Ideas into movement
Boost TNI's work
50 years. Hundreds of social struggles. Countless ideas turned into movement.
Support us as we celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2024.
The new CONCORD and Hands on the Land publication ‘Investing for Development?’ examines the impacts of the EU’s investment regime on food security, the Right to Food and land governance.
This paper sheds light on how the dominance of the corporate private sector-led approach in both EU’s investment regime and development cooperation framework jeopardizes the EU’s commitments to PCD and human rights, and adversely impacts the food security and the livelihoods of small-scale food producers in developing countries.
A shift in EU development and investment policies results in increasingly placing the responsibility for supporting rural development in the hands of the corporate sector. Indeed, the recent EU development cooperation agenda for food security incentivizes de facto a stronger role for large-scale private capital, over public sector investment, in smallholder farmers and regional markets. In addition, the EU investment regime protects large investors’ rights over governments’ policy-making space for protecting the right to food of small-scale producers.
In the absence of a recognition that small-scale producers constitute the most important “private sector” in developing countries, EU development cooperation and investment protection strategies are in total contradiction with its own food security policy framework (2010) that aims to enhance sustainable small-scale food production as a mean to increase food security in developing countries.
Within the context of the European Year for Development and EU’s Policy Coherence for Development approach – implying that the objectives pursued in development cooperation should not be jeopardized by the effects of policies and actions in other policy areas– the paper presents the following recommendations: