Niada, L., “Hunger and International Law: The Far-Reaching Scope of the Right to Food,” Connecticut Journal of International Law, Volume 22, No.1, Fall 2006, pp. 131-201 (original) (raw)

International Economic Law and the Right to Food

Rethinking Food Systems: Structural Challenges, New Strategies, and the Law (Nadia Lambek, Adrienna Wong, Leah Brilmayer & Priscilla Claeys, eds.), 2014

This chapter examines the historic and current policies and practices that have contributed to food insecurity in the global South. It analyzes the impact of international economic law on the patterns of trade and production that perpetuate food insecurity, and recommends concrete measures that the international community might take through law and regulation to promote the fundamental human right to food. Part I provides a short introduction to the right to food framework and its implications for international trade, investment, and finance. Part II places the current food crisis in historical perspective by discussing the trade and aid policies that laid the foundation for food insecurity in the global South from colonialism until the early 1980s. Part III explains how food insecurity was exacerbated by the free market reforms implemented in the global South in the last three decades pursuant to structural adjustment programs mandated by international financial institutions and to multilateral and bilateral trade agreements. Part IV discusses the impact on food security of the financial crisis, the climate crisis, and the growing acquisition of agricultural lands in the global South by foreign investors. Part V describes concrete steps that states could take to respect, protect and fulfill the right to food, both nationally and globally. Part VI concludes with a variety of proposals to better integrate human rights law, environmental law, and international trade and investment law, so as to create a more enabling global environment for the realization of the right to food.

The Right to Food: A Global Overview

Access to food is essential to human survival and the "right to food" is a fundamental human right whose fulfillment impinges on the realization of most other human rights. Yet the pervasiveness of human hunger worldwide starkly illustrates the ongoing failure to fulfill the "right to food." This chapter defines the right and analyzes its evolution in international human rights law. It then examines the extent to which commitments to respect, protect, and fulfill the right to food at the international and national levels are upheld in practice. The chapter finds that failure to fulfill the right to food in part reflects old challenges including the failure to integrate human rights law with the commitments, agendas, and laws governing international financial institutions, transnational corporations, trade agreements, and other aspects of the international economic governance architecture. Additionally, however, it reflects new challenges posed by climate change, increased meat consumption on the part of a growing global middle class, and the shift toward biofuel production.

Reflection of the UN Special Rapporteur on right to food.pdf

In March 2015, international law and human rights scholars, practitioners,and students participatedin a symposium at the UCLA School of Law focusing on the challenges and opportunitiesin realizingthe rightto food in the 21"' Century. I delivered the keynote address at this event, in which I utilized my experience as the UN Special Rapporteuron the Right to Food to reflect on the current status of the right to food worldwide. In this Essay, I further elucidate issues confronting the right to food. I begin by emphasizing the importance of adopting a human rights based approach to addressinghungerandfood security. Next, I explore the development of the right to food, and the implementation of that right domestically through an analysisofthejusticiabilityoftherighttofood.I identify globalchallenges affecting the eradicationof hunger, and examine alternativesto the current food system. Finally, I conclude this Essay by offering my recommendations for fostering a coordinated internationalresponse aimed at ensuring the protectionandimplementationofthe righttofood.

From Justiciability to Justice: Realizing the Human Right to Food

The international human rights regime has recognized the right to food since its inception, yet chronic hunger remains one of the most flagrant human rights violations of our time. Food security—the ability to access adequate, nutritious food—continues to elude almost 1 billion people. In 2008, the economic downturn, coupled with environmental events affecting crop yields, caused global food prices to skyrocket. The resulting food crisis created an even greater urgency to resolve the issue of global food insecurity. This article explores the state’s role in facilitating the realization of food security in two contexts: India and Ethiopia. Le régime international des droits humains a reconnu le droit à l’alimentation depuis le tout début. Pourtant, la faim chronique demeure une des violations des droits humains les plus flagrantes de notre époque. La sécurité alimentaire – la capacité d’un individu à accéder adéquatement à des aliments nutritifs – continue d’échapper à près d’un milliard de personnes. En 2008, la récession économique, ajoutée aux incidents environnementaux ayant affecté les récoltes, a engendré une montée en flèche mondiale des coûts des aliments. La crise alimentaire qui en a résulté a rendu l’urgence de résoudre cette problématique mondiale de l’insécurité alimentaire d’autant plus importante. Cet article aborde le rôle de l’état dans la facilitation de la réalisation de la We analyze the normative content of the right to food in international law and examine the promise and realization of food security in each country. The article sets out key principles for a justice-based framework to food security, an approach based on the state’s obligation to ensure the progressive realization of the right to food and reform corrupt or dysfunctional institutions that perpetuate systemic inequality. The approach emphasizes the primacy of four interconnected strategies: (i) strengthening institutions; (ii) improving access to justice; (iii) empowering rights holders; and (iv) supporting food sovereignty.

The right to food: Progress and pitfalls

Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation, 2015

Over the course of the past decade the human right to adequate food has definitively emerged as a normative response to widespread food insecurity, global food crises, and to the related phenomenon of agricultural "land grabbing." This article considers both the progress and pitfalls in using the "right to food" framework to meet the paramount challenge of ensuring equitable and sustainable access to sufficient, nutritious food for all. The right to food under international human rights law The right to food, as codified under international human rights law, calls on states to ensure that all people are free from hunger and that they have physical and economic access at all times to sufficient, nutritious food that is sustainably produced. 1 As part of their duty to respect the right to food, states must refrain from measures that prevent existing access to food. The duty to protect requires states "to ensure that enterprises or individuals do not deprive individuals of 1 As codified under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and as interpreted by the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR Committee), this framework calls on states to immediately ensure that all people are free from hunger and to progressively ensure: "The availability of food in a quantity and quality sufficient to satisfy the dietary needs of individuals, free from adverse substances, and acceptable within a given culture; The accessibility of such food in ways that are sustainable and that do not interfere with the enjoyment of other human rights."

Right to Food and Food Security: A Comparative Perspective

International Food Law How Food Law Can Balance Health, Environment and Animal Welfare, 2021

FIn the past three decades, the right to food has evolved, multiplied and diversified in such a way that it has led to an innovative definition of food security, also in the light of global health emergencies. This has also revealed the multisectorial and multidi- mensional aspects of the rights related to food, whose implementation requires the appropriate use of new technologies and scientific innovations and the benefits of which should be available for the whole society, including future generations. In this chapter, the author focuses on the attention of the essential features of the international human right to food, its evolution and its impact on regional and national legal systems. This enhances the role of the framework laws regulating the monitoring and evaluation mechanisms of the right to food and food security which, on the other hand, explains the function of the judiciary and the justiciability of economic, social and cultural rights. That implies the right to equal access to adequate food and the right to live in an inclusive, safe, non-polluted environment.

Ensuring Food Security Through the Human Right to Adequate Food

By considering how the right to adequate food has been interpreted and applied in international law, I argue that there are important pragmatic reasons to appeal to the right to adequate food in promoting and ensuring food security. I respond to practical and conceptual objections against recognizing the right to adequate food as a human right. First, I consider the objection that the right to adequate food, like other socio-economic rights, is not a real human right because it cannot be enforced by courts in the same way as civil-political rights (the justiciability objection). In addition to considering how the right to adequate food and other socio-economic rights have been legally enforced by courts or monitoring bodies in international law and in other domestic legal systems, I also consider how some socio-economic rights have been protected in state constitutions within the United States and how courts have enforced these, an area that is often neglected in discussions of socio-economic rights in the United States. I also respond to a more conceptual objection that the right to adequate food and other rights to goods and services are not real rights or real normative claims since it is not clear who has a duty to fulfill these rights (the claimability objection). Onora O’Neill provides the strongest defense of this objection. While I agree that these rights will remain empty manifesto rights until corresponding duties are specified and allocated, I argue that duties need to be defined automatically from the idea of the right itself or pre-institutionally, as O'Neill suggests. In my response, I consider different dimensions of the right to adequate food and recent issues in the United States that can be addressed by this right, such as food deserts.

The Right to Food Sovereignty in International Law

The Right to Food Sovereignty in International Law, Ordine internazionale e diritti umani, (4/2021). , 2021

ABSTRACT With the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) in 2018, the right to food sovereignty was officially included in an international legal document for the first time. The concept of food sovereignty has been widely analyzed in sociology and politics, whilst it is rarely described in the legal context. This article aims to clarify the relationship among existing norms of international law such as the right to self-determination, the right to development and the right to adequate food with the right to food sovereignty. In order to clarify this relationship the article compares them with food sovereignty as described in the UNDROP and it highlights the similarities and the differences among each of these norms. The article also includes an analysis of the concept of food sovereignty as included in national legal systems.

International Law as a Meta-Framework for the Protection of the Right to Food

1. The need for an integrated approach. -2. The interplay of quantitative and qualitative aspects of the right to food. -3. The concept of 'adequacy': moving towards a human right to food in international law? -4. The normative content explained in General Comment No 12. -5. State obligations under the Covenant. -6. Breach of the standards of protection established by the Covenant. -7. Limits inherent in the universal protection system. -8. Distribution of competence in setting standards. -8.1. The role of private governance. -8.2.