Right to Food Forum (FIAN-FAO)
Online Discussion: 10 Year Anniversary of the Right to Food Guidelines
“Despite the progress made, the right to food remains one of the most frequently
violated of all human rights. As such, the 41st session is an opportunity for
taking stock with regard to the Right to Food Guidelines specifically, as well as
the process towards the progressive realization of the right to adequate food
more generally. Further, it is an opportunity to generate a renewed political
commitment towards advancing the implementation of the right to adequate food,
as well as towards addressing the most important challenges in that regard,
including: ensuring the primacy of human rights, human rights accountability, and
human rights coherence at all levels.”
Theme 1: Right to Adequate Food - Past and Present
What have been some of the most important achievements and some of the
major shortcomings in the struggle for the right to adequate food during the
past decades on the global, regional and local level?
Theme 2: The Right to Food Guidelines
How have the Right to Food Guidelines contributed to the promotion and
protection of the right to adequate food over the last ten years? What are some
of the key achievements and the main limitations of the Guidelines and their
implementation?
Theme 3: The Future
What are the major challenges and ways ahead for the full realization of the
right to adequate food at the local, national, regional and global levels?
http://www.fao.org/fsnforum/righttofood/
Summary Response from the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum
Globally, as well as in Southasia and in Pakistan, mass hunger and malnutrition have come
to be recognized as unacceptable in a democratic world, and there is acknowledgement by
states and international organizations that such impoverishment and deprivation has made
untenable a world without violent conflict.
This is an important achievement for promoting and protecting all human rights for all – a
perspective that emphasizes chronic malnourishment as itself revealing the persistent violation
of economic, social and cultural rights which lead to hunger, as well as underscoring that hunger
excludes people from any real opportunity to achieve remaining rights.
Any targeting runs the danger of denying universal citizen rights. However, when the
goal is recognized to be universal outcomes, then attention to the right to food has correctly
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This note is prepared by A. Ercelan at the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, currently secretariat of the World
Forum of Fisher People.
Right to Food Forum (FIAN-FAO)
Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, May 2014
helped to refocus on differential public action for children, women, and the aged since their
needs – for food specially but generally for a decent life -- can be very different from those of
young, adult males.
Major shortcomings must obviously begin from the global failure to eradicate mass
hunger, e.g. in the time span of the MDGs. It is a glaring failure of state and society, and
certainly not for lack of social resources – e.g. Pakistan has long had national income per capita
that well exceeds any credible estimate of income required to eliminate hunger, and annual
foreign aid is enormous. This extreme inequity overwhelms the considerable progress made in
other indicators of human well-being; it suggests a weak civil society and one that gets easily
distracted in advancing entitlements of the well-fed. Some good initiatives – such as the
employment guarantee in India – have not even been attempted in other countries of Southasia
and elsewhere that are blighted by significant incidence and intensity of chronic
malnourishment.
Important contributors to failure include global militarization, with impacts that extend
beyond the diversion of substantial resources to armaments. When, for example, violent
conflicts exclude many from attaining even subsistence livelihoods, then even the right to food is
not realizable. However well-stocked the market may be, food grains cannot be consumed by
those who are excluded from income.
Neoliberal macroeconomics ill-advised, aggressively peddled by donors, and greedily
adopted by hunger-plagued states remain a major constraint to eradicating hunger. Illustrations
of policies that subvert the right to food include reducing subsidies on food for the hungry rather
than levying taxes on wealthy tax evaders and avoiders. State attachment to sharp inequality of
income and wealth has led to ‘jobless growth,’ such as maintaining high unemployment to keep
real wages low.
Export obsessions exacerbate the policy of cheap labour, perversely acclaimed as an
advantage in trade. The same donors who push for human rights, and specially the right to food,
also tempt countries to increase exports that obviously undermine efforts to increase the
provision of food to the hungry. When it is not blatant as export of food it conceals the diversion
of land and water away from food production as e.g. sugar, Basmati rice, and water-guzzling
textiles and garments. Ironically, by extending GSP-plus to Pakistan and retaining it for
Bangladesh, the EU contradicts its call for compliance with core human rights.
Even those committed to the right to food often proclaim that the zero-hunger goal
requires boosting supplies by existing production techniques. This is a tragedy since the
integrity of nature has been destroyed by supposedly modern and innovative methods.
The Right to Food Guidelines should have helped states to prepare a comprehensive
plan of action, and one that is time bound. This has not happened.
The central fault lies in these guidelines being voluntary, and hence without
accountability of states for failing to take action. There are also other problems in statement and
interpretation that have resulted in action but wholly contrary to fulfillment of the right to food.
These include exports of ‘high-value’ items that in fact compete with land and water in growing
food, and are ecologically destructive. Imports of ‘cheap’ food have often meant further
impoverishment of producers, again both economically and ecologically.
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Right to Food Forum (FIAN-FAO)
Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, May 2014
Invited to improve labour productivity, states have perversely used this to build
infrastructure that in fact reduces the ability of poor people to access food affordably and
permanently. Power projects that use freshwater and return degraded water into water bodies is
obviously bad. But even irrigation infrastructure can be deleterious, and not just to fisheries.
Income inequality and hence vulnerability to hunger are accentuated because state water
projects invite ‘hijacking’ by large landowners.
While land reforms are mentioned in the guidelines, but weakly. Hence no food insecure
country has considered serious land reform. Small-scale producers are mentioned favourably,
but the guidelines do not stress that they are the only solution to equitable production and hence
distribution of food. As remarked by some, prior counter-distribution of wealth is required rather
than reliance on post redistribution of income.
The Guidelines state the central objective “to strengthen people’s access to and
utilization of resources and means to ensure their livelihood.” In assessing the impact, one
needs to ask if the Guidelines lays enough stress. There is also no binding follow up of state
action for pursuing “inclusive, non-discriminatory and sound economic, agriculture, fisheries,
forestry, land-use, and, as appropriate, land-reform policies, all of which will permit farmers,
fishers, foresters and other food producers, particularly women, to earn a fair return from their
labour, capital and management, and encourage conservation and sustainable management of
natural resources.”
The biggest challenges to achieving the universal right to food lie in enabling a multiple
transformation in the structures of production and consumption. Access to natural resources
must be democratized, in ways that increase autonomy of small producers in ways to reduce
vulnerability to state power and market greed. Use of natural resources has to promote
ecological sustainability. Production and distribution of energy must shift away from the wasteful
to needy, which implies all expansion through decentralized solar and wind systems.
The global community must stop all aid that denies the right to food, of which coal and
nuclear plants are an example; drilling in water bodies is frightening; fracking represents
enormous danger to the ecological contributions of water. So is the import of fossil fuels,
including LNG, which require export revenues from sources that diminish food production and
expand economic inequality.
It is usual for national constitutions to acknowledge state obligations to citizens based
upon the right to life, which surely requires the right to food, made possible by a decent
livelihood. The task for public action at all levels is to ensure that these remain the priority.
Extensive agrarian reforms to benefit the landless are required. For the remaining rural citizens,
and all urban citizens, the state must implement guaranteed employment at a decent wage. This
would enable a dignified existence, denied to recipients in charity handouts of food.
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