Many thanks for your open invitation for comments on the Water and Food Security zero-draft consultation paper.
I would like to provide brief insights in order to draw attention on the need to explore stronger arguments about the power of transnational capital and the threat that it represents when seeking systemic actions to attain water and food security.
The rise of development strategies focusing on economic growth at all cost and dismantling the role of the state poses a challenge for the implementation of the human rights approach. Therefore, it would be useful to contextualise the human rights approach with broader development strategies that gives prevalence to the private sector, concentration of capital and commodification of nature.
So long as development strategies are geared towards resource extraction and export oriented production under free market regimes, there will be an inherent conflict of interest for states to protect natural resources and subsequently to ensure food security. There are many documented cases within the extractive industry that provide testimony of this. A landmark case is the devastating impact of the oil extraction in the Ogoniland-Nigeria over a period of 50 years affecting millions of people. (Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland, United Nations Environment Programme, 2011). The unregulated environment for corporations and the voluntary nature of their corporate social responsibility programmes are inconsistent with national legal frameworks and human rights covenants.
Development strategies pursued through public-private partnerships, where public money has been shifted towards promoting corporate led initiatives such the New Alliance for food Security and Nutrition and Agricultural Corridors in Africa, have been widely contested by civil society, as they are expanding corporate control on natural resources and destruction of livelihoods.
The institutional, political and legal apparatus that protects transnational capital through free trade agreements and direct foreign investment needs to be deconstructed in order to bring back the functionality of the human rights approach. Investment treaties and free trade agreements offer few instructions as to how such agreements should be reconciled with human rights obligations of the state. Governments might pursue policies and measures in furtherance of human rights obligations, only to encounter allegations that such initiatives run afoul of parallel international obligations to protect foreign investors and their activities. (Luke Eric Peterson, 2009).
The report would benefit by arguing a stronger case for:
1. Recommending the food sovereignty framework alongside the agroecology as a viable strategy to build food regimes that ensure water governance, management and use for food security at local and global levels.
2. Exposing the conflict of interest between corporate social responsibility and its unsuitability to protect the public interest.
3. Recommending binding regulations that give power to the state to hold corporations accountable.
4. Exposing cases where state is confronted with protecting foreign direct investment and human rights protection, in order to reject the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes.
Best regards
Graciela Romero
International Programmes Director
War on Want
Graciela Romero