A/HRC/16/40 which local products cannot compete. As a consequence of dumping practices, smallholders have less income and fewer resources to buy seeds and fertilizers, which in turn affects their agricultural production and consequently their livelihood. Subsidies also produce long-term sectorial distortions in developing countries. Given the availability of cheap subsidized products obtainable through trade, there is a general disincentive to invest in agriculture. Undeniably, the past 30 years have witnessed serious underinvestment in the agricultural sector of developing countries owing to the growing perception that agriculture is unprofitable.24 22. Linked to the serious human rights challenges posed by dumping practices is the market domination of a few large transnational corporations in all sectors of the food chain: production, trade, processing, marketing and retail (E/CN.4/2004/10). For example, in the United States of America, the beef and the pork packing industries are dominated by four firms (Tyson, Cargill, Swift & Co., the National Beef Packing Co. and Smithfield Foods, Tyson Foods, Swift & Co. and Cargill) with a market concentration ratio of 83.5 per cent and 66 per cent respectively.25 There is a trend towards the reproduction in the markets of developing countries of the oligopoly structure observable in the United States and the European Union.26 The Special Rapporteur on the right to food stresses that only competition law regimes, which are designed in compliance with States’ obligations to protect the right to adequate food can combat abuses of buyer power, and outlines accordingly a set of recommendations for both States and the agribusiness sector (A/HRC/13/33).27 B. Discrimination against people working in rural areas 23. Hunger, like poverty, is still predominantly a rural problem, and among the rural population it is the peasant farmers, small landholders, landless workers, fisherfolk, hunters and gatherers who suffer disproportionately. The United Nations Millennium Development Project Task Force on Hunger has shown that 80 per cent of the world’s hungry live in rural areas. Some 50 per cent of the world’s hungry are smallholder farmers who depend mainly or partly on agriculture for their livelihoods, but lack sufficient access to productive resources such as land, water and seeds. Another 20 per cent of those suffering from hunger are landless families who survive as tenant farmers or poorly paid agricultural labourers, and often have to migrate from one insecure, informal job to another. Another 10 per cent of the world’s hungry live in rural communities from traditional fishing, hunting and herding activities.28 24. People living in the rural areas, including smallholders, landless workers and people living from traditional fishing, hunting and herding activities, face a number of impediments in realizing their right to food, which in turn places them in the abovementioned situation of vulnerability in respect to hunger. Some impediments are environmental or geographically-related, such as drought, floods or infertile land. Others are of social or human-caused origin, such as an inequitable distribution of land, traceable 24 25 26 27 28 8 IFAD, “Food prices: smallholder farmers can be part of the solution”. Mary Hendrickson and William Heffernan, “Concentration of agricultural markets”, April 2007. Available from www.foodcircles.missouri.edu/07contable.pdf. John Wilkinson, “The globalization of agribusiness and developing world food systems”, Monthly Review, September 2009. See also Olivier De Schutter, “Addressing concentration in food supply chains: the role of competition law in tackling the abuse of buying power”, Briefing note 3, December 2010. Pedro Sanchez and others, Halving Hunger: It Can Be Done, UN Millennium Project 2005, Task Force on Hunger (London, 2005).