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	The Human Rights Impact Assessment project by Rights & Democracy Canada   May 2008   The Human Rights Impact Assessment project is a three-year initiative that developed a draft methodology to assess the impact of companies on the human rights of communities. This methodology, which is composed of 10 steps and a research guide, was applied with communities in the Philippines, Tibet, Democratic Republic of Congo, Argentina and Peru.   The case studies were led by civil society research groups and concluded with the publication of a report which is part of the volume 1 of the Investing in Human Rights Series. The report includes an overview of the debate around corporate accountability and human rights, a summary of the approach adopted by the project’s international advisory committee and the results of the five case studies.   Why a human rights impact assessment for investment projects?   In recent years, corporate involvement in human rights has become a high-profile issue. In some cases, corporations have been directly responsible for the violation of human rights (abusive labour practices for example, forced evictions), while in other cases, they have been complicit in government violations (eg. using government security forces to suppress opposition to their business, providing technology that is used to suppress rights).   In some cases, civil society organisations have identified abuses that companies failed to see, even when they have adopted explicit human rights policies. In some instances official government or UN enquiries have substantiated civil society''s allegations of human rights violations.   Very often, local communities whose lives will be fundamentally transformed by investment projects lack information, access to decision-making authorities, and very frequently, pertinent information about their own human rights. NGOs or communities facing large-scale controversial investment projects are ill-equipped to challenge or negotiate with the companies, government decision-makers and international backers.   The human rights impact assessment initiative aims to tackle this crucial power difference by developing a tool for people wanting to protect human rights. While our main focus for this initiative is with civil society groups, our hope is that our methodology will be of interest to governments and private sector actors as well.   Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are now routinely done for large-scale investment projects receiving public backing (through the World Bank for example). Sometimes, EIAs include social aspects, and sometimes a separate social impact assessment is done. Indeed, the human rights community has a great deal to learn from the practice of social impact assessments and already, human rights are included as some of the essential values for SIA practitioners.   The principal difference between a social impact assessment and a human rights impact assessment is that the latter necessarily draws upon a substantial body of international law, developed over the last half-century, which defines a series of detailed normative standards which governments have agreed to abide by. These are the standards against which performance should be measured in a human rights impact assessment. The methodology of the human rights impact assessment is also informed by a human rights framework, as explained below.   Virtually all new voluntary initiatives developed to increase corporate social responsibility, make some reference to human rights. For instance, the first two principles (of ten) of the Global Compact pertain directly to human rights.   Principle 1 asserts that “Businesses should support and respect the protection of international human rights within their sphere of influence” and principle 2 states that businesses “should make sure that they are not complicit in any human rights abuses”.   After several years of operation, the Global Compact has begun to develop the analytical capacity to begin assessing corporate involvement in human rights violations and developing more precise guidelines for its members.   In keeping with the “purely voluntary” philosophy of the Global Compact, the methodologies it chooses to highlight are those that are voluntary – ways for corporations to assess whether or not they are compliant with human rights norms without any external means of verification, much less legal consequences for non-compliance.   There appears to be new momentum for the notion of human rights impact assessments, amongst businesses, Parliamentarians and international agencies. To cite just two recent examples.   The 2005 resolution on business and human rights adopted by the UN Commission on Human Rights asks the Secretary General to appoint a special representative whose mandate includes developing “materials and methodologies for undertaking human rights impact assessments of the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises";   The Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade also recently adopted a report from its Sub Committee on Human Rights with the following recommendation to the Government of Canada: “Put in place stronger incentives to encourage Canadian mining companies to conduct their activities outside of Canada in a socially and environmentally responsible manner in conformity with international human rights standards.   Measures in this area must include making Canadian government support – such as export and project financing and services offered by Canadian missions abroad – conditional on companies meeting clearly defined corporate social responsibility and human rights standards, particularly through the mechanism of human rights impact assessments.. 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	Deadly Greed - The Role of Speculators in the Global Food Crisis by Reuters / Spiegel Online India / Germany   April 2008   Markets responsible for world food crisis, says UN. (Reuters)   Global investment funds and the weak dollar are largely to blame for high world food prices, a senior official of the United Nation''s Food and Agriculture Organization said on Thursday.   "The crisis is a speculative attack and it will last," said Jose Graziano, the UN food and farm organization''s regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean. "This is not a conspiracy theory," he said.   Across the globe foods from bread to milk have become more expensive and in some countries helped fuel inflation. High prices for rice, beans and other food staples provoked food riots in Haiti this week.   "The lack of confidence in the (US) dollar has led investment funds to look for higher returns in commodities ... first metals and then foods," Graziano told a news conference in the capital.   Investors have speculated in commodities including wheat, corn and rice because stocks in recent years have been drawn down by rising demand in emerging markets and supply shortages due to adverse climate in key producer nations, Graziano said. "Speculative attacks become possible when you have low reserves," Graziano said.   Stocks of some food crops have fallen to their lowest levels in three decades, according to Brazilian farm experts.   April 2008   Deadly Greed - The Role of Speculators in the Global Food Crisis, by Beat Balzli and Frank Hornig. (Spiegel Online)   Vast amounts of money are flooding the world"s commodities markets, driving up prices of staple foods like wheat and rice. Biofuels and droughts can"t fully explain the recent food crisis -- hedge funds and small investors bear some responsibility for global hunger.   Not long ago, Dwight Anderson welcomed reporters with open arms. He liked to entertain them with stories from the world of big money. Anderson is a New York hedge fund manager, and as recently as last October he would talk with enthusiasm about his visits to Malaysian palm-oil plantations and Brazilian grain farms. "You could clearly see how supply was getting tight," he said.   In mid-2006 Anderson was touting the "extraordinary profitability" of field crops from corn to soybeans. He was convinced that rising worldwide hunger would be synonymous with highly profitable -- and dead-certain -- investment bargains.   In search of new investments, Anderson sends dozens of his employees to visit agricultural regions around the world. Back in New York, at his company"s headquarters on the 27th floor of an office building high above Park Avenue, they bet on agricultural markets from Peru to Vietnam.   But in the towers above Manhattan"s urban canyons, it"s easy to lose touch with the ground. Hedge fund manager John Paulson was recently celebrated for achieving a record annual profit of $3.7 billion (€2.3 billion). Those who work in this environment have only one rule: Don"t disappoint profit-hungry investors.   "I"m constantly wired," Anderson used to say, back when he talked to journalists. His nickname in the industry is the "Commodities King," and his Ospraie hedge fund is the world"s largest. These days, though, Anderson avoids the media. He"s even kept his face out of the media by buying up rights to all photos of himself on the market. His spokesman is now paid, mainly, to say nothing.   A Broken Market?   There are plenty of questions to ask Anderson, though -- in particular about the role of international investors in the current spike in the price of staple food. Not only is there talk that investors have profited from desperate hunger in Honduras, the Philippines and Bangladesh; critics also wonder if commodity speculators are making the crisis worse.   In Washington, DC, a regulatory body called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission held public hearings on this very question. Farmers and food producers argued that the market was "broken," suggesting that the steep rise in the price of staple crops was hurting everyone -- farmers as well as the people they feed. "The market is broken, it"s out of whack," said Billy Dunavant, head of a cotton-producing firm in the United States, at the Tuesday hearing.   Regulators on the commission warned against government intervention, and no doubt fund managers like Anderson would, too. But the crisis keeps deteriorating. India and Vietnam have imposed export bans on ordinary rice. Indonesia is following suit. According to the United Nations, North Korea is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. After unrest shook countries from Egypt and Uzbekistan to Bangladesh, thousands of South Africans took to the streets of Johannesburg last Thursday to protest high food prices. In Haiti, the prime minister was fired after riots over the price of rice.   Biofuels and global warming have been blamed for shortages driving up the price of food, and both trends have played their role. The planet"s grain reserves are almost empty for a number of reasons, including global population growth and greater prosperity in some countries like India. Feed corn is in short supply because industrialized nations have used it for ethanol. Droughts -- in Australia, for example -- have devastated rice and wheat harvests. Wheat reserves worldwide are only sufficient right now to cover about 60 days of demand.   This helps to explain why commodity prices have rallied since early 2006, with the price of rice ballooning 217 percent, wheat 136 percent, corn 125 percent and soybeans 107 percent.   But classic supply and demand theory offers only a partial explanation. Sudden price hikes since last January have been alarming.   Agricultural scientists at the world body"s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) have presented a report on the world food crisis. And criticism is growing that hedge funds, index funds, pension funds and investment banks bear part of the blame. Visit the related web page
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