"From risk to resilience: A good practice guide for food retailers addressing human rights in their supply chains", 21 July 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability at the heart of global food value chains. While the novel coronavirus that ignited the current global crisis is new, the underlying issues plaguing agricultural supply chains are not. This paper offers timely insights on emerging good practices to address exploitation in global food supply chains, based on 26 key informant interviews, and analysis of Oxfam's latest Supermarkets Scorecard.

... food retailers in many countries are taking important steps towards fulfilling their duty to respect human rights.... For example: ...

• Initiatives to address recruitment fees are gathering momentum;
• Some suppliers recognizing the value of trade unions and collective bargaining; ...
• It is becoming more common for companies to make public commitments to living wages, living incomes and gender strategies.

But overall, we find that the sector as a whole is yet to truly tackle the deep structural change needed to end the endemic exploitation of small-scale food producers and workers upstream in food supply chains. Reducing risks and improving resilience in supply chains ... must include ... Adopting a comprehensive HRDD approach, with a proactive gender lens and integrate this into core business practices. For food retailers, this means ensuring that suppliers win business based on their own good practices, prices reflect the cost of sustainable production and a fair share of value demonstrably reaches the women and men producing food products.