Pulses are good for nutrition and income, particularly for women farmers who look after household food security, like those shown here at a village outside Lusaka, Zambia. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Jun 8 2018 (IPS)

Lawmakers at the highest levels urgently need a “revolution in thinking” to tackle the twin problem of sustainable food production and migration. Starting with an inaugural event in Brussels, then travelling on to New York and Milan, an international team of experts led by the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition (BCFN) is urging far-reaching reforms in agricultural and migration policy on an international scale.

“We should be scared about the situation that is in front of us, but we should also be fascinated by the solution,” Paolo Barilla, BCFN Vice Chairman, said at the start of the first International Forum on Food and Nutrition which took place June 6 in Brussels."As we see it right now, there is no strategy at all at governmental levels in the EU to deal with migration, let alone how food policy might help.” --Lucio Caracciolo

Barilla and several experts speaking at the event pointed out the many problems lying ahead involving world-wide sustainable food production.

“One third of all food worldwide is thrown away, nearly one billion people go to sleep hungry every night and in the meantime, 650 million are obese. We urgently need new comprehensive, multi-stakeholder food systems to fix this situation,” said Andrea Renda, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies, organizer of the event together with BCFN and the United Nations Sustainable Solutions Network (UN SDSN).

“In thirty years we will need to feed nine billion people. But at the same time, because of climate change the arable land is diminishing. The Sahara desert has increased ten percent in size the last decade and the South of Italy and Spain are drying up. How will we feed everyone?” asked Lucio Caracciolo, geostrategist and President of research company MacroGeo.

The experts called on all states that are signatory to the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda to urgently establish an Intergovernmental Panel on Food and Nutrition, modeled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who succesfully achieved international consensus on how to tackle climate change.

Moreover, they called upon the EU to change the focus of its agricultural policies from simply increasing production to focusing on new systems that assure healthy, nutritious, affordable diets for everyone. Instead of a “Common Agricultural Policy,” the EU should shift to a “Agri-Food Policy.”

“In the current EU Common Agricultural Policy, two-thirds of the subsidies have nothing to do with sustainable development,” Andrea Renda tells IPS, “and one third is spent on innovation in agriculture, in a broader, more holistic approach. This must at least be reversed.”

Throughout the event, hunger and food insecurity were repeatedly cited as the long-term drivers of migration across the Mediterranean. For the occasion of the event, MacroGeo launched a 109-page report on the nexus between migration across the Mediterranean and food security in Africa.

The authors state that there is a particularly strong link between migration, food and conflicts. “Refugee outflows per 1000 population increase by 0.4 percent for each additional year of conflict and by 1.9 percent for each percentage increase of food insecurity,” the MacroGeo authors write, referring to recent research by the World Food Program.

“That might not seem a lot but in a country of fifty million that amounts to one million refugees per year,” said Valerie Guarnieri, assistant executive director of the World Food Program who repeated the statistics in front of the audience of 600 attendees on Wednesday.

“The connection between migration and food is heavily neglected in policy, this is a way to push it into the agenda,” Lucio Caracciolo told IPS, “because as we see it right now, there is no strategy at all at governmental levels in the EU to deal with migration, let alone how food policy might help.”

The contentious matter of dumping of European surplus produce – often named as one of the causes of hunger, food insecurity and migration – in Africa was accordingly dealt with in a talk with EU Commissioner for Agriculture Phil Hogan, not coincidentally just ahead of long-awaited negotiations on the reform of the EU’s agricultural policy. The Commissioner pledged that the new Common Agriculture Policy 2021-2027 program will reduce spending on production of commodities often dumped in the developing world. At the same time, he said Europe was ending trade barriers on imports of food from the developing world.

As part of its ambitious list of policy recommendations, BCFN also calls for more awareness of the illegal exploitation of migrants in EU agriculture. According to the experts, specific EU programmes should provide funding for the fight against unethical practices. And spreading a message which does not go well with the current Italian government, MacroGeo’s Lucio Caraciolo called for a “normalisation of the presence of migrant labour. European agriculture in the South cannot survive without their help. So it is up to us to assure that their rights are respected,” he told IPS.

In its report, MacroGeo proposes a circular and seasonal migration model, in which temporary workers are contacted directly from their country of origin on a yearly basis and for determined periods. The workers are granted permits and ensured that they can return to their home country. “Intended results include disincentivizing unregulated economic migration, ensuring employees are granted work conditions as per the law, and the possibility to return to the same farms, enhancing human resources effectiveness,” the report says.

Bob Geldof, musician, activist and organizer of 1984’s Live Aid. closed the event with an at times bitter speech broadening the discussion. “We had a 1200 percent increase in consumption in the last eighty years and we’re talking about sustainability?” he asked. “Sustainability is simply impossible with this irrational economic logic, which boils down to ‘more for ourselves all the time.’”

In September, the International Forum will travel to New York to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly. In November, it will hold a third and final event in Milan.

Maize is a food staple in Guatemala's "Dry Corridor," which has been hit by both drought and flood. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Mar 16 2013 (IPS)

The world’s food security remains “vulnerable”, new data suggests, with some 870 million people experiencing sustained hunger and two billion suffering from micronutrient deficiencies.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a Washington think tank, says such numbers are “unacceptably high”, and warns that anti-hunger programmes have been “piecemeal”.

In an influential annual report on the state of the world’s food policy, released Thursday, the organisation said there were some positive achievements made last year, but that a number of policy changes are still required.

Growing jobs

The report identifies agricultural development as an important potential job creator, particularly for young people. In developing countries, however, it warns that youths are no longer seeing agriculture as a viable career, looking instead to urban areas for work.

Leaders in sub-Saharan Africa – a region with the world’s fastest-growing population as well as youngest – are today looking to create job opportunities in agriculture, using new technology and farming techniques. In doing so, they are hoping to encourage the young and innovative emerging workforce in such a way that they can have a transformative impact on both economic growth and social development.

Higher production yields, after all, would simultaneously create jobs, lower food prices, and reduce hunger and malnutrition.

“Agriculture in most developing countries is a labour-intensive sector and makes up a big chunk of the labour force,” Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington advocacy group, told IPS.

“In recent years, large firms have introduced a type of agriculture that is very capital intensive and highly mechanised, but employs very little labour, so there has been a huge loss of employment. Further, modern agriculture requires modern infrastructure– electricity, grain elevators, fertiliser storage and mechanical expertise. To get there requires a lot of investment, but if done properly the nonfarm sector will grow alongside the farming sector.”

If properly managed, however, food policy experts say the sector’s employment potential is significant.

“Agriculture in Africa is now recognised as a source of growth and an instrument for improved food security,” Sheggen Fan, director-general of IFPRI, said Thursday.

“Africa’s agriculture can absorb large numbers of new job seekers. But in order for agriculture to be a technically dynamic and high-productivity sector that contributes to food security, it will need an influx of educated and innovative young labour.”

Conflict fuelling hunger

IFPRI’s researchers identify violent conflict, particularly in Central Africa, as both a cause and consequence of food security.

“Violence in Central Africa, especially in Nigeria, which accounts for more than a quarter of agriculture of sub-Saharan Africa has reduced output growth and food security, and has had dramatic social and economic consequences,” Mary Bohman, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said at a panel discussion Thursday.

Armed conflict in northern Mali and renewed violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo reportedly resulted in the displacement of approximately three million people within the region and forced a further 70,000 people to flee to neighbouring countries.

Fighting in Somalia and Yemen, the civil war in Syria, and unrest across the region in the aftermath of the Arab Awakening was compounded by low rainfall.

Drought in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the United States had a dramatic impact on agricultural production and supply throughout the world. Approximately 80 percent of farmland in the United States was hit by the most severe drought in half a century, while high temperatures and low rainfall reduced wheat production in Australia, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine – among the top producers and exporters of wheat.

According to many environmentalists, such extremes will only be further exacerbated as global climate change progresses – with further risks to food security.

“2012 was an extraordinary year for climate change researchers,” said Andrew Steer, president of the World Resource Institute (WRI), a think tank.

“During the past year, it has become generally accepted that the world will see a two-degree increase in average temperature. But even then, food production, land degradation, deforestation are not the only problems – we’re talking about water risks across the spectrum and skyrocketing food prices.”

He said the new IFPRI report propels the issue of food into the centre of the discussion on climate change.

Gender factor

Experts are increasingly focusing on the centrality of gender equality in promoting agricultural growth and food security. Indeed, at Thursday’s event, presenters exhibited particular excitement over this new emphasis.

Over just the past year, new evidence on the role of gender in agricultural productivity has emerged, including in the World Bank’s annual World Development Report. This new data indicates that agricultural performance and food security improve through both agricultural and non-agricultural reforms that increase women’s access to production resources.

Further, women’s contributions to agriculture in developing countries have been shown to bring overall gains in agricultural productivity as well as increased nutritional benefits. Such contributions also improve women’s access to education, technology and financial services.

“When you look at statistics on the number of women farmers in the world, it is commonly anywhere from 40 to 80 percent in developing countries,” Danielle Nierenberg, co-founder of Food Tank, a think tank here, told IPS.

“These women, however, don’t have access to the same resources as men; don’t have access to extension services, credit or the ability to make financial transactions, they often don’t own land or are prohibited from owning land.”

Nierenberg says it is very encouraging to see donors and investors beginning to tailor their production projects to the inclusion of women.

“While men more commonly grow cotton and maize and other industrial crops, women are the ones who grow the food that feeds the family,” she says. “To be effective, initiatives will need to focus on women’s overall equality across all sectors, not just the food and agriculture sector. Until we do that, we’re not going to see the gains we need – like higher yields, economic growth, the protection of environmental resources or the reduction in malnutrition and poverty.”

IFPRI director-general Fan agrees that the status of women is “critical” to poverty reduction, particularly in bringing down levels of malnutrition.

“Women have higher standards, and have been shown to better allocate the household budget as well as feed their families with more nutritious food,” he says. “One of the biggest links between poverty reduction and malnutrition is directly related the status of women.”

Tikal Mayan ruins in Guatemala. The Sumerians and Mayans are just two of the many early civilisations that declined apparently because they moved onto an agricultural path that was environmentally unsustainable. Credit: cc by 3.0

By Lester R. Brown
WASHINGTON, Feb 7 2013 (IPS)

The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity. Over the last decade, world grain reserves have fallen by one third. World food prices have more than doubled, triggering a worldwide land rush and ushering in a new geopolitics of food.

Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold.

This new era is one of rising food prices and spreading hunger. On the demand side of the food equation, population growth, rising affluence, and the conversion of food into fuel for cars are combining to raise consumption by record amounts.

On the supply side, extreme soil erosion, growing water shortages, and the earth’s rising temperature are making it more difficult to expand production. Unless we can reverse such trends, food prices will continue to rise and hunger will continue to spread, eventually bringing down our social system.

Can we reverse these trends in time? Or is food the weak link in our early twenty-first-century civilisation, much as it was in so many of the earlier civilisations whose archeological sites we now study?

This tightening of world food supplies contrasts sharply with the last half of the twentieth century, when the dominant issues in agriculture were overproduction, huge grain surpluses, and access to markets by grain exporters. During that time, the world in effect had two reserves: large carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) and a large area of cropland idled under U.S. farm programmes to avoid overproduction.

When the world harvest was good, the United States would idle more land. When the harvest was subpar, it would return land to production. The excess production capacity was used to maintain stability in world grain markets. The large stocks of grain cushioned world crop shortfalls.

When India’s monsoon failed in 1965, for example, the United States shipped a fifth of its wheat harvest to India to avert a potentially massive famine. And because of abundant stocks, this had little effect on the world grain price.

When this period of food abundance began, the world had 2.5 billion people. Today it has seven billion.

From 1950 to 2000 there were occasional grain price spikes as a result of weather-induced events, such as a severe drought in Russia or an intense heat wave in the U.S. Midwest. But their effects on price were short-lived. Within a year or so things were back to normal. The combination of abundant stocks and idled cropland made this period one of the most food-secure in world history.

But it was not to last. By 1986, steadily rising world demand for grain and unacceptably high budgetary costs led to a phasing out of the U.S. cropland set-aside programme.

Today the United States has some land idled in its Conservation Reserve Program, but it targets land that is highly susceptible to erosion. The days of productive land ready to be quickly brought into production when needed are over.

Ever since agriculture began, carryover stocks of grain have been the most basic indicator of food security. The goal of farmers everywhere is to produce enough grain not just to make it to the next harvest but to do so with a comfortable margin. From 1986, when we lost the idled cropland buffer, through 2001, the annual world carryover stocks of grain averaged a comfortable 107 days of consumption.

This safety cushion was not to last either. After 2001, the carryover stocks of grain dropped sharply as world consumption exceeded production. From 2002 through 2011, they averaged only 74 days of consumption, a drop of one third. An unprecedented period of world food security has come to an end. Within two decades, the world had lost both of its safety cushions.

In recent years, world carryover stocks of grain have been only slightly above the 70 days that was considered a desirable minimum during the late twentieth century. Now stock levels must take into account the effect on harvests of higher temperatures, more extensive drought, and more intense heat waves.

Although there is no easy way to precisely quantify the harvest effects of any of these climate-related threats, it is clear that any of them can shrink harvests, potentially creating chaos in the world grain market. To mitigate this risk, a stock reserve equal to 110 days of consumption would produce a much safer level of food security.

The world is now living from one year to the next, hoping always to produce enough to cover the growth in demand. Farmers everywhere are making an all-out effort to keep pace with the accelerated growth in demand, but they are having difficulty doing so.

Food shortages undermined earlier civilisations. The Sumerians and Mayans are just two of the many early civilisations that declined apparently because they moved onto an agricultural path that was environmentally unsustainable.

For the Sumerians, rising salt levels in the soil as a result of a defect in their otherwise well-engineered irrigation system eventually brought down their food system and thus their civilisation. For the Mayans, soil erosion was one of the keys to their downfall, as it was for so many other early civilisations.

We, too, are on such a path. While the Sumerians suffered from rising salt levels in the soil, our modern-day agriculture is suffering from rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. And like the Mayans, we too are mismanaging our land and generating record losses of soil from erosion.

While the decline of early civilisations can be traced to one or possibly two environmental trends such as deforestation and soil erosion that undermined their food supply, we are now dealing with several. In addition to some of the most severe soil erosion in human history, we are also facing newer trends such as the depletion of aquifers, the plateauing of grain yields in the more agriculturally advanced countries, and rising temperature.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the United Nations reports that food prices are now double what they were in 2002-04. For most U.S. citizens, who spend on average nine percent of their income on food, this is not a big deal. But for consumers who spend 50-70 percent of their income on food, a doubling of food prices is a serious matter. There is little latitude for them to offset the price rise simply by spending more.

Closely associated with the decline in stocks of grain and the rise in food prices is the spread of hunger. During the closing decades of the last century, the number of hungry people in the world was falling, dropping to a low of 792 million in 1997. After that it began to rise, climbing toward one billion. Unfortunately, if we continue with business as usual, the ranks of the hungry will continue to expand.

The bottom line is that it is becoming much more difficult for the world’s farmers to keep up with the world’s rapidly growing demand for grain. World grain stocks were drawn down a decade ago and we have not been able to rebuild them. If we cannot do so, we can expect that with the next poor harvest, food prices will soar, hunger will intensify, and food unrest will spread.

We are entering a time of chronic food scarcity, one that is leading to intense competition for control of land and water resources – in short, a new geopolitics of food.

*Lester Brown is the president of Earth Policy Institute. For further reading on the global food situation, see Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, by Lester R. Brown (W.W. Norton: October 2012). Or read more here.

The Korean Women’s Peasant Association won the 2012 Food Sovereignty Prize for its efforts on behalf of the survival of small-scale and ecologically sustainable farming in South Korea.

The announcement was made Wednesday at the fourth annual Food Sovereignty Prize ceremony in New York. In addition to its work on sustainable farming, the Korean Women’s Peasant Association(KWPA) also focuses on the consumer’s right to healthy and affordable food, decent wages and working conditions for farmers, and the right of female workers to receive the same wages as the men.

Jeomok Bak, chairperson of Korean Women’s Peasant Association, center, receives a Food Sovereignty Prize from Leticia Alanis, executive director of La Union, left, and Nancy Oritz-Surun, director of La Finca del Sur, right. Credit: Stuart Ramson/Insider Images for WhyHunger

“It is a great honour. I am really pleased that our work is being recognised,” Jeomok Bak, president of KWPA told IPS at the award ceremony. “Food is closely connected to women because women feed their families and children. The right to food is linked to women’s rights,” Bak added.

Apart from the winning organisation, three other initiatives fighting for food sovereignty were honoured at the ceremony, held at the National Museum of the American Indian and hosted by WhyHunger.

One of those initiatives, the Unified Peasant Movement of Aguan Region, did not have a representative at the event. Envoys from this Honduran association of over 2,500 landless peasants, working for the right to land in a country where governmental land grabbing for biofuel plantations is commonplace, were not allowed to leave their home country.

Instead, Lucy Paguada from Honduras Solidarity NYC, originally a Honduran citizen and now a U.S. resident, held a speech on behalf of her Honduran friends.

“We want to name those responsible for our social tragedy,” she said. “First, the United States government, for financing and training the Honduran police and army.”

Paguada went on to criticise leading politicians and landowners in Honduras, calling them “puppets of the U.S.”. She also expressed her anger at the assassination of Antonio Trejo Cabrera on September 22. The Honduran human rights lawyer, who defend the peasants movement, was gunned down after leaving a wedding south of the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa.

“He had previously denounced his killers on television,” Paguada said.

The two other initiatives being honored, National Fisheries Solidarity Movement from Sri Lanka and Coalition of Immokalee Workers from the state of Florida in the United States, were able to send representatives to the awards.

Rights for tomato workers

Lucas Benitez from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers told the audience about his movement’s struggle to improve working conditions at tomato farms in Florida. “90 percent of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. in winter comes from Florida,” he explained. “This industry… is one of the richest and most powerful in this country.”

Despite the industry’s profits, in the past tomato pickers working in extreme heat were not provided with shade. Female employees who were sexually harassed had nowhere to go to report assaults. Working extremely long hours was standard, according to Benitez.

But the struggles of the CIW have helped to bring about a new code of conduct for the tomato industry in Florida. “Last week, we signed an agreement with Chipotle,” Benitez announced with pride, his voice strong.

The restaurant chain Chipotle Mexican Grill is a major purchaser of tomatoes in the United States and has now committed to buying the vegetables at a fair price.

Still, many fast food conglomerates and supermarkets still refuse to pay respectable prices for tomatoes, Benitez stated, and so the CIW’s work must continue. “We will not stop until we feel that we are treated with the respect that all human beings are being entitled to.”

A global dilemma

Olivier De Schutter, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, was a special guest at the Food Sovereignty Prize ceremony. He delivered a passionate speech about the meaning of food sovereignty.

The definition of the term is “the right of people to define their own food policy”, De Schutter said. The basic idea is that needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food – not the demands of markets and corporations – shall determine food policies.

“About 15 percent of the food being produced is traded across borders. It is not much,” De Schutter continued. “Yet that segment of the food system is determining all the rest to a large extent.”

“In many developing countries I see that investment goes to export agricultural products, not to the small farmers trying to feed their families. And look at how agricultural research and development is being financed. For whom? For the export market. For the large producers.”

The Belgian-born De Schutter also lashed out at his native Europe. “The European Union uses 614 million hectares (of land) annually to feed itself… 50 percent of this land that is used to satisfy the needs of the E.U. is land that is outside the Union, land in developing countries,” he said.

“Food does not go where the need is, it goes where the money is today.”

De Schutter also linked food sovereignty to climate change. “It is exactly because of climate change that we must deconcentrate food production, so that all regions are able to produce as much as they can for themselves. That is how resilience can be built.”

The event ended with a highly applauded performance by musician and activist Tom Morello, an original member of the bands Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, who also had a few concluding words: “Some people choose between Rolls Royce and Lamborghini. Others choose between which dumpster they are going to get their food from tonight. That is a crime.”

The root cause of hunger and malnutrition for millions of people worldwide lies in the severely skewed and unfairly structured hierarchy of policymakers, not in natural disasters or food shortages, according to the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch 2012 (RTFN Watch) released Tuesday.

Jorge Medina practices integrated, diversified farming on land near Havana. Credit: Ivet González /IPS

The report entitled “Who Decides About Global Food and Nutrition: Strategies to Regain Control” describes marginalised people, such as peasants and the indigenous, who continue to suffer hunger despite their efforts to farm and cultivate their own food, as “victims of selfish interests”.

The report outlines how ineffective policies surrounding food security and agricultural development breed hunger and malnutrition globally.

Martin Wolpold-Bosien, a founder of the Watch, told IPS, “Food and power are related,” he said. “This is very clear. As long as we do not empower the people, more are affected by hunger and nutrition.”

Wolpold-Bosien is a the coordinator of the Right to Food Accountability at Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN), which annually publishes the globally respected publication, RTFN Watch.

According to the Watch, there is a direct correlation between power and food, in that those with power never hunger, and those without any voice in decision-making have lost individual sovereignty over their own nutrition.

The report defines food sovereignty as “the right of Peoples to define their own policies and strategies for the sustainable production, distribution, and consumption of food, with respect for their own cultures and their own systems of managing natural resources and rural areas, and is considered to be a precondition for Food Security.”

There is an emphasis on the idea that chronic hunger, food riots, and other complications following natural disasters and emergency situations are not direct results of the situations themselves, but rather of the serious gap which exists between decision makers and the effect of those decisions on the livelihoods and daily needs of civilians.

The main reason for this growing gap is that governments and multilateral organisations are relying ever more heavily on public-private partnerships as stakeholders in the path to end hunger, including the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the Scaling Up Nutrition Initiative (SUN).

According to the Watch, public-private partnerships seek a solution through short-term intervention strategies, as opposed to the holistic approach designed to cut the cause of hunger at its roots.

Wolpold-Bosien expressed to IPS his concern in the role of Public-Private Partnerships in the Private Sector. “You cannot expect the private sector to be the best actor for public interest,” he said. “The private sector by definition is constituted to serve the private interest and their business.”

The RTFN Watch argues that, although Public-Private Partnerships are often considered a necessity in the funding of development work, deeper analysis of these partnerships unveils the contradictory agendas involved. The underlying causes of nutritional deficiencies are rarely addressed while very selective programmes are targeted, thereby overlooking locally derived causes and needs.

The RTFMN Watch outlined seven case studies of individual countries, one from each continent, in which the right to food and nutrition are violated due to ineffective legal structures. It also made the direct connection between these violations and the states’ unethical seizures of natural resources and land grabbing, as seen in the case studies of Mexico and the Arab Spring.

“It is impossible to combat the causes of hunger while keeping existing power relations untouched,” stated civil society representatives in an official statement.

The solution to hunger, they argue, is in citizen action, social movement, and the redirection of control from the companies and severely compromised, and often corrupt, chain of power back to the civilians themselves.

The proposed plan of action is to occupy political space, or “Occupy the Food System,” a social movement to include the voice of all people, rich or poor, in the decisions regarding their own food and nutrition.

“Human rights are perhaps the most efficient weapon for the combat against hunger,” Wolpold-Bosien told IPS. If we do not open political space and occupy political space for them and their voices, it’s very difficult to do something against the structural courses of hunger.”

An important step was made toward achieving the goal with the reform of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in 2009. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the CFS aims to be “the most inclusive international and intergovernmental platform for all relevant stakeholders to work together to ensure food security and nutrition for all.”

“So this is the point—we have to use those instruments that help people affected by hunger and malnutrition to raise their voices and to be more powerful.” Wolpold-Bosien told IPs. “And human rights is absolutely a strong tool because it is an obligation of states.”

The report is the fifth annual RTFN Watch. It was published by 15 civil society organisations and their partners with the intention of creating a platform for activists, media, and scholars to promote, advocate, and lobby for the right to food and nutrition.

It is also a tool to pressure national and international policymakers into prioritising the human rights of the civilian, especially because the RTFN Watch is the first and only of its kind.

“This report is human rights based and helps people to visualise their struggle at a global level,” said Wolpold-Bosien.