A/HRC/25/57 employment opportunities in the industry and services sectors, making it impossible for governments to finance social protection schemes. 25. Improving support to smallholders is therefore essential in achieving local food security. The Special Rapporteur explored different tools to achieve this. At the heart of his proposals lies the question of how to ensure that the freedom of choice of small-scale food producers is truly respected. This requires pursuing two reform programmes in parallel. 26. On the one hand, food systems must be reshaped in order to be more inclusive of small-scale food producers, who have generally been disadvantaged in the past, both as a result of inequitable food chains and because agricultural technologies have not taken into account their specific needs. With this aim in mind, the Special Rapporteur noted the importance of addressing imbalances of power in food chains, in particular by regulating buyer power in situations where dominant positions may be a source of abuse: this has been an entirely forgotten dimension of the reforms that have been promoted since 2008 (A/HRC/9/23, paras. 35–38; and A/HRC/13/33). He also sought to define the conditions under which contract farming – based on long-term agreements between agricultural producers and buyers – could benefit small-scale farmers, suggesting a variety of business models that could usefully be implemented to support the inclusion of small-scale food producers in the food systems (A/66/262) and noting the importance of supporting farmers’ organizations. He called for reforming a regime of intellectual property rights on plant varieties that can make commercially bred varieties inaccessible to the poorest farmers in low-income countries (A/64/170). 27. On the other hand, the right of small-scale food producers not to be forced or coopted into the dominant food systems must be recognized. Respect for their access to productive resources is key in this regard. The Special Rapporteur dedicated a report to access to land as a component of the right to food, identifying the threats posed by the increasing commercial pressures on land and suggesting the adoption of anti-eviction laws as well as tenancy laws (A/65/281; see also A/HRC/9/23, paras. 20–22). He put forward minimum principles and measures to address the human rights challenge regarding largescale acquisitions or leases of land (A/HRC/13/33/Add.2). He suggested that the promotion of agroecology, already mentioned above, could be of particular importance to cashstrapped farmers working in the most difficult environments and unable or unwilling to enter into more highly capitalized forms of agriculture. He also emphasized the need to support farmers’ seed systems, which are threatened by the almost exclusive focus of public policies on high-yielding plant varieties – which, although they perform well under the right set of conditions, may be more costly and less suitable in specific agroecological environments (A/64/170). He extended his study to artisanal fishers, expressing the hope that the International Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries, to be negotiated within the FAO Committee on Fisheries in 2013–2014, would improve the protection of artisanal fishers against the various threats he identified (A/67/268). 28. There is a strong overlap between the recommendations made in these various reports and the Declaration of the Rights of Peasants - Women and Men, adopted in 2008 by the international network of peasant organizations, Via Campesina, which the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee attached to its final study on the advancement of the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas, submitted in 2012 (A/HRC/19/75). This declaration now forms the basis of the discussions launched on 15 July 2013 within the open-ended intergovernmental working group mandated by the Human Rights Council in its resolution 21/19 to negotiate a United Nations declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas. The Special Rapporteur strongly supports this process. In his first report to the Human Rights Council, he already noted that peasants formed a particularly vulnerable group, because of the increased competition for the resources on which they depend, because of the pressures of industrial 12