Food and Human Rights in Development - volume I : Legal and Institutional Dimensions and Selected Topics

The right to adequate food is firmly established in international human rights law. It is among those most cited in solemn declarations and most violated in practice. In a landmark decision, the 1996 World Food Summit decided to break with the all too familiar right-to-food rhetoric and requested a clarification of "the content of the right to food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger" and the means for its implementation. Since then much efforts have gone into further conceptualisation of social and cultural rights in general and the right to adequate food in particular. UN agencies, scholars, interested governments and civil society have joined forces in attempting to provide a foundation for national and international follow-up of the recommendations of the World Food Summit, reinforced by the Millennium Development Goals. This first of two volumes provides evidence of some of this work and gives direction for future activities to promote and protect the right to adequate food for all. It has contributions from some 15 authors who have all been directly involved, from different angles, in the advancement of the right to food and related human rights over the past years. Besides introducing the concept of the right to food and elaborating on its theoretical basis and meaning in development, it provides several recent examples from work both at the national and international level to apply it in practical situations, and with a special view to how to go about identifying the corresponding obligations of states and complementary duties and responsibilities of non-state actors and international organisations. Finally, several chapters address the right to food under special circumstances and for special groups needing particular attention. The book is the first of its kind on the right to food as a human right. It is not a textbook but is intended to inform and stimulate further debate among scholars, policy-makers and practitioners and activists alike, on some of the major issues of concern in applying a right-based approach to alleviating food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition, and in promoting access to and consumption of nutritionally adequate, safe and culturally acceptable food on a sustainable basis for all. It is now evident that with the current pace of events the goal set by the WFS and the MDG of halving poverty and hunger by 2015 will not be achieved. There is a growing need to watch some of the possible effects of rapid economic globalisation and market liberalisation on food and nutrition security conditions, and to promote countervailing measures to offset their most negative consequences, particularly for vulnerable groups. The right to food is a first test case of the extent to which the application of economic, social and cultural rights can effectively exert such counterforce in an increasingly economics- and market-driven international climate, and enhance progress towards established goals.

Wenche Barth Eide is a Norwegian human rights scholar with base in Law and Social Science Research. She is emeritus Associate Professor at the University of Oslo, Department of Nutrition (until 1997 under Nordic School of Nutrition). She holds a Master's Degree (Cand. real.) of Zoology (Zoo-physiology) at the University of Oslo 1962, and a Postgraduate Academic Diploma in Nutrition at the University of London (1965–66). She became a University Fellow, at the Institute for Nutrition Research (1963–66), then moved to the US and became a Consultant to the UN System (UN Protein-Calorie Advisory Group, PAG) to lead an African-Norwegian team to prepare a first ever report of the UN on Women in Food Production, Food Handling and Nutrition, on leave from UiO 18 months, 1975-1976. She was a Consultant, of the Norwegian Research Council (at the time Council for Research on Societal Planning, RFSP). Then she became Technical Adviser in Nutrition, at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Rome (1989–94) on leave from UiO.

Uwe Kracht, an agricultural economist with a PhD degree from the Technical University Berlin, has dedicated most of his professional career to sustainable, human-centered development, with emphasis on food, agriculture, nutrition and the elimination of poverty. In pursuit of these activities, he has been involved in efforts to place these within a framework determined by ethical and human rights principles. After working as an international manager in the US food industry with responsibilities for Latin America, Europe, Australia and Japan, he joined the United Nations system in the early 1970s to advance the fight against hunger and malnutrition through the work of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the UN World Food Council (WFC) over a period of two decades. As WFC’s Chief of Policy Development and Economic Analysis he was responsible for the successful negotiation at the UN General Assembly to incorporate specific hunger-alleviation goals into the International Development Strategy for the 1990s. He was also co-convener of consultations between Bretton Woods institutions and UN agencies on food and anti-poverty objectives in structural adjustment programs, which contributed to changes in policy and operational procedures in the concerned institutions. Since the mid-1990s, he was active as an independent development consultant, promoting the application of economic, social and cultural rights to food, nutrition and broader development problems, which included responsibility for launching a broad- based NGO initiative for the implementation of the 1996 World Food Summit’s recommendations to clarify and operationalize the right to food as a fundamental human right. He has written extensively on food, nutrition and development issues. His over 50 publications include two books on food security and nutrition and two on food and human rights in development.