A recent report from Right to Food and Nutrition Watch Consortium concludes that food insecurity and human rights violations continue despite the international human right to food and new global policies and programs to ensure it – through community-based agriculture, community control of natural resources, and local and regional food systems. The report, Ten Years of the Right to Food Guidelines: Gains, Concerns and Struggles, argues that despite these efforts to protect and advance the human right to food, corporate interests consistently block the implementation of these new policies.
The consolidated power of the food and beverage industry has contributed to the global problems of both obesity and malnutrition, and these same private enterprises are grabbing precious natural resources from small-scale and family farmers and fishers, drastically undermining community food sovereignty.
The Right to Food and Nutrition Watch is an annual publication to “monitor and advance the progressive realization of the right to adequate food and nutrition at global, regional, national and local levels and give visibility to peoples’ struggles and resistance on the ground.” The 2014 publication arrived with the tenth anniversary of the FAO’s Right to Food Guidelines and calls for renewed commitment by governments, UN agencies and civil society organizations to fully realize the right to adequate food and nutrition for all people. The report was written with the support of the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance, of which WhyHunger is a founding member, and revisits the Right to Food Guidelines, examining their influence and sustained relevance over the last decade.
To hold corporations and governments accountable for actions that subvert the right to adequate food and nutrition for global communities, the report “calls on governments to exercise political will in addressing the inequities in food systems, demanding the right to food be ‘mainstreamed’ in coherent food, nutrition, energy and trade policies.” Through democratic engagement with the communities and individuals that are most affected by these top-down policies, met with intersectoral policies that prioritize human rights, governments can advance a more equitable food system for all.
To read the full report, see Ten Years of the Right to Food Guidelines: Gains, Concerns and Struggles.
