A/HRC/43/44 G. Promote youth in farming 78. The average age of farmers worldwide is rising at an alarming rate, threatening the future of family farming. Children engaged in agriculture are often victims of child labour, while youth populations legally permitted to work in the sector are abandoning agriculture, forestry and fisheries owing to poor access to information, a lack of key services (education, health care, transport and communications) and markets, as well as the perception that agriculture is unprofitable and unstable.66 To counter this narrative, States should provide essential services and improve technical knowledge and skills, and incentivize access to land, credit and other productive resources for youth populations. States should also adopt mechanisms and policies that transform agricultural work into decent employment with robust social protections. 79. Increasingly, public-private partnerships are emerging to address entrepreneurial needs and are advocating stronger innovation policies that will benefit youth populations. In 2017, for example, the G20 announced its initiative for rural youth employment to train 5 million young people and provide jobs for another 1 million by 2020. FAO has also promoted four major pathways for creating employment for rural youth: full-time work on family farms; part-time farm work combined with off-farm household enterprises; agricultural wage-earning employment; and full-time off-farm household enterprises. 67 Additionally, the Committee on World Food Security has introduced a workstream on youth employment, rural transformation and territorial approaches as part of its multi-year programme of work for the period 2020–2023. All these new initiatives should, however, be critically evaluated and carefully monitored to avoid creating further inequalities among non-privileged youth. H. Invest responsibly in technology and regulate innovation 80. Innovative technologies have been lauded as a potential solution to food insecurity, eliminating inequalities and barriers to food. Given that it is estimated that 60 per cent more food will need to be produced by 2050, biotechnology may offer a critical toolbox of both low-tech solutions (such as biopesticides and biofertilizers) and high-tech solutions (such as those involving advanced genomics). However, as the “green revolution” has taught, an excessive focus on increasing production encourages a reliance on technology that inflicts major environmental damage and exacerbates social inequalities. Currently, increasing digitalization and dematerialization of agriculture has the potential to dispossess local knowledge, workers and production processes, with the effect of concentrating power in the hands of large corporate agribusiness operations, while disempowering local producers and consumers.68 81. Biotechnologies, mostly developed and owned by the private sector, are protected by patents and intellectual property rights. For instance, because of corporate oligopoly, four multinational agrochemical firms control over 60 per cent of global seed sales. Rather than being respected as belonging to a shared commons, patents are restricting farmers’ freedom to preserve and exchange seeds and interfering with breeders’ rights to use the seeds for research. 82. Corporate agribusinesses have also increased investment in biotech and plant-based meat alternatives, demonstrating that there is a profitable market in food that does not contribute to climate change or environmental destruction. However, such technologies are often exclusionary, as they are not affordable for much of the world’s population. Such “future of food” innovations should be developed so that all relevant actors have an equal opportunity to use and benefit from them. 66 67 68 18 See FAO, The Future of Food and Agriculture: Trends and Challenges, p. 100. Ibid., p. 96. See Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition, “Right to food and nutrition watch. When food becomes immaterial: confronting the digital age” (2018), p. 11.