Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-2016

Abstract

Over the past decade, the world has witnessed heightened corporate interest in large-scale land-based agricultural investment. While such investments can potentially have positive effects for local communities, they also can have wide-ranging negative impacts on human rights, including through forced displacement and the loss of livelihoods. This Article examines the impact of large-scale corporate agricultural investment on the right to food, as well as on human rights more generally. It considers the protections offered by the investment and human rights legal regimes to both corporations and individuals, including recent international developments relating to transnational corporate accountability and efforts to integrate human rights considerations into investment treaties and arbitration. The current legal regimes, however, offer imbalanced protections, and emphasize remedial solutions for human rights abuses rather than preemptive protection of rights. While improving redress mechanisms is important, governments must also place greater emphasis on ensuring the sustainability and rights-compatibility of investments from the outset. This Article thus explores measures that could be taken by both host and home states to prevent right-to-food abuses in the context of large-scale agricultural investment. Greater efforts by host and home states to regulate and monitor investors could improve the design and implementation of such investments. Better investments, in turn, could result in more rights-consistent outcomes that promote, rather than harm, the right to food.

Disciplines

Agriculture Law | Environmental Law | Food and Drug Law | Human Rights Law | International Humanitarian Law | International Law | Land Use Law | Law | Natural Resources Law | Securities Law | Transnational Law

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