All the special procedures of the UN Human Rights Council can published calls for inputs. These calls are addressed to any interested parties to the subject. Civil society organizations and human rights defenders are strongly encouraged to participate.

The current call for inputs from the Special Rapporteur Michael Fakhri, is directly linked to peasants struggles and the rights enshrined in UNDROP. The inputs will be the base material for the next report of the Special Rapporteur to the General Assembly of the United Nations. The report will take them into account to draw conclusion and propose guidelines.

We are reproducing below the call for inputs, you can find the official page here.

Deadline : June 12th, 2025

Purpose: To inform the Special Rapporteur’s upcoming thematic report to the UN General Assembly, October 2025

Background

The Special Rapporteur seeks inputs from both States and civil society to better understand how the concentration of power in the hands of a relatively small number corporations affects food systems, governance, and people’s everyday lives — and to explore transformative alternatives that prioritize human rights, social equity, and ecological sustainability.

Corporate-led industrial food systems have a massive environmental impact and often violate the rights to life, health, water, food and the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment. In many places in the world, they also deprive the people of eating healthy and culturally appropriate food, in line with dietary habits and ancestry traditions.

Objectives

To inform the Special Rapporteur’s upcoming thematic report to the UN General Assembly, October 2025

Key questions and types of input/comments sought

Submission of inputs

The Special Rapporteur on the right to food invites States, international organizations, national human rights institutions, civil society organizations, communities, business enterprises, academia, networks, and other relevant stakeholders to share inputs to address the topics below. He encourages the submission of specific data, statistics, good practices, and further materials to enrich the report.

Please email your responses to the questionnaire by 12 June 2025 in Word format (subject: Inputs for Food Systems report) to hrc-sr-food@un.org. Kindly limit your submissions to a maximum of 2,500 words (5 pages), and if necessary, add links to relevant documents or attached annexes. Due to a limited capacity for translation, we request that your inputs be submitted in English, French, or Spanish.

Unless otherwise specified, the input will be published on the website of the Special Rapporteur. If you would NOT like your written input or any other information to be published on the website of the Special Rapporteur, please explicitly indicate this in your input. While we encourage submissions on general situations, in view of consent and privacy issues, contributions containing names of alleged victims will be considered but not published online.

Please provide your inputs to the following questions:

Questions for Civil Society Organisations (CSOs)

1. How does the concentration of power in the in the hands of a relatively small number of corporations affect food sovereignty and the right to food in your country or region? Please, if relevant, share examples of how corporate-led food systems have negatively impacted the human rights of communities, workers, small-scale farmers and vulnerable groups in your country/region.
2. What alternatives to corporate-controlled food systems are you promoting or supporting (e.g., agroecology, food cooperatives, community-supported agriculture)?
3. What barriers or threats do these alternative systems face from dominant corporate actors or state policies?
4. What kind of legislation is needed in your country to limit the growing corporate concentration and power in food systems and allowing to hold corporations accountable for human rights violations?
5. Please share any experiences you have with lawsuits against corporations for their human rights violations in your food system.
6. Please share your experiences within a social and solidarity economy?
7. Have you experienced or observed forms of ‘controlled participation’ where CSOs were invited to join a process in ways that undermined autonomy? If yes, please describe.
8. How are you navigating the shrinking political space for food sovereignty within international forums like the FAO or the CFS?

Questions for Businesses

1. Are you a small/medium enterprise (SME) or a transnational corporation?
2. What markets do you work in? What would make those markets more fair and stable?
3. How do you incorporate human rights obligations into your business?
4. Please describe any human rights due diligence process your company has adopted to respect the right to food throughout its activities. In particular, please provide information on positive measures taken to prevent and address negative human rights impacts in food systems, including as they relate to supply chains, labour practices, Indigenous People’s rights, and land use.
5. Please provide information on existing measures to provide effective access to remedy for victims of abuses of their human right to food that your company may have caused or contributed to through its operations.

Next Steps

Input/comments may be sent by e-mail. They must be received by 12 June 2025 .

Email address: hrc-sr-food@un.org

Email subject line: Submission for the call for input HRC-SR-FOOD

Word/Page limit:
2500 words / 5 pages

Accepted file formats:
Word, PDF

Accepted Languages:
English, French, Spanish, Arabic

La entrada Call for input from the Special Rapporteur on the right to food se publicó primero en Defending Peasants' Rights.

In this paper the two authors, who were key actors of the adoption of UNDROP, explain how the UNDROP came to be, some of the rights enshrined in it and finally they open perspectives for the future.

There are many reasons to consider the Declaration as one of the most relevant actions in the realm of human rights law taken by the United Nations in recent years. Some of them are the recognition of peasants as specific subjects of rights; the reaffirmation of existing standards tailored for the reality of people living in rural areas; and the development of international law to address existing gaps in the protection of their rights in complex subject matters such as the right to land, the right to seeds, and the right to means of production. In underscoring the importance of the Declaration for the world, this research paper narrates the process of construction of the Declaration, its contributions to international human rights law and stresses on its potential […]

Maria Natalia Pacheco Rodriguez and Luis Fernando Rosales Lozada

La entrada The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas: One Step Forward in the Promotion of Human Rights for the Most Vulnerable se publicó primero en Defending Peasants' Rights.

This research brief was first published by the Geneva Academy, you can find it here.

Peasants and other people working in rural areas, including fisherfolk, pastoralists and herders feed between 70 and 80 per cent of the world population, but they represent 80 per cent of those suffering from hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. It therefore comes with no surprise that the rights to food and food sovereignty are at the heart of the rights-based struggles of rural communities, that violations of these rights have been at the core of the call for elaborating UNDROP, and that these rights are central in the UN Declaration.

In UNDROP’s article 15, states recognized the right to adequate food and the fundamental right to be free from hunger, as well as the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas to produce food and to adequate nutrition. They also recognized their right to food sovereignty, for the first time in an international instrument adopted by the UN General Assembly.

La entrada Research Brief: The rights to food and food sovereignty in UNDROP se publicó primero en Defending Peasants' Rights.