A/HRC/25/57 As the Special Rapporteur has also highlighted with regard to the exploitation of fish stocks (A/67/268, paras. 21–23 and 29–32; A/HRC/19/59/Add.4 (Madagascar), paras. 38–43), they present the international community with specific challenges that result from globalized markets connecting populations with widely diverging purchasing powers, in the context of finite resources. The reason why large areas of farmland can be dedicated to producing feedstock to satisfy the overconsumption of meat in affluent societies, or to fuel their cars, is that consumers in rich countries can command the resources that will allow their lifestyles to continue unchallenged. Similarly, the huge amounts of retail and consumer waste in rich countries are correlated with the fact that, as incomes have grown, the proportion of the household budget spent on food has diminished. This highlights the limits of the argument that the expansion of trade in agricultural commodities leads to efficiency gains by encouraging a division of labour according to comparative advantage: in fact, the expansion of trade also has resulted in the luxury tastes of the richest parts of the world being allowed to compete against the satisfaction of the basic needs of the poor.31 Ultimately, this creates a highly worrying competition for the natural resources needed for food production, particularly land. While a purely Malthusian view of land as finite oversimplifies the issue of competition for scarce resources, as the productivity of land can be increased to a certain extent and as some land can still be brought into production, recent research has highlighted the considerable social and ecological costs of doing so. Once these trade-offs are taken into account, this research shows, there is significantly less cropland available for future expansion than has been traditionally assumed in most scenarios.32 C. Poverty reduction 24. Finally, food and agricultural policies should address the distributional issues that result in large groups of the rural population in developing countries being too poor to satisfy their basic needs. Small-scale food producers and the landless rural poor, including many farmworkers who barely survive from their labour on large plantations, represent a majority of those living in extreme poverty. Yet, the promotion in the past of export-led agriculture, often based on the exploitation of a largely disempowered workforce, operated at the expense of family farms producing food crops for local consumption. This resulted in a paradoxical situation in which many low-income countries, though they are typically agriculture-based, raw commodity-exporting economies, are highly dependent on food imports, sometimes supplemented by food aid, because they have neglected to invest in local production and food processing to feed their own communities (A/HRC/9/23, annex I, para. 5). It also led to increased rural poverty and the growth of urban slums, and to the inability of governments to move to a more diversified economy: whereas such a diversification requires adequate infrastructure, a qualified workforce, and a consumer market allowing producers of manufactured goods, or service providers, to achieve economies of scale, none of this can happen when half of the population is condemned to extreme deprivation. Thus, the lack of support for small-scale farmers has not only weakened own-production as a means of access to food. It has also had severe impacts on the two other channels through which the right to food can be realized, as it has reduced 31 32 E. Lambin and P. Meyfroidt, “Global land use change, economic globalization, and the looming land scarcity”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 108, No. 9 (March 2011), pp. 3465–3472. E. Lambin and others, “Estimating the world’s potentially available cropland using a bottom-up approach”, Global Environmental Change, vol. 23, No. 5 (October 2013), pp. 892–901. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2013.05.005; E. Lambin, “Global land availability: Malthus versus Ricardo”, Global Food Security, vol. 1, No. 2 (December 2012), pp. 83–87. 11