A Pledge to Uphold the Human Right to Food on World Food Day 2025 

by Jeff Conant, Senior International Forests Program Manager 

Today, October 16 is #WorldFoodDay – a day established to commemorate the founding of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 1945, and a moment to highlight the need for collective action to address hunger and renew our commitments to improving global food systems, nutrition and livelihoods.   

On the occasion of this year’s World Food Day, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri will deliver his recent report on Corporate Power and Human Rights in Food Systems to the United Nations General Assembly. The report, based on broad inputs from experts worldwide — including Friends of the Earth and our partners at BankTrack, FoodRise, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and Rainforest Action Network — details how the profit-driven model of corporate-controlled food systems inhibits the realization of the right to food: “Corporations have grown so large and powerful over the past several decades that they now globally dominate food systems,” the report states. “Concentrated power in food systems is so concentrated that a relatively small group of people shape what is grown, how it is grown, labour conditions, prices and food choices in a way that serves the ultimate goal of profit maximization and not the public good.” 

The report calls for efforts to “curtail corporate power; ensure food markets are fair and stable; and hold corporations accountable for human rights violations in food systems.”    

The forest program at Friends of the Earth U.S. has for years focused on the primary drivers of tropical deforestation – palm oil, soy, cattle, and other agrocommodities. Recognizing that these are all food commodities, produced not to address hunger but to enrich and overfeed the wealthy at the expense of the rest, we are increasingly turning our attention to the need to transform food systems as a way to remedy the global crisis of deforestation, land grabbing, and human rights violations. At a time when food prices are preventing access to healthy food for ordinary working people; when food itself is being weaponized in conflict regions to drive mass famine, displacement, and genocide; when industrial agribusiness is driving a death spiral of species loss, exploitation, petrochemical poisoning, and climate emergency; and when the United States has abandoned its responsibility to the international community and is aggressively undermining global human rights, it is urgent that global civil society step up to affirm, uphold and advance the human right to food.   

Therefore, in an effort to support and amplify this message, Friends of the Earth’s forest team is collaborating with the newly established UNDP Food and Power Initiative to deliver a pledge today to the UN Special Rapporteur to endorse the Rapporteur’s call for corporate accountability and protection of human rights. In a humble but potent gesture of support launched during New York Climate Week, the pledge, endorsed by a dozen organizations and thousands of individuals, reads as follows: 

I pledge to uphold, defend and protect the human right to food. With my words and my actions, recognizing both the extent and the limits of my personal power and ability, I pledge to stand with efforts to reject the weaponization of food and hunger; to support local food and farm economies; to expose and challenge corporate control of food and food systems; and generally to affirm that food is and should be treated not as a brute commodity for speculation, but as a human right and a public good.  

Read our brief letter to the UN Special Rapporteur, and let’s keep fighting for the human right to food!