A/HRC/13/32 B. Discrimination against peasants 21. Hunger, like poverty, is still predominantly a rural problem, and among the rural population it is the peasant farmers, small landholders, landless workers, fisherfolk, hunters and gatherers who suffer disproportionately. The United Nations Millennium Development Project Task Force on Hunger has shown that 80 percent of the world’s hungry live in rural areas.14 Some 50 per cent of the world’s hungry are smallholder farmers who depend mainly or partly on agriculture for their livelihoods, but lack sufficient access to productive resources such as land, water and seeds. Another 20 per cent of those suffering from hunger are landless families who survive as tenant farmers or poorly paid agricultural labourers and often have to migrate from one insecure, informal job to another. Another 10 per cent of the world’s hungry live in rural communities from traditional fishing, hunting and herding activities. 1. Smallholder peasants, rural producers, toxins, fertilizers and genetically modified seeds 22. Around 50 per cent of the world’s hungry live on small plots of land and produce crops for subsistence and/or sale on local markets. Many face problems because they live in remote areas or on marginal lands that are vulnerable to drought and natural disasters, while good, fertile land tends to be concentrated in the hands of wealthier landowners. For example, most of the fertile lands of central Guatemala are part of huge plantations, while the majority of smallholder farmers and indigenous people are left to cultivate the steep slopes of Guatemala’s mountainous regions (see E/CN.4/2006/44/Add.1). The same is true in other countries, such as Bolivia (A/HRC/7/5/Add.2) and Ethiopia (E/CN.4/2005/47/Add.1). 23. Together with land, peasants need seeds in order to secure their food security. Until recently, they were free to use seeds for replanting, selling or exchange. But this freedom is now threatened by a few transnational corporations that control the seed market and their patents on improved or genetically modified seeds (A/64/170). A third of the entire global seed market is in the hands of just 10 corporations, including Aventis, Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta. Monsanto alone controls 90 per cent of the global market in genetically modified seeds. 24. Another 20 percent of the world’s hungry are not small farmers, but landless people. Most of these people work as tenant farmers or agricultural labourers. Tenant farmers usually have to pay high rents and have little security of possession from season to season. Agricultural labourers usually work for extremely low wages that are insufficient to feed their families and often have to migrate from one insecure, informal job to another.15 This is for example the case in Bangladesh (E/CN.4/2004/10/Add.1) and Guatemala (E/CN.4/2006/44/Add.1). 2. Peasants and single-crop production 25. Since colonization, political and economic elites have largely imposed single-crop production to local rural populations, a process that continued after independence, in the name of neo-liberal free-trade policies. Instead of benefiting small peasants, this process favours highly mechanized agriculture and the interests of transnational corporations. In 14 15 United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger, “Halving hunger, it can be done”, UNDP, 2005. IFAD, “Rural Poverty Report 2001: The challenge of ending rural poverty”, Oxford University Press, 2001. 7