Network Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition
The Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition is an initiative of public interest CSOs and social movements - peasants, fisherfolk, pastoralists, landless people, consumers, urban people living in poverty, agricultural and food workers, women, youth, and indigenous peoples - that recognize the need to act jointly for the realization of the right to adequate food and nutrition.
The Network
- opens a space for dialogue and mobilization of its members to hold States accountable with regard to their territorial and extraterritorial obligations to realize this right;
- supports the struggles of social movements and groups fighting against violations of this right;
- supports and does its best to protect human rights defenders against repression, violence and criminalization;
- moves to end the impunity of state-condoned violations and of non-state human rights abusers; and
- promotes the holistic interpretation of the human right to adequate food and nutrition, including the full realization of women´s human rights, within the food sovereignty framework.
Why the network
The decision to create a new network was the result of a broad consultative process that took into account:
- The aggravation of the chronic world food crisis, which has unleashed massive land grabbing processes that are leading to the eviction and threat of eviction of millions of small-scale food producers, majority of them women. At the same time, unemployment, low wages, slave-like working conditions, and forced migration continue to plague urban and rural dwellers in most countries, while women continue to be submitted to structural violence, including discrimination, child marriage, unpaid work, etc.
- The persistence of gross violations of the RtAFN at the global level and almost absolute impunity of perpetrators, which is unacceptable and has to be overcome.
- The recognition that no single social movement or organization can tackle all these challenges alone, and that there is a need to join forces among all organizations and movements committed to the human rights approach so that they are heard at the international level and to finally change the policies, identify accountability gaps, and demand these to be closed.
The Network was launched in June 2013, in Vienna, after two years of broad consultations.
