A/HRC/13/33 in Industry and Commerce; and even where labour inspectorates exist and are competent to monitor employment in rural areas, they may not have the resources to function effectively. C. The role of employers in respecting the right to food 21. Employers have a responsibility to respect the right to food, even where laws are insufficiently protective of agricultural workers or where the existing labour legislation is inadequately monitored. At present, the globalization of the food economy increases the competitive pressure exercised on suppliers, pushing them to lower wages and downgrade other working conditions, and weakening the ability of unions to resist this downward trend. This can and must be reversed. Its responsibility to respect the right to food implies that a company must not contribute, directly or indirectly, to human rights abuses through its relationship with suppliers. Agribusiness corporations operating at a global level should use their influence on suppliers to ensure that wages and working conditions improve, rather than degrade, as a result of their suppliers joining global value chains. Agribusiness companies could make unilateral undertakings to monitor compliance with certain social standards in the supply chain. They may conclude international framework agreements with global unions. These tools are not a substitute for the enforcement of protective regulatory standards by the State, but they can improve situations that, otherwise, would be even worse. 1. Codes of conduct 22. Agribusiness companies increasingly adopt codes of conduct to ensure that their suppliers comply with certain requirements related, for instance, to freedom of association, to health and safety at work, and to the prohibition of child labour. Indeed, the proliferation of such codes has been such that one of the challenges is now to coordinate, further encourage, or harmonize, the multiple private initiatives. There are attempts to encourage the comparison of good practices between multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI). Transnational corporations increasingly share experiences in supply chain management. One example is the Global Social Compliance Programme (GSCP), which seeks to improve coordination between a number of supply chain management schemes, by developing a reference code that may serve as a benchmark for the partners involved, and by making progress towards mutual recognition of social auditing practices. Such coordination should mitigate the difficulties resulting from the coexistence of a myriad of codes of conduct imposed by the various clients of local suppliers. 23. While welcome in principle, these unilateral initiatives also present companies with other challenges. First, the quality of these codes varies greatly. The value of codes consists in the fact that they may go beyond the minimum requirements that are laid out in domestic legislation or in international labour standards that companies have a responsibility to respect; a code that does not move beyond those minimum requirements is a source of confusion, not progress. Second, these codes should avoid shifting all the burden of compliance onto the supplier, and recognize that it is the responsibility of the buyer to support compliance by meeting part or whole of the investment cost required, by providing technical capacity, and by funding the monitoring procedures. Third, codes would be too easy to circumvent if the supplier could simply subcontract or outsource certain segments of the chain; codes should apply to the whole supply chain, including sub-suppliers and subcontractors. Fourth, lack of compliance should lead to the adoption of a corrective action plan, supported by the buyer, with well-defined and reasonable time frames, rather than to the cutting off the business relationship – a solution which, for the workers concerned, may be worse than the evil to be combated. Fifth, these codes should be binding on the companies adopting them, and failure to implement them adequately should come at a cost. The Special Rapporteur believes that a company adopting a code but failing to GE.09-17776 9