The Right to Food
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Description
At the conclusion of the World Food Conference held in Rome 1974 the governments of the world proclaimed “that within a decade no child will go to bed hungry, that no family will fearforits next day's bread, and that no human being's future and capacities will be stunted by malnutrition”. As that decade comes to a close the tragic reality is that little, if any, progress has been made towards meeting those goals. During the target year of 1984, as during every other year since the Conference, literally millions of children have starved to death, tens of millions have gone to bed hungry and malnutrition continues to afflict hundreds of millions of people in all parts of the world. These statistics make hunger by far the most flagrant and widespread of all serious human rights abuses. Yet, for the most part, it is a problem which has to date been perceived by most (well-fed) policy-makers, academics, human rights activists and others as a painful but inevitable fact of “life”, rather than as an abregation of all that the concept of human rights stands for. The present book is an attempt, for the first time, to make hunger a prominent issue on the international human rights agenda and to put the right to food on the agenda of national and international food agencies. In the first chapter Philip Alston provides an overview of the problem and examines the role of law - past, present and future - in promoting the eradication of hunger and malnutrition. The assumption underlying that analysis, and shared by most if not all other contributors, is that there are significant benefits to be derived from tackling hunger as a human rights issue within the framework of established norms of international law. The question of duties attaching to the right to food, which Alston considers from the standpoint of international law, is further developed from a philosophical perspective by Henry Shue. In a chapter dealing with the broad philosophical aspects of the right to food Amartya Sen establishes its validity as a basic right. This perspective is reinforced by a wide-ranging historical review undertaken by Pierre Spitz in which he shows that even in ancient times both the legitimacy of governments and their hold on power were often dependent on their ability to manage the local food system in the interests of avoiding widespread hunger. He also demonstrates that historically the occurrence of widespread hunger has usually been the result of an abuse of economic or political power. Roger Plant then traces the evolution in recent decades of Latin American policies relevant to the right to food. His analysis emphasizes the potentially explosive consequences of the institutionalized gap between political rhetoric and its legislative embodiment on the one hand and the harsh reality of widespread hunger on the other - a contradiction which has also characterized much of the approach of the international community. Other contributions deal with different aspects of the challenge of giving substance to the right to food through the creative use of law. In addressing the local and national dimensions of that challenge Clarence Dias and James Paul survey some of the practical means by which activist popular organizations can make effective use of available legal resources in order to assert the right to food of local communities. In the chapters dealing with the international dimensions particular emphasis is placed on establishing, from a jurisprudential viewpoint, that economic, social and cultural rights are full-fledged human rights and are not merely vague aspiration of limited hortatory value. This fundamentally important issue is approached from different angles by Fried van Hoof and Guy Goodwin-Gill. Finally, the chapters by Katarina Tomaševski and Gert Westerveen are devoted to the complex but eminently practical issues of how respect for the right to food might effectively be monitored through the use of social indicators and how the right to food-related obligations of states under international law could more effectively be supervised by the international community. In the final analysis, the stakes involved in efforts to give substance to the right to food are immense. Success would mean that the eradication of hunger and malnutrition would become a serious priority concern for all governments for the first time in world history. Failure would mean the continued loss of millions of human lives every year, despite the existence in the world of ample food and other resources with which to avoid such a tragedy. Moreover, if the right to food, as perhaps one of the most basic economic rights is, as a number of critics have claimed, not susceptible of implementation as a human right, then the foundations on which the past—1945 international consensus on human rights have been constructed are invalid - with all the consequences which that would imply. The present volume thus constitutes a modest first step towards the operationalization of economic human rights, beginning with the right to food. The attemps of the authors to deliver their message has been substantively assisted by the possibility to include cartoons of Plantu, Honoré and Bellenger in the book. We are indebted to the three artists and to EIP for the permission ro reprint the cartoons.
Publication Date
1984
Recommended Citation
Alston, Philip G. and Tomaševski, Katarina, "The Right to Food" (1984). Faculty Books & Edited Works. 766.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-books-edited-works/766
