A/HRC/43/44 II. Critical perspective: globalization and commodification of food systems 6. The current industrial agricultural model has serious disadvantages. It generates food loss and waste, mistreats animals, emits greenhouse gases, pollutes ecosystems, displaces and abuses agricultural and fishery workers, and disrupts traditional farming communities. Put simply, the human rights of food system actors, including agricultural workers, smallholder farmers and consumers, are often ignored or their rights violated. The following section provides a critical view of those trends and other obstacles to upholding the right to food. The discussion further assesses the progress made in addressing the challenges to achieving solutions and the remaining gaps. A. Trade agreements, subsidies and neoliberalism 7. The globalization of food systems has the potential to support greater availability and diversity of food, thus addressing food insecurity and malnutrition. In practice, however, this phenomenon has perpetuated global inequality and undermined access to food for the most vulnerable populations. Today’s food systems are dominated by trade agreements and economic policies that prioritize profits over the right to food. Power is concentrated in the hands of a few corporate actors that benefit from free trade rules and export-oriented agricultural policies. Such regimes privilege large-scale agribusinesses to the detriment of others, creating instability in the global food system. 8. Around the world, small producers are disappearing and local markets are collapsing. Rural producers, increasingly facing poverty, have been forced to respond to trade rules and production incentives (such as subsidies and tariffs), which have affected their ability to meet local food needs and participate in larger markets. Unilateral measures taken by countries under the guise of ensuring safety or protecting intellectual property rights often disproportionately disadvantage smallholders and producers who do not have the capital to implement the required measures and whose capabilities are therefore limited. 9. Fiscal policies that promote farm subsidies and other protectionist measures mostly benefit large multinational corporations and big landowners over the interests of local producers. The common agricultural policy of the European Union, which is one of the world’s largest subsidy schemes (representing 40 per cent of the European budget), 3 is intended to promote “farmers’ food sovereignty” but is often subject to distortion and manipulation that threatens the livelihoods of local producers.4 The most heavily subsidized areas experience the worst pollution and a rise of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.5 10. Smaller producers in developing countries struggle to compete with subsidized products from developed countries.6 Subsidies saturate global markets with unhealthy food, as they promote major commodities, such as corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sorghum, milk and meat, at the expense of diverse food systems and food security.7 11. Several States have adopted neoliberal reforms, including fiscal consolidation or austerity measures, and broader, structural reforms that liberalize, deregulate and privatize food markets to the detriment of smaller producers. For instance in Greece, such policies have generated favourable conditions for larger food retailers and private traders, but have contributed to a rise in rural poverty, unemployment and food insecurity (A/74/164, para. 3 4 5 6 7 4 See Matt Apuzzo and Salam Gebrekidan, “Who keeps Europe’s farm billions flowing? Often, those who benefit”, The New York Times (11 Dec. 2019). Selam Gebrekidan, Matt Apuzzo and Benjamin Novak, “The money farmers: how oligarchs and populists milk the E.U. for millions”, The New York Times (3 November 2019). Matt Apuzzo and others, “Killer slime, dead birds, an expunged map: the dirty secrets of European farm subsidies”, The New York Times (25 December 2019). Emmett Livingstone, “How EU milk is sinking Africa’s farmers”, Politico (8 April 2018). Since 1995, the United States of America has provided farmers with nearly $300 billion in agricultural subsidies for commodity crops.