Food Recognized as Basic Human Right

By Aarthi Gunnupuri Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 25 2013 (IPS) - Food, as a basic human right, helps citizens and courts hold governments accountable for violations or victimisation that results in hunger, said Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

Addressing reporters last week, De Schutter submitted his final report to the General Assembly, after a five year mandate. The report is based on 11 country missions and spans submissions from states across all regions.

De Schutter dedicated the report to the “progress that right to food has made in the last ten years.” The progress is partly due to a shift in perception, he said.

“For many years hunger and malnutrition were seen as technical issues that could be addressed by increasing production, by improving trade, by the help of economists” and what governments came to realise in the early years of the past decade was “that the issue of accountability, of governance, combating discrimination” were “hugely important,” he said.

The special rapporteur’s report also includes right to food consultations in Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern and Southern Africa and West Africa. He cited a case where the South African government, in order to combat overfishing, allocated fishing quotas to big fishing groups, while entirely ignoring small fishers that depended on fishing for sustenance.

With the right to food as law, the court was able to intervene and push for a revised legislative framework with the interests of the small fishers in view.

Similarly, a high court in Kampala, Uganda, was able to secure compensation for over 2,000 small farmers illegally evicted from their farm for a German coffee company, De Schutter said.

According to the special rapporteur, another area that saw progress was the adoption of framework laws and national strategies. “This has been particularly important in Latin America under the leadership of Brazil and Guatemala” he said, which resulted in several countries in the region adopting laws and national action plans to implement the right.

In times of crisis, De Schutter said, governments in developing countries usually rushed to give cash transfers to the poor or put temporary programmes in place without long-standing sustainable solutions.

“Codifying as legal entitlements the benefits that otherwise people receive as hand-outs from governments is an essential safeguard against misuse of funds, against corruption,” he said.

 While identifying key areas where progress has been made, Schutter’s report to the General Assembly also makes recommendations for the full realisation of the right. This means that hunger, sometime in the future, may well be an issue of the past.