A/HRC/43/44 36. Most States remain reluctant to regulate the food and beverage industry with measures similar to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, or to adopt national strategic plans with time frames and specifically tailored budgetary initiatives. Instead, States continue to rely on public-private partnerships that are beset by conflicts of interest and weak monitoring and accountability mechanisms. 37. The Committee on World Food Security is currently drafting voluntary guidelines on food and nutrition security, which has the potential to advance the right to food and nutrition over industry interests. Specialized agencies of the United Nations, particularly WHO, have also created platforms for States and partner organizations to engage in global nutrition monitoring activities, such as UN REACH (Renewed Efforts Against Child Hunger) and the National Information Platform on Nutrition. Also in 2019, in a joint advocacy brief with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Special Rapporteur called for the development of healthy food environments and the mobilization of support systems, including greater education and social protection systems, to uphold the right to food for children.38 F. Loss of biodiversity and environmental degradation 38. Biodiversity is vital to sustainable agriculture and food production, but it is diminishing at unprecedented rates, threatening the world’s food supply and global access to available, adequate and sustainable food. In its first ever report on the state of the world’s biodiversity for food and agriculture, released in February 2019, FAO reported an alarming loss of biodiversity: fewer than 200 plant species make major contributions to food production and just 3 crops – wheat, maize and rice – account for more than half the world’s plant-based calories. Nearly one third of fish stocks are overfished and nearly 26 per cent of the 7,745 local livestock breeds are at risk of extinction. 39. Nearly 20 years after the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment warned that biodiversity loss would undermine food security and poverty reduction, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found with a high degree of confidence that climate change creates an additional stress on land, exacerbating threats to livelihoods, biodiversity, and human and ecosystem health and food systems. Studies by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) have also found that sustainably increasing food outputs to meet the world’s energy and nutritional needs requires new production methods that enhance, rather than degrade, biodiversity. Reducing meat in diets in developed countries could have important ecological benefits, as 70 per cent of the destruction of global forests is being carried out in order to grow animal feed. 40. Indigenous peoples are custodians of 80 per cent of the world’s remaining biodiversity, but are facing severe food insecurity, extreme poverty and other human rights deprivations. Despite the protections set forth in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, mining projects, hydroelectric developments, the creation of national parks and the designation of protected areas have compromised the rights of indigenous peoples in Argentina, Bangladesh, Botswana, Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Namibia, the Russian Federation, South Africa, Uganda and elsewhere (see A/HRC/42/37).39 New developments 41. States continue to invest in production practices and industrial agriculture that have detrimental environmental impacts. The palm oil industry is expanding, despite its links to the displacement of indigenous people and other rural communities, especially in Indonesia and South-East Asia (see A/HRC/40/56/Add.2). Cattle ranching and local and subsistence 38 39 10 United Nations Children’s Fund and Special Rapporteur on the right to food, “Protecting children’s right to a healthy food environment” (2019). See also David Nathaniel Berger and others, eds., The Indigenous World 2019 (Copenhagen, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2019), pp. 11–14.