Securing rights through commodity roundtables? A comparative review. Pre-conference draft as electronic report

Resource

PDF

Filename: roundtables.pdf
Size: 1.41 MB

Summary

This paper is a comparative review of rights across a number of existing voluntary standards and draws from a technical workshop in Bangkok in October 2012 organised by UK-based human rights organisation Forest Peoples Programme with the support of RECOFTC – The Center for People and Forests, and the Rights and Resources Initiative. The Technical Workshop to Review Commodity Roundtables Standards on Free, Prior and Informed Consent, Customary Land, Conflict Resolution and High Conservation Values brought together the representatives of six commodity roundtable standards (the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, the Forest Stewardship Council, the Roundtable on Responsible Soy, the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels, BonSucro and the Shrimp Aquaculture Dialogue) as well as NGOs with long-standing experience working with, and knowledge of, various voluntary commodity standards (Sawit Watch, WWF, Oxfam and ProForest).

Commodities  dominate agricultural production, land use and acquisition, and economic livelihoods across the developing world. Yet commodity production remains one of the greatest challenges for sustainable and equitable economic development, poverty reduction and global environmental stewardship, whether in terms of preventing biodiversity loss, reducing environmental pollution, addressing climate change, promoting rural development, or strengthening governance, land tenure and law enforcement.

A more conducive business environment for the development of voluntary standards has more recently emerged through the international debate about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and associated initiatives, such as the United Nations Global Compact, a strategic policy initiative for businesses that are committed to aligning their operations and strategies  in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption. The UN Framework on Human Rights and Business, unanimously accepted by the UN Human Rights Council in 2005, states the responsibility of  transnational corporations and other business enterprises to  respect human rights and to  provide effective remedy  to stakeholders, independent of States’ abilities and/or willingness to fulfil their own human rights obligations.

Growing recognition of the responsibilities and role that the private sector can play in regulating and improving practices related to human rights has given rise to standard-setting by the private sector to regulate commodity production and processing, so that it takes place in a way that  respects rights, secures favourable and sustainable livelihoods and diverts pressure away from areas crucial to local livelihoods and of high conservation value. Such standards, which recognise the importance of protecting customary rights in land and other natural resources and the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), have now been developed for inter alia forestry, timber estates, palm oil, soya, sugar, aquaculture, biofuels and carbon sequestration. Similar standards for  dams, mines, (including specifically for aluminium) and protected areas have also been advanced but are at earlier stages of development.

Operating relatively independently of one another, the commodity roundtables have each developed, through multi-stakeholder processes, their own standards against which member companies are audited and certified. While these processes  of text negotiation among stakeholders have encouraged an important degree of shared ‘ownership’ of the standards, a result of their separate evolution is that the various schemes have developed disparate and sometimes  even contradictory approaches to the way they address critical issues such as human rights, land tenure, legality and permitting, livelihood security, risk avoidance and dispute resolution. 

Authors

Chao, Sophie
Colchester, Marcus
Jiwan, Norman