- PERIPLO, together with allied organizations, is advancing people-centered human rights due diligence in the agri-food sector, starting from the moment that shapes much of working conditions: recruitment.
The labor of migrant farmworkers sustains much of the food that reaches our tables every day, both within and beyond the region. Fifteen years after the adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, organizations, companies, and workers are already operating across agri-food supply chains, building the conditions the standard promised. This change has names, territories, and results.
That work, however, begins long before the first day in the field. The way a person is recruited (whether they pay fees, whether they receive clear information, whether their transport is safe) shapes everything they will experience throughout the employment relationship. When hiring carries debt or deception, those irregularities follow workers straight into the workplace. Recruitment is not a preliminary formality: it is the first link where rights are either guaranteed or violated.
For this reason, PERIPLO regards ethical recruitment as a fundamental practice within the human rights’ due diligence process. Fair hiring, free of recruitment fees, free of discrimination, and backed by verifiable information, lays out the groundwork for decent employment and makes it possible to prevent rights violations before they occur. Models that already prove this exist internationally certified regular labor migration processes, monitoring systems that accompany the entire migration cycle, and responsible recruitment protocols adopted by companies in the sector. The UN Working Group’s July 2025 report on labor migration explicitly recognizes good practices that have emerged in the region.
As a Fundación Avina initiative in the Guatemala–Mexico–United States agricultural corridor, PERIPLO brings together civil society organizations, companies, and public institutions around a shared idea: that due diligence stop being an exercise in formal or reputational compliance and become a genuine preventive process, people-centered and built from the ground up. Its work connects the experience of those who make food production possible with the decisions made throughout supply chains.
Ahead of the review of regional commitments on business and human rights, PERIPLO calls on States, companies, and cooperation bodies to extend the scope of due diligence to recruitment and to translate it into concrete decisions that respond to the mobility inherent to agricultural work. Recognizing the value of workers, beyond remittances and their economic contribution, is the starting point for any responsible supply chain.
As part of this regional dialogue, PERIPLO, civil society organizations, women farmworkers, and the private sector will take part in the event “How to Conduct Human Rights Due Diligence from the Global South?,” held during the 10th UN Regional Forum on Business and Human Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Follow the conversation here.
