The Right to Food
United Nations
General Assembly
Human Rights Council
Sixteenth session, 20 December 2010
Agenda item 3
Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil,
political, economic, social and cultural rights,
including the right to development.
Report submitted by the Special Rapporteur,
Olivier De Schutter
on the right to food.
Basics of the Right to Food
• Increasing food production to meet future
needs, is not sufficient.
• It will not allow significant progress in
combating hunger and malnutrition
• if it is not combined with higher incomes and
improved livelihoods for the poorest
The Right to Food
• This is particularly important to small-scale
farmers in developing countries.
The Right to Food
• Short-term gains will not offset long-term losses of
productive ecosystems, threatening our ability to
maintain current food production levels.
Food production in Developing
Countries 1979 - 91
Change in total food production in developing
countries, 1979-81 to 1989-91
Sources: FAO (Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations), 1991
Change in per capita food
production, 1979-81 to 1989-91
The Right to Food
• We have the ability to greatly improve
agricultural production in many poor, fooddeficit countries.
• While at the same time improving the
livelihoods of smallholder farmers and
preserving ecosystems.
The Right to Food
• It would contribute to rural
development and preserve
the ability for future
generations to meet their
needs.
• It would also contribute to
the growth of other parts of
the economy by creating
demand for non-agricultural
products with new, higher
incomes in rural areas.
Ensuring the right to food requires
• …the possibility either to feed oneself
directly from productive lands and waters,
or to buy food.
• This implies ensuring that food is available,
accessible and adequate.
People wait for food at a UN
distribution center in Port-auPrince, Haiti, 2008
Accessibility requires physical + economic access
• Physical accessibility means that food is
accessible to all people, including the
physically vulnerable such as children,
older persons or the disabiled;
• Economic accessibility means that food
must be affordable without
compromising other basic needs such as
education fees, medical care or housing.
Adequacy requires
• Adequacy requires that food satisfy dietary
needs (factoring a person’s age, living
conditions, health, occupation, sex, etc), be
safe for human consumption, free of adverse
substances and culturally acceptable.
Community Partners
• Participation must include of foodinsecure groups in the design and
implementation of all food policies.
• This is a key dimension of the right to
food, and really all initiatives from the
outside world, for policies to be
successful.
Food systems should be developed in order to
meet the following three objectives:
• First, food systems must ensure the availability of
food for everyone.
• Estimates call for a 70% increase in food production
by 2050, assuming population growth, and changes
in the food types and amounts eaten found with
increased urbanization and higher incomes.
Meat Eaten / person
Meat Production
• At present, nearly half of the world’s cereal
production is used to produce animal feed, and
• meat consumption is predicted to increase from
37.4 kg/person/year in 2000 to over 52
kg/person/year by 2050, so that by mid-century,
50 per cent of total cereal production may go to
increasing meat production.
World Meat Production USA
Grain needed to make 1 kg meat
Reallocation of grains
• Therefore, reallocating cereals used in animal feed
to human consumption, a highly desirable option
in developed countries where the excess animal
protein consumption is a source of public health
problems…
• (UNEP) estimates that the loss of calories
from feeding cereals to animals instead of
using cereals directly as human food
represents the annual calorie need for more
than 3.5 billion people.
Food Losses
• In addition, food losses in the field (between
planting and harvesting) may be as high as 20 to 40
per cent of the potential harvest in developing
countries due to pests and pathogens,
• Average post-harvest losses, from poor storage
and conservation, amount at least to 12 per cent,
and up to 50 per cent for fruits and vegetables.
Agrofuels
• Finally, as a result of policies to promote the
production and use of agrofuels, the diversion
of crops from meeting food needs to meeting
energy needs contributes to tightening the
pressure on
agricultural
Exploring
links between supplies.
EU agricultural
policy and world poverty
Exploring links between agricultural policy
and world poverty
• Recent dramatic increases in food prices are having severe
consequences for poor countries and poor people.
• The FAO reports that food prices rose by nearly 40 percent in 2007
and made further large jumps in early 2008.
• Nearly all agricultural commodities—including rice, maize, wheat,
meat, dairy products, soybeans, palm oil, and cassava—are
affected.
Food Riots Lead to Increased Push for
Food Security
• In response to the price hikes, food riots have occurred in
many developing countries, including Burkina Faso,
Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Senegal,
and Somalia. According to the FAO, 37 countries are now
facing food crises.
Second, agriculture must develop in ways
that increase the incomes of smallholders.
• Food availability is, first and foremost,
an issue at the household level,
• Hunger today is not because stocks are
too low or to global supplies unable to
meet demand, but to poverty;
• increasing the incomes of the poorest is
the best way to combat it.
There is not a shortage of foods.
Economic growth originating in agriculture is at least
twice as effective in reducing poverty as GDP growth
originating outside agriculture.
• Multiplier effects are significantly higher
when growth is triggered by higher
incomes for smallholders, stimulating
demand for goods and services from local
sellers and service providers.
Large agrobusinesses
• When large estates increase their revenue, most is
spent on imported inputs and machinery, and
much less trickles down to local traders.
• Only by supporting small producers can we help
break the vicious cycle that leads from rural
poverty to the expansion of urban slums, in which
poverty breeds more poverty.
Third, agriculture must not compromise
its ability to satisfy future needs.
• The loss of biodiversity, unsustainable use of
water, and pollution of soils and water are
issues which reduce the continuing ability for
natural resources to support agriculture.
Climate change
• Climate change, which translates in more frequent
and extreme weather events, such as droughts
and floods and less predictable rainfall, is already
having a severe impact on the ability of certain
regions and communities to feed themselves.
It is also destabilizing markets.
• The rise in sea level is already causing the
salinization of water in certain coastal areas,
making water sources improper for irrigation
purposes.
• The change in average temperatures is threatening
the ability of entire regions, particularly those
living from rain-fed agriculture, to maintain actual
levels of agricultural production.
March has meant 6,000 weather records broken
By Chris Dolce, Jonathan Erdman, Nick Wiltgen, weather.com
We've seen an amazing, historic run of record warmth in March 2012.
First, consider the sheer number of daily record highs either tied or broken over the past two
weeks. The counts in the table below are courtesy of the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)
since Mar. 9. Counts from Mar. 23 are still being tabulated and will be posted later.
Day
Fri. Mar. 9
Sat. Mar. 10
Sun. Mar. 11
Mon. Mar. 12
Tue. Mar. 13
Wed. Mar. 14
Thu. Mar. 15
Fri. Mar. 16
Sat. Mar. 17
Sun. Mar. 18
Mon. Mar. 19
Tue. Mar. 20
Wed. Mar. 21
Thu. Mar. 22
# of Records
101
105
189
138
218
460
662
496
565
586
510
710
575
295
Africa
• By 2080, 600 million additional people could be at
risk of hunger, as a direct result of climate change.
• In Sub-Saharan Africa, arid and semi-arid areas are
projected to increase by 60 - 90 million hectares
• In Southern Africa, yields from rain-fed agriculture
could be reduced by up to 50 % by 2020.
• Most past efforts focused on improving seeds and
providing farmers chemicals + fertilizers to increase
yields, replicating industrial models of external
inputs to produce outputs in a linear model of
production.
Agroecology seeks to improve the
sustainability of agroecosystems
•Instead, agroecology seeks to improve
the sustainability of agroecosystems by
mimicking nature instead of industry.
•Scaling up agroecological practices can
simultaneously increase farm productivity
and food security, improve incomes and
rural livelihoods, and reverse the trend
towards species loss and genetic erosion.