Union leaders are beautiful speakers. Their voices reel you in with words that crest and fall, sonorous, resonant, exciting, inciting. You may never hear as many good speakers in one room as at a congress of an international federation of unions. In mid-May, I was an observer at the International …
Is there any country in the world with a more complex relationship to food than India? It is the site of the original Green Revolution, yet has some of the worst levels of child malnutrition in the world. Its rising middle class is often blamed, along with their Chinese counterparts, …
Changing legislation, ongoing litigation, and new policy recommendations constantly shift the ways in which laws affect our human rights. Here’s a quick look at recent news from around the globe arising at the intersection of food, the law, and human rights: In Canada, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to …
Sexual violence and sexual harassment are not limited to certain socioeconomic classes, races, or even sexes, but there are few people more vulnerable to these crimes than immigrant workers. And while advocates have released many reports on labor rights violations against farmworkers, in the United States and elsewhere, very few …
I never thought I’d hear an official of a major corporation admit publicly that capitalism was broken, but perhaps that’s what corporate leaders do when speaking to a room full of union leaders. I was thus surprised on Thursday to hear Miguel Pestana, Vice-President for Global External Affairs of Unilever, …
Last August, many people in the South African wine industry, the South African farmers’ associations, and the Western Cape government were livid – because of me. I had written a Human Rights Watch report that looked at human rights conditions on South Africa’s fruit and wine farms in the Western …
In April, farmers and organizations commemorated International Peasants’ Day by rallying against land grabbing. FIAN, one of the preeminent right-to-food groups, announced that land grabbing breaches international human rights law, a claim that’s been made by other organizations as well. Is this true? Our answer may depend in part on how …
If you care about hunger, you should care about the US Farm Bill, an expansive law governing food and agricultural issues. The law is renewed approximately every five years; at the end of April, the Senate Agricultural Committee passed a version that it will send to the entire Senate soon. …