Hunger: The Biology and Politics of Starvation

[12] The Right to Food

[12] The Right to Food Is There a Right to Food? Following the first World Food Conference in 1974, as detailed in chapter 1, the international donor community established an increasingly accurate system of satellite observations of the world’s arable land. Today we in the developed world know when and where food shortages, food insecurity, chronic hunger, starvation, and famine are taking place. We can go to “www.fao.org” or “www .usaid.gov” or “www.who.int,” select a country, and get the latest famine early warning system (fews) or international health information. Our donor agencies also have the means to deliver emergency food relief quickly, even by air if they wish, and to assist with long-term development aid. The knowledge of hunger, starvation, and disease, and the means to respond to them, are easily at hand. Further, our governments and international agencies have written and deployedthelegalstructurestomovefoodfromdonortorecipient .Theyhavealso drafted and signed documents agreeing to the “moral right to food.” We know, and we can respond. Yet food assistance is not always moved swiftly; neither is this “right” universally agreed to; nor does it always serve as the foundation for humanitarian responses to food needs. Jean Zeigler, un Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, points out that: “On the one hand, the un agencies emphasize social justice and human rights. . . . On the other hand, the Bretton Woods institutions [World Bank and imf], along with the government of the United States of America and the World Trade Organization, oppose in their practice the right to food—emphasizing liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and the compression of state domestic budgets—a model which in many cases produces greater inequalities.”1 These two positions—the humanitarian and the “secular” or “market”—delineate the struggle over “the right to food” that continues today, despite the fact that this right is defined as “fundamental” in two International Human Rights Covenants (discussed below). What makes a claim to food a “right”? Xiaorong Li, writing in World Hunger and Morality, states: “The right to food should be understood as a need-based right. The right to food is a right of access to the means to procure adequate food. The right to food must be supported by social practices conducive to a stable social and economic order. Such an order is necessary to prevent deprivation and to insure that each person has the opportunity to secure adequate access 254 [] the way forward to food. Governments are primarily responsible for instituting and maintaining this order and thus for protecting the right to food.”2 The right to food, Xiaorong Li concludes, “is thus a basic right.”3 The right to food is well established in international law. It has its origins in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration is a commendable and broad-based statement of the “rights” that should be available to all human beings. Written just three years after the end of World War II, it calls for “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” in a world where “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” It stakes out a wide tent of social justice and human rights. The Declaration’s articles declare “the right” to freedom of movement and speech and assembly; “the right” to employment and even “rest and leisure.” Article 1, writes Asbjorn Eide of the Norwegian Institute of Human Rights, “lays the foundation of ethical behavior by stating that everyone is born free and equal in terms of dignity and rights and that everyone is endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Ethical behavior, he believes, requires that people go beyond self-interest and care for one another.4 Article 25, which defines the core issue and framework of this book, also articulates the moral and human rights of ethical behavior. This includes a wide moral ground where “everyone” has “the right” to health and “well-being.” That includes “food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services,” and “the right to security” when one is unemployed, sick, disabled, widowed, elderly or experiencing any “other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”5 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted, in part, to serve as a foundation for further legislation. It is often used as the fundamental instrument of a Human...