Commodities

There are hundreds of commodities that are traded across the world daily. Soft commodities are mainly agricultural, ranging from rice to cotton to timber, while hard commodities include coal, oil, as well as rare earth minerals used in the transition to a low carbon economy.

IHRB works on a range of issues relating to trade and commodities, focusing in particular on addressing adverse human rights impacts associated with the extraction of commodities as well as efforts to improve the performance of actors involved in buying, refining, trading and transporting commodities across global markets.

The core of the programme focuses on how commodity traders – who are often removed from the production processes – can ensure human rights due diligence on the commodities they trade. We do this by engaging with industry, governments, standards organisations and civil society to raise standards sector-wide. Extraction is of particular focus due to the exponential demand for transition minerals (copper, cobalt etc) needed to accommodate the transition to a low-carbon economy.