international human rights obligations, the Paris Agreement, and the Green Agenda for the Western Balkans. 

The report was compiled with the Center for Ecology and Sustainable Development (Centar za ekologiju i održivi razvoj, CEKOR) in Serbia, the Center for Environment (Centar za životnu sredinu, CZZS), and the Aarhus Center (Aarhus Centar) in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Sinking village

It investigates the impacts of coal mining and related activities throughout the coal cycle on people’s right to adequate food and nutrition and to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. There is a particular focus on local struggles and resistance to the impacts of coal power in three locations: the villages of Klicevac and Drmno, near Drmno mine and Kostolac power plant in Serbia; Kamengrad mine and Kamengrad village, in the municipality of Sanski Most in Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Ugljevik power plant and coal mine, also in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“The mine is destroying not only their livelihoods but also their properties,“ says Zvezdan Kalmar from CEKOR, about the impact of Drmno mine on the nearby village of Klicevac in Serbia.

“We expect that in a few years time … part of the village will actually sink,“ he adds.

Testimonies gathered from local people and civil society groups highlight clear indications of ecological destruction. These include polluted and disrupted groundwater supplies, which leads to waterlogging, water shortages and diminished agricultural yields. There are also reports of plant diseases, flooding and subsiding of homes and farm facilities and increased instances of respiratory illness, allergies, and other severe health issues.

Laws must be respected

Despite this, the governments of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina have yet to act. There is a shocking lack of transparency, participation, and local democracy in both countries combined with repeated failures to conform to national and international legal frameworks. Local communities are rarely consulted and there is little evidence of credible environmental impact assessments. 

“Policies and laws are there to be respected and duly followed. What is the point of having them if they are simply ignored? Says Dragan Osti? from the Center for Environment in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“We need to keep our environment clean, alive, and for people and communities to be able to live on their land for as long as they wish to.”

FIAN International joins local civil society groups, CEKOR, CZZS, Aarhus Center, and the communities in demanding urgent action from the governments of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovia to address these serious rights violations. They must establish proper remedy mechanisms to compensate and resettle affected people, stop support to coal-fired power and set ambitious coal phase-out goals in line with their international human rights obligations and the Paris Agreement.

They should also do more to safeguard, respect, and restore biodiversity, with a particular focus on the human right to adequate food and nutrition, and the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.

Read in English the full report, the Executive Summary, and the Key Recommendations.

Read in Serbian the full report, the Executive Summary, and the Key Recommendations. 

Read in Bosnian the full report, the Executive Summary, and the Key Recommendations. 

For more information or media interviews please contact Clara Roig Medina, FIAN International Digital Communications: roig@fian.org

Communities affected by mining in Koudiadiène, Pambal and Diogo in Senegal demand protection

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Senegalese associations including Collectif pour la défense des intérêts de Koudiadiène, Association de défense des intérêts des riveraines des phosphates de Thiès, Association pour le développement des activités des femmes et jeunes de Pambal, Fédération nationale pour l’agriculture biologique and Réseau national des personnes affectées par les opérations minières have submitted on July 18, 2023, a Universal Periodic Review (UPR) parallel report on Senegal that points out to the human rights abuses linked to mining activities undertaken by SEPHOS and GCO.  

The mining activities of these two European companies have led to land grabbing and forced evictions in some localities such as Lam-Lam by SEPHOS and Fout, Keur Gamou and Diourmell by GCO. The affected communities in Koudiadiène, Pambal and Diogo have been forced to abandon their land due to excessive dust that destroys land and crops, and causes health problems including dermatological and respiratory disorders.

These land grabs have also affected their access to drinking water, water for cultivation and to healthcare facilities in the village of Diourmel. Moreover, access to housing has become a problem for 28 families in the village of Fout and for half of adult children in the village of Diourmel. 

Senegalese associations and members of communities affected denounce that compensation has been inadequate or non-existent for those who have been forced to abandon their land.

“Compensation must take into account the annual income earned by each landowner, multiplied by the number of years each landowner has been unable to work his or her land due to mining activities,” said Pierre Pathé Thiao, an affected community member from the Lam-Lam locality. 

The loss of land has left members of the communities living in poverty and some are unable to pay for medical treatment. Some families have taken their children out of school due to poverty. In Koudiadiène, affected communities have changed their eating habits, replacing couscous with rice. This situation has led to increased cases of diabetes. Millet agriculture has decreased significantly while peasants have stopped growing tomatoes, especially in the fields near the mining sites. Moreover, some families do not have the financial means to buy other food such as meat or fish to diversify their meals.  

Agricultural land and biodiversity have therefore been destroyed, impacting people’s livelihoods and right to food.  

“We have heard that GCO has restored a part of the land destroyed and it has given it to the Water and Forest Service. The land must be returned to the previous landowners,” said Pape Beye, a community member from Diogo who has lost his land. 

This UPR parallel report requests that Senegalese authorities guarantee the restoration of the land as a first step to ensuring communities’ livelihoods and that the restored land returns to the members of the communities. Second, among other claims, affected communities call for legal recognition of customary rights over their land which will require a reform of the current land governance, which considers rural communities as land users with no control over the land they use for sustenance. 

“Given the importance and social function of land for those who depend on it, the recognition of customary land rights would be crucial to ensuring that those who depend on land, especially in rural areas, have real control over it,” says Valentin Hategekimana, Africa Coordinator at FIAN International who has contributed to the UPR parallel report.  

Affected communities also denounce the criminalization of human rights and land defenders and demand that the Senegalese state guarantees their freedom of speech regarding their land rights concerns.  

Read the full UPR parallel report on Senegal in French here.

For more information, please contact Valentin Hategekimana: hategekimana@fian.org  

Nyéléni process: Recognizing the power of people’s movements

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In 2007 the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) played a vital role in uniting small-scale food producers and their allies to establish a shared vision of food sovereignty and implement strategies to make it a reality. Over time, a robust global movement for food sovereignty emerged, gaining significant political recognition. Together, we have achieved the democratization of global food and agricultural arenas, including the reform of the Committee on World Food Security. Our struggles also influenced food sovereignty policies in various national contexts and successfully secured political acknowledgment of peasants as rights holders through the ratification of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas.

However, our achievements are now under threat due to an extended period of systemic crises. Right-wing forces, authoritarian regimes, and the corporate capture of democratic governance spaces are on the rise globally, accompanied by the dismantling of the United Nations multilateral system. Human rights violations against peasant and Indigenous communities, along with climate change, biodiversity loss, armed conflicts, and hunger, are escalating rapidly. Furthermore, renewed threats to food sovereignty come from new business configurations, in which hedge fund speculation firms and digital technology titans join forces to oil the wheels of the failing agro-industrial production system.

In this context, the IPC advocates for a new global Nyéléni process, leading up to the next Nyéléni Global Forum in India in 2025. Recognizing the power of people’s movements, we aim to strengthen solidarity and unity by bridging local and global struggles. We are striving to adopt an intersectional perspective to address the multi-dimensional global crisis effectively.

By collaborating with climate justice, workers’ rights, feminist, solidarity economy, anti-war, youth, and other movements, we seek to resist the corporate takeover of governance spaces, safeguard human and collective rights worldwide, protect ecosystems, and secure a dignified life on Earth for present and future generations.

IPC for food sovereignty, Friends of the Earth International, La Via Campesina, Transnational Institute

Read the Nyeleni Newsletter No.52 here or download

Ilustration: Andrés Mateo Ayala Luna @calma_88

Towards People’s Food Power

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The lack of decisive action at global level in response to the ongoing systemic food crisis has deeply impacted communities around the world, fostering hunger and malnutrition, as well as worsening structural inequalities and systemic discrimination.

The latest Global Report on Food Crises estimates that 258 million people faced acute levels of hunger in 2022, up from 193 million in 2021 and 155 million in 2020. The State of Food Security and Nutrition report, published last week, confirmed that hunger and malnutrition are still on the rise. 

Ahead of the UN Food Systems Summit +2 Stocktaking Moment in Rome next week, a new FIAN report Food Systems Transformation: in Which Direction? calls for deep food systems change, based on full respect for human rights and care for people and planet.

“In these times of multiple and intertwined crises, it is more urgent than ever that governments and the UN listen to the voices of the most affected constituencies, and change direction,” says Sofia Monsalve, Secretary General of FIAN International.

“The main stumbling block for taking effective action towards more resilient, diversified, localized and agroecological food systems are the economic interests of those who advance and benefit from corporate-driven industrial food systems.”

On the global governance level, there is an ongoing struggle between two different approaches: attempts to further democratize multilateralism, as advanced with the reform of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) and attempts to replace multilateralism with multistakeholderism – where giant corporations sit around the table, with governments and food producers, to discuss the future of food systems – as advanced during the first UN Food Systems Summit (FSS) in 2021.

The FSS+2 Stocktaking Moment is poised to repeat the failures of the FSS itself and further consolidate the dominance of industrial food systems over global decision making. It will open the door of the UN to even greater influence from large private companies and their networks, ignoring the strong concerns expressed by many civil society, small-scale food producers’ and workers’ organizations, Indigenous Peoples, women, youth and academics.

The UNs Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is heading in the same direction. Despite geopolitical rivalry in other arenas, the FAO leadership from China and the US have a common agenda on corporate food systems. They have established an unprecedented open-door policy for the corporate sector, with favourable funding schemes and generous multistakeholderism policies. All of this is occurring in the absence of any serious corporate accountability framework.

However, there is a counterbalance to this creeping corporate hijack of global food governance.

“People’s food power is changing food systems from below,” says Sofia Monsalve.

“We must head towards a food systems transformation, based on respect for all human rights and care for people and planet, to advance agroecology, food sovereignty, biodiversity, gender justice and diversity, as well youth agency, climate justice, economic and social justice, in all dimensions of food systems.”

This report is a FIAN contribution to the larger efforts of the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism for relations to the CFS in response to the global food crisis and the People’s Autonomous Response to the UN Food systems Summit.

For more information or media interviews please contact Clara Roig Medina, FIAN International Digital Communications: roig@fian.org

 

 

 

Rights of future generations

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The rights of future generations have long been neglected in the analysis and application of human rights. Yet, human rights law does not limit itself to present generations. The foundations for international law to address the rights of future generations are established in international instruments in an array of subject areas spanning nearly a century; constitutions and legislative acts adopted by the majority of the World’s States; in the laws, traditions, and cosmologies of Indigenous Peoples and traditional communities from every continent; and in the doctrine of major faith traditions representing the majority of the world’s people. 

The Maastricht Principles on the Human Rights of Future Generations, launched in parallel to the High-level political forum in New Work on 13 July, seek to clarify the present state of international law as it applies to the human rights of future generations. The Principles consolidate the developing legal framework and affirm binding obligations of States and other actors as prescribed under international and human rights law. They also provide a progressive interpretation and development of existing human rights standards in the context of the human rights of future generations. They further recognize that States may incur additional obligations as human rights law continues to evolve. 

These Principles provide examples of how realizing rights of future generations requires attention to the distinct rights of particular groups and peoples, but does not do so comprehensively. It is important to read these Principles together with other human rights standards setting out the implications of human rights for particular groups, including groups subject to historic and current systemic discrimination in its many forms.

The Principles represent the result of a process of nearly six years of research, dialogue and analysis, drawing on the expertise, experience and perspectives of some two hundred legal and human rights researchers and practitioners, national and regional current or former human rights mandate holders, members of Indigenous Peoples and traditional communities, and representatives from civil society organizations and social movements.They build on historic traditions and knowledge spanning millennia. 

The Principles were adopted in Maastricht on 3 February 2023. Signatories include experts located in all regions of the world and include current and former members of international human rights treaty bodies, regional human rights bodies, and former and current Special Rapporteurs of the United Nations Human Rights Council. This initiative builds on expert legal opinions adopted in Maastricht, the Limburg Principles on the Implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1986); the Maastricht Guidelines on Violations of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1997); and the Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations of States in the area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (2011) and its accompanying commentary.

The full explanation of each Principle, and the sources supporting them will be set out in the Commentary to these Principles.

More information about the Principles can be found at https://www.rightsoffuturegenerations.org/

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