In regions where hunger is most common, large agricultural lands are purchased and become focused on productions far beyond the food security of the local people. State aid and aid organizations are moving in this direction in the name of agricultural development. However, developed states consider hunger as a development problem specific to third-world countries.

Indeed, the Green Revolution considers hunger a production problem and so production increased rapidly in most countries with developments in agricultural technology and biotechnology. The question arises: How has hunger increased when there is enough food for everyone in the world?

Although there are many variables, free trade does not have the expected effect on the food sector. Considering its close relationship with nature, importance in the rural-urban relationship, and, as a necessity for sustaining life, agriculture cannot be seen as just another economic sector.

Developing states have turned to products that are lucrative in the export market, and have allocated agricultural land to products such as cocoa, coffee, and tobacco, instead of crops that will feed their people.

Further, developing countries cannot compete with subsidies provided to farmers in developing countries, so the people of developing countries have gradually become dependent on cheaply imported foods available easily through free trade regulations. Thus, hunger has reached a serious level in states whose economy is based on luxury agricultural export crops.

These problems are exacerbated by considering hunger as a development problem rather than a violation of human rights. Hunger has been depoliticized, with food aid and free trade deemed as solutions, with the assistance of the international media.

Most populist states, by pointing out the power of social capital , consider the problem of hunger a problem of individuals or communities.

In light of the rights-based approach, hunger should be evaluated through the right to food, and in terms of the right to food, interstate cooperation is a legal responsibility to ensure socio-economic rights in accordance with Article 11 2 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights ICESCR.

The obligation to fulfill the right to food is divided into three sub-categories: a the obligation to facilitate, b the obligation to provide, and c the obligation to promote.

According to the General Comment No. Therefore, it can be argued that there is a definite legal obligation to cooperate in hunger situations dependent from emergencies. The duty to cooperate is more clearly regulated in Article 13 of the Draft Convention on the Right to Development.

Article 13 4 emphasizes a fair multilateral trade system by promoting official development assistance and financial flows, including foreign direct investment to countries with the greatest need. In this regard, the first and only regulation that directly regulates food aid is the Food Assistance Convention FAC.

Although compliance with the FAC, which replaced the previous Food Aid Convention, seems quite high, the number of participating states and aid assistance is not at the desired level. At the same time, the FAC gives priority to WTO agreements in case of conflict between WTO regulations and its regulations Article 3 , making it questionable whether it would be a useful tool to combat hunger in times of emergency.

Although states consider aid incompatible with free trade principles and use aid to avoid other obligations for example, hidden dumping changes can be made in the ongoing WTO negotiations. Ultimately, the relationship between international trade and human rights must be examined from a different perspective in terms of ensuring the right to food.

The main users of soil — small farmers who feed us — are deprived of this resource in most places. Not only that, but agricultural workers are starving because they must feed other people cheaply and excessively.

In this ironic situation, the support given to farmers is limited by international trade regulations. In most developing countries, a significant number of farmers cannot meet the increasing agricultural inputs due to drought, their debts, and exchange rates for example, see the case of Turkey. Australia, Hungary, Israel, New Zealand, Guatemala, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America all voted against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants in the General Assembly.

But, a t the same time, civil society, indigenous peoples, a nd a cademics have warned a gainst the corporate capture of food governance a nd called for a UN-wide corporate a ccountability framework. The re is growing momentum for change a head of the 75th a nniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , which will be commemorated in December.

A nd the right to a dequate food a nd nutrition, in particular, could be a t the to p of the a genda. A transformation on this scale requires close collaboration between the diverse mix of people who a re engaging in creative forms of resistance, a s well a s progressive governments that a re ready to listen to the m a nd represent the ir interests.

Respect for human rights must form the basis of a ny effort to reduce a cute hunger. It is the only way to create a sustainable a nd equitable system that provides a dequate food for a ll.

Michael Fakhri is UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Elisabetta Recine is President of the Brazilian National Food a nd Nutrition Security Council CONSEA.

Sofia Monsalve is Secretary-General of FIAN International. Copyright: Project Syndicate, Your support helps keep our journalism independent and our content free for everyone to read. Join our community here. Close menu Eco-Business International Edition.

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Regions Show more Regions. A human rights approach to the global food crisis. Respect for human rights must form the basis of any effort to reduce acute hunger — it is the only way to create a sustainable and equitable food system. An estimated million people faced acute food insecurity in , the highest number since Image: eatwell.

By Michael Fakhri, Elisabetta Recine, Sofia Monsalve. org Did you find this article useful? Join the EB Circle! Poverty Consumption Climate Most popular.

The law stands between food availability and food entitlement. Starvation deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance. There is no doubt among the experts that adequate food is available or could be produced with current resources not only on a global scale, but also in almost every country-even in those known for persistent malnutrition.

Many of the so-called poor countries produce more than enough food not only for their internal markets, but even for export, with hunger and malnutrition nonetheless persisting in the country.

In a market economy, people who are too poor to exercise effective demand will not have food unless they produce food for them­selves, or receive food through transfers.

Hunger and malnutrition today are not about avail­ability of food, but are a matter of rights and entitlements. Some people maintain that the obligation of states to provide access to food exists only to­wards the "deserving poor"-those who lack access to food for reasons beyond their control.

The tendency is to blame the poor and vulnerable groups for their impoverished status. Fears that a state feeding part of its population would eventually face economic ruin have little to do with the human right to food. The fact that there is a legal guarantee to certain goods in case of basic need does not mean that people deliberately fall in need and that such goods are then generally obtained by invoking this guarantee thus leading to a state feeding its people.

There are many reasons why people would not make use of this guarantee-the simplest reason being that they prefer not to fall into deprivation. Experience shows that people who are given a real choice by providing them access to resources, technologies and work with dignity prefer to use these opportunities to feed themselves.

There is another critique of the human right to food and similar economic and social rights. In this argument, a state strong enough to legally guarantee access to food would necessarily undermine civil and political rights.

Usually this critique points to the experience in the So­viet Union and other socialist countries. It is wrong, however, on both counts. The Soviet Union did not provide a legal guarantee for economic and social rights, nor do states implementing economic and social human rights have to do so at the expense of civil and political rights.

Quite the contrary: Only on the basis of economic and social rights can political and civil rights flourish without discrimi­nation and vice versa. This is one of the aspects of the indi­visibility of human rights-and has been aptly pointed out by the international community. Given the crucial importance of access to food in a world of plenty where massive hunger persists, it may not come as a surprise that the right to food has been playing a pioneering role in the resurgence of economic and social rights during the past fifteen years.

The right to food was the first of the ESC rights to be studied by the UN human rights system. In a report titled The Right to Food as a Human Right became the starting point for a series of investigations into the rights contained in the ICESCR. The crucial role of the right to food was reconfirmed almost ten years later when the World Food Summit requested the High Commissioner for Human Rights to define its legal content.

Another consequence of the World Food Summit was the "Draft Code of Conduct on the Right to Adequate Food. The Draft Code’s article 4 is considered to provide the current definition of the right to food.

It states:. The right to adequate food means that every man, woman and child alone and in community with others must have physical and economic access at all times to ade­quate food using a resource base appropriate for its procurement in ways consis­tent with human dignity. The right to adequate food is a distinct part of the right to an adequate standard of living.

The right to food is enshrined in several international human rights and other treaties. They are:. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Article 11 1 states clearly that the "right to an adequate standard of living includes food, housing, clothing. Article 24 2 c obligates states parties "to combat disease and malnutrition, including within the framework of primary health care, through, inter alia , the application of read­ily available technology and through the provision of adequate nutritious food and clean drinking water, taking into consideration the dangers and risks of environmental pollu­tion.

The Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International and Non-International Armed Conflicts. The Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International and Non-International Armed Conflicts declares in article 54 1 that starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited.

Article 54 2 prohibits attack, destruction, removal or rendering useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or any other motive.

Access to adequate food is funda­mental for the right to adequate food. Accessed food must be ade­quate in terms of quality and quantity. Access to adequate food has been defined in terms of intake of nutrients, calories and proteins. Hunger and malnutrition are the consequences of lacking access to adequate food.

The consequences of food deprivation can be diag­nosed with considerable medical precision. Malnutrition need not be undernutrition lacking quantity of food in­take , but could also be due to lack of quality food. Both are often the results of poverty and discrimi­nation, in particular gender-based discrimination.

Precise indicators for food intake and malnutrition are less important for the description of the right to food than might be expected. A breach of a state’s obligations can normally be detected without counting calorie intake or having the victimized person go through a medi­cal examination.

Adequate food may also refer to socioeconomic and cultural circumstances. Similar to an adequate standard of living, adequate food means different things under different cultural cir­cumstances. Nevertheless, there is a minimum standard universal under all cultural and other circumstances.

This minimum has even been spelled out in article 11 2 of ICESCR as the fundamental right to freedom from hunger. There are definitions for hunger and malnutrition in terms of intake of nutrients. It is possi­ble to establish minimum dietary requirements as well as a minimum income necessary to prevent hunger and malnutrition and deprivations of other basic needs for deprived groups.

This has often been called the "absolute poverty line" or "basic needs line," whereas the in­come necessary for an adequate standard of living according to article 11 1 is called the "relative poverty line. Absence of absolute poverty can be seen as the minimum standard under the right to an ade­quate standard of living.

In terms of income the relative poverty line is normally defined as a percentage of average per capita income in the country.

Most social scientists would agree that anything below 40 percent of per capita income is generally seen as relative deprivation. Therefore the 40 percent mark would be called the "relative poverty line" or "adequacy line.

The right to adequate food provides an example of the interdependency of human rights. There are many aspects to this right that demonstrate strong links with other human rights. The human right to food is part of the right to an adequate standard of living.

An adequate standard of living is either a result of a transfer or seen as something earned in return for eco­nomic activities, like wage labor, self-employment, providing goods, services or means of production. A living is earned or transferred, and quite often it is both.

The right to an ade­quate standard of living can therefore be seen to be implemented through social welfare transfers, through the right to earn one’s living or through the right to social security.

For many of the most vulnerable groups, the right to food poses itself not so much as a question of the right to social welfare payments, as these systems have not yet been fully put in place.

Under such circumstances addressing the right to food means first of all ad­dressing the family’s and community’s right to feed themselves.

This means access for the family or community to productive resources and work. Most people realize their right to food by realizing their right to work.

Because Georgia is a notoriously antiunion state, many US companies relocate there to take advantage of the poorly paid work force. In addition, subminimum wage labor is available from "welfare exiles"-people who are kicked out of the welfare system after only four years, not the federal standard of five-and from prison labor.

Many corporations are switching the few remaining manufacturing and service industry jobs away from unionized labor to prisoner and welfare labor as a way to cut their production costs. The Hunger Coalition commissioned a public survey on this issue and found that the majority of Georgians supported raising the minimum wage.

The right to social secu­rity when seen in a very narrow sense includes the security of ac­cess to food for persons unable to participate in economic life, where they would other­wise earn their living. Social secu­rity, however, must not be identified with wel­fare state measures. So­cial security is a univer­sal concept going far be­yond social insurance, which is a method of implementing the right to social security.

In many societies social se­curity is provided through the extended family or other means. Already in article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the right to social security is seen as a means to address the lack of livelihood under specific circumstances as described above, and it is attached to the right to an adequate standard of living that in­troduces the same article.

We can therefore say that the right to social security imple­ments the right to an adequate standard of living under circumstances where persons do not earn their living. The right to an adequate standard of living complements the traditional concept of social security, which makes these services depend on "circumstances beyond his control.

The right to an adequate standard of living, however, introduces state meas­ures like social welfare that must be available on the sole basis that a person’s other income is insufficient to provide for an adequate standard of living, and in particular food.

The right to food is closely linked to the right to health. This is obvious for the question of undernutrition, which is the ultimate cause of a very large number of health-related deaths in the Southern hemisphere. Studies in the Northern hemisphere reveal that poor people’s diet is less healthy than that of rich people.

In addition, the effects of agricul­tural production techniques promoted by agribusiness threaten everybody’s health-rich and poor. Access to food that is really adequate in terms of health has become a problem for many Northerners. Both the health risks and lack of sustainability of current agricultural practices shed new light on article 11 2 of the Covenant related to reform of agrarian systems.

The same is true when it comes to the right to work in agriculture-or in rural areas in general. Food is largely a women’s issue. In most families it is women who prepare the meals and who work in the fields.

At the same time, it is often they who eat last and eat only what is left over. Women own about 1 percent of the agricultural land in the world, although they work perhaps more than 50 percent of the land.

Women’s minimum wage is generally lower than men’s minimum wage for the same work. Thus, work that may feed a man may not feed a woman.

Women’s weaker economic posi­tion makes women usually more vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition. The extra strains of pregnancy and child rearing also put an extra risk on women’s food security.

Inheritance laws that exclude the wife or girl child can put her in a weak position, threatening her food security once her husband or father has died. Family structures in many places put the food security of women into the hands of their husbands, brothers, or other males.

These situations need special attention by every state and the community of states. They need to be addressed and remedied through education and legislation. Many measures of economic security policies or employment programs themselves overlook women and their food needs. Women continue to suffer discrimination in the implementa­tion of many of the states’ obligations described in the next section.

Women’s rights have in many situations a great bearing on their right to food. Food cannot be separated from how it is produced, how it is acquired and how it is eaten.

These are fundamental aspects of the culture and values of a community and of its identity. Adequate food is more than a package of calories and nutrients, and more than just a com­modity.

Adequate food is culture. Cultural and minority rights related to food have to be respected, protected and fulfilled. In most cases this requires a community to feed itself. This is obvious for indigenous people. However, a general indicator of societies offering a high quality of life is that they value food as part of their culture and feed themselves.

See Module 17 for more on cultural rights. In most situations of severe hunger and malnutrition, people lack access to food because their community lacks access to food. The right to feed oneself frequently primarily affects a community rather than an individual.

Within such an affected community it may be women and girls who suffer most from deprivation of food. Under many circumstances it is there­fore necessary to see the right to food, and in particular the right to feed oneself, as a right of communities derived, of course, from the individual’s right to food rather than primarily as a right of individuals.

For a considerable number of countries, hardly any serious expert believes that these coun­tries will be able to implement the right to feed oneself for the rural masses in the foreseeable future without agrarian reform. Evading agrarian reform measures under such circumstances violates the right to feed oneself.

Such evasion may take different forms. Obviously, the crudest form is the simple absence of agrarian reform legislation or agrarian reform pro­grams. Agrarian reform that meets the obligation to fulfill access to adequate food may require more than merely the dis­tribution of productive resources land, water, technology, etc.

The following states’ obligations have been clarified in recent years in the context of the ICESCR. The generic states’ obligations under the right to food are the obligations to respect, protect and fulfill each person’s access to food. A breach of a state’s obligations leads to the de­struction of a person’s access to food or keeps a person in a situation of food deprivation.

The "respect-bound obligations" impose a duty on states not to destroy access to food. These respect-bound obligations are unconditional in the sense that the state can always be expected to stop destroying people’s access to food. Since even the poorest state can do so, these obli­ga­tions are imperative.

The "protection-bound obligations" make a state duty-bound to protect a person’s access to food against destruction by a third party-his or her neighbors, employers or business enter­prises.

Whereas the respect-bound obligations are fairly straightforward, protection-bound obligations can become fairly complicated. What kind of protection can reasonably be ex­pected from a state? The "fulfillment-bound obligations" refer to the state’s duty to fulfill access to food for those in need.

It means, in particular, the state’s obligation to provide food for each person threat­ened by hunger and malnutrition. What it does not mean is a general state obligation to pro­vide food. To fulfill means nothing more and nothing less than to ensure that people over­come their deprivation. The obligations to protect and fulfill access to adequate food must be seen in relation to the proviso of "maximum use of available resources," as this may imply state infrastructure and resources.

In almost all countries and at the level of the international community of states, there is no general lack of food or resources to fulfill access to food for all.

Lack of food is rather a problem of poverty and lacking access to productive resources and work. The principle of nondiscrimination is particularly important for the right to food. The state’s obligations mentioned must be implemented and enforced without discrimination, for exam­ple, on the basis of gender or generation.

Nondiscrimination on the basis of generation has to include the children, and the aged as well as future generations. As far as children and future generations are concerned, the principle of nondiscrimination calls for sustainability of ac­cess to food. This includes concerns about future food production, as many current agricul­tural production practices are not sustainable.

The human rights principle of sustainability entails an obligation of the community of states to address these questions here and now. Present agricultural and other economic practices, which bank on the food resources of future generations, need to be stopped as a matter of human rights.

The right to food is usually recognized as part of the right to an adequate standard of living. This is implicit and often explicit in the provisions relating to social security, minimum in­come, agrarian reform or minimum wage legislation, which tend to refer to basic needs, in­cluding food.

The constitutional law of most democratic countries acknowledges that the state has to give a guarantee to secure adequate living conditions for everybody. When it comes to the role of the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to food in domestic jurisprudence, the picture changes somewhat.

True, for certain elements of the right to food, there does exist considerable jurisprudence. When it comes to legally guaranteed access to food for the poor, however, the situation is less convincing.

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