GENEVA – States must urgently defossilise and detoxify food systems, to address climate change and protect human health, particularly of children, a UN expert has told the Human Rights Council.
“In the current geopolitical context, food systems are facing extreme instability due to worsening climate change and armed conflicts that increase fuel and food prices and insecurity. We urgently need to move away from industrialised food systems that are premised on fossil fuel dependence and significant harm to the environment, the climate and human rights,” said Elisa Morgera, the UN Special Rapporteur on climate change and human rights, presenting her latest report to the Council last week.
“Food systems are responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and these emissions risk increasing significantly due to insufficient climate action in this area,” Morgera said.
In addition, industrialised food systems are heavily reliant on petrochemicals – plastics, fertilizers and pesticides – which harm forests, soil and the ocean and their contributions to a safe climate. Petrochemicals are further responsible for additional human rights harm arising from biodiversity loss and toxic pollution, food waste and ultra-processed foods.
The widespread impacts on the human right to health – particularly due to malnutrition, obesity and non-communicable diseases – compound local and global negative impacts on the rights to food, water and a healthy environment, with the most vulnerable groups disproportionately affected.
Morgera warned that increased climate instability and human rights harm arise from the unprecedented concentration of corporate power and accumulation of land and resources in few global actors who have evaded accountability due to well-documented patterns of disinformation, greenwashing and climate obstruction,” she said.
Despite all these negative impacts, governments continue to provide more than USD 670 billion annually in subsidies to industrial agriculture, aquaculture and large-scale fisheries, in addition to subsidies to fossil fuel, plastic and petrochemical production,” the expert said. “In other words, taxpayers are subsidising a deeply harmful industry several times over, while bearing the burden of several trillion USD per year of environmental harm.”
“Transforming food systems must be grounded in international human rights law and the legal obligations on climate change clarified by the International Court of Justice,” Morgera stressed. “States must prevent foreseeable harm, effectively regulate harmful activities, and ensure accountability for corporate actors that deepen the climate crisis, fossil fuel dependence, and global exposure to harmful chemicals.”
“We already have tested, sustainable alternatives to these predominant, harmful food systems,” Morgera underscored, in line with best available science pointing to Indigenous Peoples’ and peasants’ knowledge systems and practices embodying resilient food systems that are contributing to food security worldwide, despite mounting challenges. “Transforming food systems thus entails supporting, legally and financially, Indigenous Peoples’ and peasants’ agroecological practices, connecting them to local markets and shorter supply chains,” she said.
“Transforming food systems in accordance with international human rights and climate obligations is not a question of better safeguards, but of fundamentally reprioritising regulation and finance towards food systems that are premised on protecting planetary and human health for all,” she said.
