Publication type: Publication

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 

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

Time to act: Securing a sustainable future through corporate accountability

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

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

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


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

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

It concludes with a set of recommendations

  • to States:

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

  • to intergovernmental and UN bodies

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

  • to civil society including trade unions

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

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

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