The right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has the physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement.  – General Comment 12 (CESCR)

The Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, has just released his report on his mission to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

YOU CAN READ IT HERE: SRRTF 2013 FAO Mission

In this blog post I provide a very broad summary of the report and then hone in on three key areas:

1. the relationship between the FAO and the private sector;
2. trade; and,
3. areas of action.

For those of us following processes of global governance of food and agriculture, this report provides advice as to how we can begin to restructure policies to ensure that they target the most vulnerable and that they are developed, implemented and monitored in line with the guiding principles of a human rights framework.

Overview of the Mission to FAO

The Special Rapporteur normally visits countries on his missions, but institutions are within the scope of his mandate. Frankly, a mission to the FAO at this stage, while the FAO is under new leadership and undergoing reform, is appropriate and timely.

The objectives of the mission were to:

• Take stock of the efforts of the FAO in promoting the right to food;
• Explore how the right to food normative and analytical framework is integrated in to FAO policies and programmes;
• Understand how integration of the right to food framework contributes to the attainment of the FAO’s core goals.

Towards this end, the report provides insight into how the human right to adequate food framework is integrated into the activities of the FAO and identifies areas where this normative and analytical framework can be used to strengthen the FAO’s contribution to the realization of the right to food.

The FAO has expressed a commitment to a rights-based approach. As the report explains, in their contribution to the Outcome Document of the Rio+20 Summit, the FAO identified two rights-based guidelines – the Right to Food Guidelines and the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure – as the “overarching frameworks for achieving food security and equitable sustainable development” (para. 18).

But uptake and integration of a right to food approach remains far from coherent across FAO’s policies and programmes. With nearly 1 billion people suffering from malnutrition, it is fundamental that the FAO break out of the institutional silos whereby “the right to food is primarily promoted through discrete projects carries out only by one part of the organization” (para. 19). Furthermore, the right to food needs to be “included as a cross-cutting area of work and the key components of its normative and analytic framework reflected in the action plans on the implementation of Strategic Objectives” (para. 22).

While the idea of rights can be complicated, what we are really talking about is the recognition of food as a legal entitlement, as opposed to a form of charity, or a hand out. As the report explains:

“legal entitlements protect the rights of people to live with dignity and ensure that all have either the resources required to produce enough food for themselves or purchasing power sufficient to procure food from the market. They place obligations on the State, and provide individuals and communities with recourse mechanisms when these obligations are not met” (para 8).

A right to food approach seeks to improve coordination across government, enhance accountability, collective learning, participation, inclusivity democracy and empowerment. It is the combination of agency of people, accountability on the part of the State, and a framework to hold governments accountable that make a right to food approach so powerful.

The report provides identifies countries where the right to food is integrated into national food and nutrition legal and policy frameworks (para. 15) and highlights countries and regions developing strategies for better incorporating the framework into their national programmes.

FAO and the Private Sector

In the report, the Special Rapporteur considers the partnerships between the FAO and the private sector and raises concerns that despite arguably legitimate objectives, there is a “lack of transparency over the conditions of deliberation, acceptance or finding of certain past partnerships and initiatives” (para. 54).

Given the increase in private sector interest in agriculture since the 2008 food price crisis, and the corresponding interest in activities of the FAO, the Special Rapporteur questions “whether the FAO will remain credible as a guardian of the public interest and as an impartial body when it intervenes to share global responses to food insecurity” (para. 54).

In line with this, the Special Rapporteur questions the contradiction between FAO supported reports and partnerships. For example, the IAASTD report, to which the FAO contributed to, calls for a fundamental shift in the way agriculture is supported. However, two years after the release of the report, the FAO signed a Letter of Agreement with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), without reference to IAASTD, or the Right to Food Guidelines and without ensuring alignment between this cooperation and the conclusions of IAASTD (para. 33).

FAO and Trade

As part of the mission, the Special Rapporteur reviewed key FAO reports on trade negotiations and agriculture and noted that the conclusions of these reports are “unfortunately only partially and insufficiently reflected in the discourse promoted by the FAO at the global level, which does not systematically indicate the conditions under which trade can improve food security at the local, national and international levels” (para. 9).  The report requested that the FAO “express its views more clearly on the question of trade and food security; building not only on its experience with a wide range of situations at country level, but also on its past attempts to ensure food security is always prioritised in the organization of trade in agricultural commodities” (para. 9).

Towards Action

The report usefully provides strategies for addressing the challenge of mainstreaming the right to food with respect to the FAO Strategic Framework with the aim of not only improving coherence but also moving the FAO towards its objectives. The Special Rapporteur proposes three areas where change can be made along with specific actions that could be taken.

1)      Procedural requirements of the right to food can be more systematically integrated into FAO activities.

1. HOW: Comparative assessments, data collection that captures the multi-dimensional nature of food insecurity that is adequately disaggregated; procedural requirements integrated into the decision-making and implementation process.

2)      FAO can consider measures to mainstream the right to food in the daily work of the Organization

1. HOW: strengthen mechanisms and procedures to facilitate systematic integration of the right to food; promote the right to food across FAO with the support of dedicated staff; a network of senior-level focal points in technical units at headquarters and in regional and national offices to support the mainstreaming effort;  and strengthened Development Law Service of the Legal Office; develop a set of standard questions to be included on a systematic basis; strengthening monitoring systems to assess the impact of the FAO’s country-level programmes and policy assistance; establish an “impact assessment culture”; make senior and middle management accountable for mainstreaming right to food principles; ensure the work has a regular budget.

3)      The right to food calls for a more systematic consideration of agriculture and food policies that benefit the most marginalised, food-insecure population groups.

1. HOW: Prioritize the most marginal segments of the population; make national food systems inclusive of poor small-scale food producers; support farmers’ seed systems, especially through local seed exchange systems; enhance access to nutritious food; limit excessive reliance on international trade in pursuit of food security; protect small-scale food producers from the abuse of buyer power in food chains; support social projection systems as a response to chronic-poverty related food insecurity.

Key Conclusions and Recommendations

The conclusions presented in the report are clear: “the right to food approach should permeate all core activities of the FAO, including food and agriculture policies, nutrition, land, and trade” (Para 21).

To summarise the conclusions and recommendations in one word it would be integration. If we subscribe to the evidence presented in the report, and in turn agree that a right to food framework can support the FAO in its objective of reducing hunger and malnutrition, it then follows that the framework needs to be integrated systematically across FAO policies and programmes, and by extension, FAO supported initiatives in member countries.

The report outlines why and how a right to adequate food normative and analytical framework can help the FAO reduce hunger and malnutrition around the world. Some are doing this well, others less so.

The Report concludes by stating that a more systematic application of the right to food as an operational tool can help the FAO improve its work towards the eradication of hunger and malnutrition. The Special rapporteur calls on the FAO and its members to fulfil their obligations to realise the right to food and to:

•  Promote an integrated approach to implementing the right to food across FAO.
•  Prioritise activities that have the largest impact on the food insecure and prioritise support to states on policies and programmes that are conducive to the right to food.
• Mainstream the right to food across the FAO.
• Integrate procedural requirements of the right to food consistently across FAO activities at the country and headquarter level.
• Ensure all new FAO norms and standards are aligned with the human rights to adequate food normative framework.
• Support the implementation of the right to food normative framework at the country and regional level through activities that integrated the right to food in legal, policy and institutional frameworks.

Final Thoughts

This report is a very important contribution to the changing architecture of global food security governance and provides a path towards greater cohesion and efficacy in FAO policy based not only in legal commitments but also on a growing body of evidence that highlights the efficacy of a right to food approach.

I am keen to engage in a discussion on the role of the environment within a broader rights-based approach. I know that Olivier De Schutter contributed to this conversation with his influential 2011 report Agroecology and the Right to Food, but I think that ecology needs to be at the core of policies moving forward and that it needs to be explicitly mentioned and not broadly assumed.

For those of you who want to know more,   I’ve posted some resources and links on the Right to Food here.

Photo http://www.michaelbenanav.com/

I am very happy to be publishing a new editorial by the Human Rights Director of FIAN, Rolf Künnemann. In this piece, Künnermann applies a critical lens to the new Global Food Security Index, launched by the Economist Intelligent Unit and sponsored by Dupont. He very clearly highlights some of the limitations of this index, especially in the context of future policy developments.

New Global Food Security Index Ignores Key Issues, May Lead to Wrong Policies
Rolf Kunnemann*

The Economist Intelligence Unit refers for its “Global Food Security Index” to the 1996 World Food Summit Definition: “Food security is defined as the state in which all people at all times have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs for a healthy and active life.” Very important here are the words “all people at all times.” A food security index would therefore have to indicate how far a community or country deviates from the “all people at all times” standard. National averages are of very limited use in this context.

The methodology of an index reveals a lot about the mind set of those who constructed it. As indices are often (wrongly) used for guiding policies, it is important to make sure that indices measure what they pretend to measure- and not what they want to measure – in order to bring about the policies favored by their authors. It is also well known that composite indices are nearly useless. And such indices hardly merit attention, if not for the political damage they could bring about.

A useful way to approach the state of food security (and its background) is to find, on a country-by–country basis, those parts of the population that lack food security, investigate where these deficiencies come from and listen to those peoples’ concerns and proposals. Only such an approach (that may, of course, contain certain elements of sampling) can provide reliable and politically useful data to address food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition. It is in the context of such an approach that some of the indicators in the Global Food Security Index, under the categories of affordability, availability and quality and safety, could be useful – while others still don’t make sense.

The affordability indicators assume that all people are consumers. In reality, most of the food insecure people are mainly producers and only partially consumers buying food on the market. A careful methodology, therefore, has to be applied to determine “food consumption as a share of household expenditure.” Similarly, the world poverty line misses out (at least on a whole range of countries) what people harvest, collect, etc. to feed themselves. Simplistic monetization may lead to wrong data for “poverty” and to wrong policies for addressing peoples’ needs.

GDP per capita is rather useless for finding out about food security – it is a crude average and highly contested as a measure, even for describing welfare in a state. Agricultural import tariffs have nothing to do with food insecurity per se – unless one assumes that these tariffs are always good or bad for food security. Vested global interests pretend that such tariffs are always bad as they increase the consumer cost of imported food. It should be recalled, however, that rich countries have used such tariffs in the past – and still do– to develop their own agriculture and foster food security.

The financing of farmers is also not necessarily good or bad for food security. Financing could be structured to drive the farmers to plant non-food crops for exports – which is seen as good by vested global interests – but bad by many others that point to the need to strengthen domestic food production (and vice versa). Many forms of farmer financing have turned out detrimental and are used for the eradication of peasant farming. The presence of a safety net program tells us very little about food insecurity. Some such programs are indeed insignificant or exclude parts of those who lack food security.

The availability indicators contain the supply of food and food aid. A supply indicator tells us little about whether people have access to supplies – and whether this supply has replaced local produce (as food aid often does), and is sustainable or leads to sustainable solutions, as it should under the definition of food security. The indicators that are related to public expenditure for R&D fail to investigate what is this expenditure/infrastructure and how this is related to food insecurity.  Similarly, with agricultural infrastructure: facilitating access of export crops to harbors is very different from facilitating access of locally produced food to local markets. The first stands for colonial type policies that may cause food insecurity, while the second type of infrastructure is what is urgently necessary.

The volatility of agriculture growth – another indicator used – is surprising as an indicator chosen. One may have expected that the volatility of food prices related to global speculation and hoarding may be somehow correlated to food insecurity – but such an indicator is missing.

The quality indicators are ambiguous as long as they do not inform national agricultural food production policies. In some areas the reason for nutritional deficiencies are essentially poverty – in others it is people’s eating habits (and sometimes both reasons are related). This is true for the U.S. and for European countries, as much as for other countries. And it is these issues that need attention. Products from local peasant agriculture tend to be nutritionally balanced, whereas imported junk food, GMOs and nutritional additives may be lucrative future business endeavors for vested interests (along the lines of “Scaling Up Nutrition – SUN” program), but fall short of establishing sustainable food quality and, instead, abuse human rights.

The human right to food requires going beyond food security by also considering how people’s access to adequate food comes about (or is destroyed) and, in particular, whether States meet their obligations as outlined in the 1999 UN General Comment on the Right to Food. This requires considering questions of food sovereignty, people’s participation, access to land, control over seeds and water, cultural adequacy and ecological sustainability, among others – that are simply ignored in the food security index.

The food security index produces numbers, but these do not give a meaningful indication of food security. The underlying assumptions for the choice of component indicators reveal a certain ideology and business model of vested interests that is detrimental to food security.

*Rolf Kunnemann is the Human Rights Director at FIAN International, an international human rights organization which fights for the right to adequate food. This editorial is the personal opinion of Mr. Kunnemann and does not necessarily reflect the view of FIAN International.

In preparing a lecture for Monday, I was reviewing my notes on the G20 and their food security programmes and I was reminded of an article written by Professor Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (those of you who read this blog, will know I am a fan).

In this particular article, published in advance of the Agriculture Ministerial Meeting, he proposed 5 priorities for the G20 so that we may start to seriously address the political problems that lead to hunger. He notes that:

It will take courage from G20 leaders to put the global food system back on track. They will have to break the “myth” of hunger as being reducible to a technical issue or to a failure of food systems to produce sufficient volumes. The French presidency appears determined to act decisively on the issue of speculation on the agricultural commodities market. But beyond that, the G20 members remain deeply divided over agricultural policy for the 21st century. The outcome of this debate will have real consequences for all humanity.

Unfortunately, the G20 failed to meaningfully incorporate his recommendations into their Agriculture Action Plan (check out a good summary here, or download the Plan here) but these 5 principles serve as a good reminder for all of us working in this field:

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