Publication type: Publication

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 (LBI) on business 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 LBI 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

True Solutions: Bottom-up approaches to the global food crisis

Posted on by fredsaxo

We present “True solutions: bottom-up approaches to the global food crisis”, based on experiences from around the world. These include urgent agroecological transformation,  sustainable fisheries and grassroots mobilizations to protect human rights-based food systems.

Communities and grassroots organizations are organizing themselves in the face of increasing hunger and malnutrition, setting an example to international institutions that are failing to address the structural causes of hunger. They are finding alternatives to the industrial food system, despite being directly affected by growing inequality, land and natural resource grabbing, dispossession and the commodification of nature.

They are seeking to break center-periphery and North-South asymmetries and neocolonial relations that are perpetuated in climate transition policies which often amount to green colonialism. They are making it clear that the global South does not want to remain a subaltern space to be exploited, destroyed and reconfigured, according to the needs of capital accumulation. 

And they are embracing a transformative eco-social approach, achieving food sovereignty in ecosocial harmony to safeguard the right to food for all.

Another world is not only possible, we are already building it from the bottom up, with organization and mobilization, from the grassroots, from our streets, neighborhoods, villages and communities. Communities are going to the root causes of problems, confronting corporate capture, greenwashing and neocolonial practices embedded in false solutions to the climate, ecological and food crises.

For more information or media interviews, please contact Amanda G. Córdova cordova-gonzales@fian.org

FIAN International annual report looks back on 2023

Posted on by fredsaxo

With the launch of the annual report, FIAN International looks back on 2023, a year in which food was weaponized in many conflicts. The Russian invasion of Ukraine had already added another layer to the global food crisis. It continued to dominate media headlines until the Hamas attack on Israel in October and Israel’s counterattacks on Gaza – both part of a protracted conflict in which access to farmland, food and water has been a major component.

Our State of the Right to Nutrition report in March highlighted that 70 percent of people live in areas affected by conflict, according to WFP figures. It examined how powerful economic and political actors use conflict, occupation and war to maintain dominance, including over food systems. FIAN has consistently called for an end to hostilities, including the use of food as a weapon. 

We joined forces with other food sovereignty voices to advocate for an end to corporate capture of the UN and global food governance. This included a campaign for greater accountability from the July UN Food Systems Summit +2 Stocktaking Moment, a corporate-dominated follow-up to the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit.  

In October, we once again joined food sovereignty and human rights allies advocating for a UN binding treaty to regulate transnational corporations and other businesses, successfully resisting attempts by some states to derail the process and arguing for an explicit reference to environmental protection.  

There were many positive developments. The UN Human Rights Council recognized the risks associated with digital technologies, which FIAN had highlighted during the year. A UN special procedure was announced for the Declaration of the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) – a pivotal milestone in raising the status of peasants and other people working in rural areas.  

During 2023, FIAN continued to support longstanding grassroots struggles, including the West African Caravan for the right to land, water and peasant agroecology, a feminist school with the Latin American Alliance for Food Sovereignty, and EU and UN advocacy by communities affected by natural resource exploitation in Senegal, Bosnia, Serbia and Colombia.  

As always, we were inspired by the great work of our national Sections around the world, such as FIAN Sri Lanka’s successful defense of the rights of street vendors and FIAN Brazil’s advocacy against the temporal framework bill which denies the land rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

These affirmations of grassroots and international solidarity will continue to fuel our dedication to fighting for agroecology, food sovereignty and the right to food and nutrition in the year ahead.

Read the annual report here.  

Selling Nature or Protecting Rights? A Right to Food Perspective on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework

Posted on by fredsaxo

Ecosystem destruction and the rapid loss of biodiversity are undermining the sustainable production of healthy and culturally appropriate food and thus the realization of the Right to Food and Nutrition (RtFN).

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 75% of plant genetic diversity has been lost since the beginning of the 20th century, as farmers worldwide have abandoned their local seeds for genetically uniform varieties. Today, out of 6,000 plant species cultivated for food, just nine account for 66% of total crop production. In addition, 90% of cattle reared in the global north originate in only six breeds and 20% of livestock breeds are at risk of extinction.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) was adopted by the states parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) on 18 December 2022 as a global plan to protect biodiversity. However, this new policy paper shows that its underlying premises give rise to concern that it enables business as usual, allowing more destruction and violation of communities’ rights.

As our analysis shows, the framework fails to establish a path away from highly destructive industrial agriculture and other extractive activities and towards agroecology.

The conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity is only possible by respecting and protecting the rights of those people and communities who act as the stewards of much of biodiversity – peasants, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, forest people, small-scale fishers etc.

Despite its significant shortcomings, the KMGBF and the increased attention to biodiversity that it has generated should be used in a tactical and pragmatic manner to advance agroecology and the rights of Indigenous Peoples, peasants and other rural people.

Download the policy paper

Remote Control and Peasant Intelligence – On Automating Decisions, Suppressing Knowledges and Transforming Ways of Knowing

Posted on by fredsaxo

Digital technologies are often touted as a   silver bullet to respond to the interconnected crises of food, climate and biodiversity.

Although they are presented by their promoters in governments and corporations as a necessary tool for innovation and for making food systems more efficient and sustainable, the reality is much more complex.

A new report Remote Control and Peasant Intelligence – On Automating Decisions, Suppressing Knowledges and Transforming Ways of Knowing, published by FIAN International, Friends of the Earth Europe and Coventry University’s Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, examines the implications of digital technologies taking hold in European agriculture.

It focuses particularly on frictions between new digital technologies and peasant autonomy, agroecology and food sovereignty.

This report is the result of a collective learning trajectory and contains valuable reflections and insights from peasants, pastoralists and critical allies. It is intended as a contribution to an ongoing discussion within the European food sovereignty movement about technology in the context of agroecology.

The viability of a techno-centric model of farming is less relevant than the question of whether it is desirable, and how the food sovereignty movement can effectively build alternative agricultural worlds.

Download report

The Role of Local Governments in Constructing Human Rights-based Food Systems

Posted on by fredsaxo

This study is based on in-depth conversations with members and associated organizations of the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition and FIAN national sections from Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Indonesia, Nepal, India, and Palestine (Gaza Strip).

Based on their experiences and perspectives, discusses opportunities for local governments to adopt progressive policies and laws around food systems. It provides examples of where this has happened and examines the challenges encountered as well as local citizens’ participation and international engagement.

Local policies can directly impact how human rights are operationalized. These policies and policy spaces must be held to the same standards that are expected of national government. Civil society can work closely with local governments, bringing concrete demands and offering tangible grassroots support.

A World Food Forum Captured by Corporate Interests?

Posted on by fredsaxo

Ahead of World Food Day, FIAN International joins social movements, Indigenous Peoples’ and civil society groups, calling for an end to growing corporate influence at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

In a new report, FIAN International and Corporate Accountability shed light on the extent of this influence over the UN’s World Food Forum (WFF), taking place in Rome next week, starting on Monday, World Food Day. The report also highlights the need for a robust accountability framework for corporate actors.

The WFF is billed by the FAO director general as “the world event on food and agrifood systems issues, with a strong focus on youth, private sector partnership and investment, and science and innovation”.

However, this year the event is clearly dominated by corporate-driven narratives, the cooptation of youth participants, and an FAO drive to broker problematic public and private investment partnerships. The FAO also significantly chose to shift the dates of a major meeting of the more inclusive UN Committee on World Food Security from World Food Day, in favor of the WFF, a move which was opposed by many countries and grassroots groups.

Rights Not Charity: A Human Rights Perspective on Corporate-backed Charitable Food Aid

Posted on by fredsaxo

The brief “Rights Not Charity: A Human Rights Perspective on Corporate-backed Charitable Food Aid” outlines the global trend of increased corporate backed food charity, and how the growing demand for humanitarian responses to food insecurity is being addressed through the food banking economy. Thus, state policies and institutions are systematically neglecting their obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the human right to adequate food. 

Amid increasing poverty, hunger, and inequalities globally, corporations are increasingly claiming to have the solution- taking up policy space and supplanting government roles. Amongst this trend, corporate-backed food charity through redirection of food waste, product donations and financial support, food banking and other food access organizations have become a significant cog in the industrial food system.  

Corporations and governments are promoting and codifying a false link between food waste and food security. Ignoring and exacerbating deeper structural problems associated with overproduction and food waste, they have created new financial incentives to uphold dysfunctional industrial models of food production, and captured charity as another vehicle to consolidate corporate control of the food system. This is a failed response to ensure food security for all, with its entrenchment undermining the state’s obligations to fulfil the human right to adequate food – and it must be challenged.  

Solutions consistent with human rights require public policies that address and overcome structural food access barriers that people face. Food and nutrition policies should be designed to overcome the need for emergency food, by ensuring that food is consistently adequate, available, accessible and sustainable. If surplus food redistribution infrastructures are required to meet this goal, these should be destigmatized, universally accessible, connected to regional food provisioning systems and governed by local community development interests and goals, not those of distant corporate actors. 

Download report here

For more information contact Amanda G. Cordova: cordova-gonzales@fian.org 

A Just Transition to Agroecology

Posted on by fredsaxo

In a new briefing paper, “A Just Transition to Agroecology”, FIAN International examines the concept of a just transition from the right to food and nutrition perspective.

It argues that only a systemic, multisectoral and human rights-based transition can guarantee a safe, sustainable, and just future for all. A just transition must address socio-economic inequalities, including gender inequalities and transform processes of marginalization and exploitation that have always benefitted the same groups.

Drawing upon the arguments of United Nations experts and concrete experiences from diverse communities, the briefing outlines specific legal and policy actions that governments can take to facilitate a just transition to agroecology.

To support a transition to agroecology, states must adopt binding transition plans that include gender-sensitive support mechanisms for rural populations and Indigenous Peoples, in line with UNDRIP, UNDROP, CEDAW and ILO conventions. The knowledge, practices, and innovations of Indigenous Peoples, peasants, small-scale fishers, pastoralists, and other rural people must be recognized and their right to effective, meaningful and informed participation guaranteed throughout the transition process.

Advocacy Note on the Promotion and Implementation of the UNDROP

Posted on by fredsaxo

It is time for the implementation of UNDROP (the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas) to be tackled at international level.

At the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva which began this week, the Permanent Mission of the Plurinational State of Bolivia will present a resolution to create this follow-up mechanism, described in a new advocacy note from FIAN, LVC and CETIM.

Since the UN General Assembly adopted UNDROP in 2018, peasants' and rural organizations have advocated for the adoption of the rights enshrined in this historic instrument. They have fought for the realization of peasants' rights and food sovereignty and the creation of equal and truly sustainable food systems. They have raised awareness, organized UNDROP trainings, monitored its implementation, and engaged in advocacy at different levels, including through legal avenues.

In some countries, public authorities have taken steps towards implementation of UNDROP, translating its content into national legislation or developing public policies based on the rights and provisions recognized in the declaration. However, despite these advances, peasants and other people working in rural areas continue to be systematically oppressed by an economic system created for the interests of the more aggressive agribusiness sector and transnational corporations. Much remains to be done.

There have been very few efforts to monitor the implementation of UNDROP at the international level. Thus, the nature and the root causes of systematic rights violations against rural workers and of historical asymmetries of power in rural areas have not been adequately addressed in international fora.

Download the advocacy note here, prepared with support from the Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation, and join us in mobilising for the creation of this follow-up mechanism.