I. The human right to food has real legal existence!
The right to food is “the right of every man, woman and child to have physical and economic access at all times to sufficient food, which is adequate to lead a healthy and active life, in ways consistent with human dignity.”2 .
This fundamental right, beyond economic, moral and political obligation, has legal existence on a world, regional and national scale.
Recognized for the first time at an international level in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in 1948, the 58 States that were at the time members of the UNO declared:
“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services”.
The authority of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is no longer questioned: the founding document, today accepted by the vast majority of States in the world, has been repeated in many treaties and constitutions.
20 years later, in 1966, the States reaffirmed the legal value of the right to food by adopting the International Covenant on Social and Cultural rights. In article 11, the States (151 at that time) agreed to take the necessary steps to implement:
“the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food (…) and to the continuous improvement of living conditions” and “the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger”.
In 2004, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) adopted “Voluntary Guidelines”, which, as their name suggests, are not legally binding. Their aim is to supply the practical tools necessary to implement the principles of the International Covenant signed 38 years before!
Included in these international reference texts are also regional texts applying to America and Europe (European Social Charter, 1961). Not counting the numerous mentions of the right to food in constitutions and national laws…
But this right is not respected: despite a significant improvement in China, India and some areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, famine continues to spread every year throughout the world, affecting 826 million people in 2001, 842 million in 2003 and 852 million in 2004. In spite of their commitment, international organizations, with at their head the United Nations and the FAO, the World Food Program and the World Health Organization are unable to curb the spread of food distress.
II. Trade, both a problem and a solution
Some social and natural phenomena constitute obstacles to the implementation of the right to food: pandemics, such as AIDS and malaria, are particularly severe in developing countries where they affect an active population working mainly in agriculture. Inter or intra-state conflicts also have disastrous economic and agricultural consequences. Finally, the success of harvests depends on climatic conditions and exceptional natural phenomena such as drought, floods and insect attacks that can cause serious situations of food insecurity.
However these are not the only obstacles to the respecting of the right to food: liberalization without safeguard is also responsible.
The States that signed the International Covenant in 1966 however, committed themselves to “take individually and through international cooperation, the measures which are needed (…) to ensure an equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need, taking into account the problems of both food-importing and food-exporting countries”.
But trade deregulation prevails: the law of the most competitive is now becoming the only real rule.
Subsistence crops grown in developing countries, which by definition are those that guarantee subsistence and food security, are struggling to compete with agricultures that are up to 1,000 times more productive3 . How can they compete with imports from developed or emerging countries, which have favorable agricultural policies and all the benefits of mechanization and the green revolution? Farmers therefore are turning, when they can, towards non-subsistence production, ear-marked for export, or they are flooding into towns looking for hypothetical jobs in the industrial or tertiary sectors.
Dependence on imports and food aid is not a sustainable solution to the problems of food insecurity because of their harmful effects on local agricultural development. Speculative excess exacerbates price volatility and primarily affects developing countries and among them, countries with food shortages, which are hit very hard by fluctuations in world prices. Shortages in supplies, because of climatic or geopolitical accidents are also a serious risk. This is reinforced by the fact that world agriculture is concentrated in a few geographical areas benefiting from unwarranted earnings (vast territories, absence of social welfare, disrespect of the environment…).
The imbalance and dependency caused by unregulated liberalization of exchange affect the capacity of countries to feed their population and therefore to ensure the right to food.
The conditions of international exchange must therefore be reexamined, as the declaration of the World Food Summit in 2002 stated “Trade is a key element in achieving food security”, but by encouraging and organizing intra-regional exchanges through agricultural policies the States, now committed to extended common markets that are protected and coherent from an in terms of agricultural competitiveness, could benefit from greater food sovereignty. This organization of international agricultural exchange will therefore be much more efficient and sustainable than it is today.
And the right to food all the more enforced…
In spite of the existence of legislative texts and institutional proliferation designed to implement the right to food, it still remains unobtainable for part of humanity. Why? The world food system, subject to the fluctuations of an insufficiently regulated market, suffers from a cruel lack of coordination between its private and institutional players.
New international cooperation must therefore be set up in order to preserve subsistence crops, to regulate the international exchange of agricultural products and to guarantee better management of world food reserves. Agriculture has been made central to a global strategic vision, and could therefore achieve its main objective: to feed people today and in the future. These are the main objectives that WOAgri is aiming to reach thanks to choices, cooperation and international decision-making tools, and to the influence it will gain through the dissemination of information.
WOAgri editorial department
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