Article series: Views from the ground – Commodity certification, human rights and deforestation

How does agriculture and natural resource extraction affect human rights? 

Land grabbing from indigenous peoples and local communities for agricultural expansion and natural resource extraction remains a significant problem in many countries. Failing to respect the land tenure rights of indigenous peoples and local communities is a human rights violation in and of itself. 

It is also almost always linked to other types of human rights violations – such as the right to food, the right to health and the right to culture, among others. In addition, when indigenous peoples and local communities seek to defend their rights, they are often faced with intimidation, criminalisation, physical abuse, sexual violence and even murder.   

Agricultural and natural resource supply chains also often involve labour rights violations, which may affect members of indigenous peoples and local communities as well as other, often migrant, workers.  

In addition to human rights violations, in the tropical forest countries where Forest Peoples Programme works, human rights violations are very often directly associated with deforestation or destruction of natural ecosystems and other environmental impacts, including pollution and biodiversity loss.  

The role of certification schemes  

In many natural resource and agricultural sectors, commodity certification schemes such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the Roundtable on Sustainable Soy (RTSS)ii and Bonsucro have been for many years the standard-bearers for addressing corporate human rights and environmental impacts.  

In the absence of adequate state regulation of corporate activities in (or outside) their jurisdiction, these multistakeholder, mostly voluntary private governance initiatives have played a key role in deciding what standards businesses in the natural resources and agricultural sectors should live up to, and if, and how, they should be held accountable to those standards. They have also often provided an important – sometimes the only – advocacy space for indigenous peoples and local communities, where they can seek to defend their human rights or seek remedy for violations.   

Yet while several of these initiatives have become significant global players – for example, RSPO-certified growers accounted for nearly 20% of palm oil production worldwide in 2014; in 2019, 86% of palm oil imported to the EU was certified sustainable, and in 2018, FSC certified 17% of the world’s production forests – the effectiveness and legitimacy of certification schemes have also come under sustained criticism from a variety of actors.

Limitations of certification schemes  

On one side, critics have drawn attention to the repeated failure of these schemes to stop corporate environmental and human rights impacts. Reasons given for this vary between schemes but include among other things inadequate environmental and human rights standards, ineffective and insufficiently independent auditing and assurance processes, weak or no accountability mechanisms, as well as other loopholes, connected for example to how the rules apply to corporate groups, or the ability to escape accountability by leaving a scheme when a complaint is made – and, of course, their voluntary, non-comprehensive nature.  

Other criticisms have come from producers and producer country governments, who have argued that these private governance initiatives, often dominated by northern NGOs and downstream buyers, seek to impose inappropriate and illegitimate standards on their natural resource and agricultural sectors, and do not align with (or have the ability to influence) state laws. The rise of state-led certification initiatives such as the Indonesian and Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil standards has in part driven by criticisms of this nature. 

States should not rely on certification schemes alone for due diligence requirements  

The role and value of certification schemes has again come under the spotlight in debates over the various legislative initiatives in the EU and the UK aimed at requiring companies to conduct due diligence on their supply chains. Many companies, industry bodies as well as certification schemes, in particular, are seeking to obtain provisions in these laws that would allow companies to rely significantly or exclusively on certification as proof that human rights and/or environmental requirements had been met. Many NGOs and rightsholders – including Forest Peoples Programme – oppose this approach.    

Yet these debates in European and British policy circles often focus on the technicalities of due diligence processes. They remain disconnected from the reality of certification on the ground. The voices of those people and communities who have experienced certification schemes – both their positives and negatives – is lost in this process. It is critical that these voices – voices of the people whose human rights are actually at stake – are heard in the discussions of how to address corporate human rights abuse and environmental destruction.