As competition to control the world’s water resources increases the 2022 Right to Food and Nutrition Watch calls for global fisheries governance that recognizes small-scale fishers as custodians of water ecosystems and protects their rights from the onslaught of extractive industries and other commercial interests.
A new report unveils how corporations and governments are actively pushing for commercial seeds in West Africa having profound implications on people’s diets and rights.
Gendered threats to rural women’s right to food and nutrition are inextricably intertwined with the pervasive patriarchal norms and practices that discriminate against women and girls, reads a civil society submission to the Commission on the Status of Women.
The food price crisis of 2007-2008number of important initiatives toproblems that led to the crisis inwas a watershed. Ten years later, despite a change aspects of the food system, many of the the first place persist. There is much to be done.
The recent 2007/2008 global financial crisis shook the world up and generated perfidious results in peoples’ lives around the world. Austerity measures are already known and applied in many parts of the world and they are increasingly becoming part of the official discourses of states and international finance agencies. These measures often deny social rights and in turn are detrimental to the poor. Technocratic solutions are often applied, which favor the instigators of the crisis: the banks and international financial institutions; the global elite; and powerful corporations. This system has encouraged continuous processes of criminalization of peoples’ struggles, the rise of fascism and the strengthening of undemocratic authoritarian regimes worldwide.
The following words could come straight out of a document published by an official UN body, or even out of a marketing campaign of some private sector corporation: “the importance of women”, “especially for women and the most marginalized”, “primarily for women of reproductive age and girls”, “women must have access to productive resources”... Nobody dares to deny the importance of women for achieving a world without hunger. And yet, something must be wrong, because year on year, decade after decade, women continue to be marginalized and left by the wayside.
“Global markets, in which food has been reduced to yet another commodity for speculation, have demonstrated that they are incapable of solving urgent situations of hunger: far from it, they actually worsen them". This statement may seem self-evident, but it is worth reminding ourselves that we live in a context of global crisis that can be defined as perverse. Globalization, which emerged some decades ago, has exponentially exploded in the last 15 years. It has paved the way towards a world where there are officially 795 million hungry people, and, what is more, many more are not even accounted for, yet they are suffering from malnutrition-related problems on a scale never seen before. Against the backdrop of an energy-dependent society—with petroleum as our system’s cornerstone—we have surpassed peak oil and seem to have forgotten that planet Earth’s resources are finite.
The 2007/2008 crisis that pushed the number of people living in hunger to one billion and compromised the human rights of many more, never really went away, the 2017 Right to Food and Nutrition Watch warns.
When the world food crisis exploded in 2007–2008, international prices of all major food commodities reached their highest level in nearly 30 years, pushing the number of people living in hunger to one billion, and compromising the human right to adequate food and nutrition of many more. The ‘crisis’—which many have described as a multifold food, fuel, finance, climate and even a human rights crisis—brought the cracks of an unsustainable, broken food system into view, forcing policy makers to acknowledge its failures. A decade later, the root causes of the crisis persist. Social movements and civil society organizations are therefore keeping up their struggle to transform food systems.
Over the last ten years, Watch readers have become familiar with the consequences of the capitalist economic model: from the depletion of natural resources to climate change, and from the concentration of wealth to the corporate capture of our food system. Despite a decade of mobilizations and struggles, we continue to witness the effects of capitalism’s appropriation and transformation of nature: the enclosure of land, the rapid disappearance of small-scale farming, the privatization of customary fishing rights, the misappropriation of seeds, deforestation to cultivate cash crops for industrial long food chains, the gradual extinction of biodiversity, human-induced pollution, meal impoverishment, nutrient-poor ultraprocessed foods, and widespread famines, to name but a few.
In 2015, the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) adopted the Framework for Action for Food Security and Nutrition in Protracted Crises (FFA) with the goal of improving the situation of populations affected by chronic food crises and the action of the various actors involved—governments, NGOs, and international organizations. Food emergencies occur in situations of war and natural disasters as well as in non-conflict contexts, where millions of people live in chronic food insecurity and high vulnerability to climatic and economic shocks, which may result in high numbers becoming unable to feed themselves.
Each year we hear ever more frequent news about rising global temperatures and so-called extreme weather events (floods, hurricanes, droughts etc.). The impact of these events on people is becoming increasingly more obvious, especially in regard to the risk posed to the realization of the human right to adequate food and nutrition.
The global agricultural system is increasingly being shaped by corporations in their own interests. In the past 40 years we have witnessed a significant shift in power from nation states to corporations as the drivers in the global agri-food system. There are multiple dimensions to this change, including trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation and reregulation in favor of corporate interests, and corporate globalization. This has led to greater authority to corporations to dictate systems of governance and allocate risk in production and distribution systems, and has generated waves of mergers and acquisitions resulting in corporate concentration. Nation states continue to play a role, but not so much as mediators of power relations between capital and national populations. States are increasingly subordinated to the logic of capital accumulation, economies of scale and concentration of technical and financial expertise. This era has also expanded financialization of the system in numerous ways. Since the birth of capitalism, finance has been an integral feature of the system—the lubricant that animates processes of production and distribution. However, in the contemporary era, financial capital relies increasingly on financial engineering to create products (such as derivatives) that enable profit without investment in productive processes.
The issue of global trade rules and their impact on food and nutrition security has been much debated over the past few years. At the heart of these debates has been the unfair rules set out in the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) at the World Trade Organization (WTO) that allowed Europe, the USA and other rich countries to retain their subsidy regimes while severely restricting the policy and fiscal space available to Asian and African countries to provide subsidies. This allows rich countries, which provide billions of dollars in subsidies to their farmers, rich and poor, to call out India on domestic legislation, such as the National Food Security Act (2013). They paint it as trade distorting, even though many of the subsidies provided by the Indian government are for small and marginal farmers and poor consumers.
The global, industrial, economic bubble unsurprisingly burst a decade ago, yet we are still witnessing and experiencing its effects in our daily lives. It was the inevitable outcome of a model that prioritizes profit at the expense of everything else: our lives, our rights and our nature. The crisis was building for years and a billion people were pushed to hunger because of drastic food price volatility, and as a result of a multi-fold crisis that grew, squeezed and affected our food systems, climate and human rights.
Each year we hear ever more frequent news about rising global temperatures and so-called extreme weather events (floods, hurricanes, droughts etc.). The impact of these events on people is becoming increasingly more obvious, especially in regard to the risk posed to the realization of the human right to adequate food and nutrition.
With the world still trapped in a multifold crisis, this year’s Right to Food and Nutrition Watch will take stock of the past decade and present thought-provoking discussions and alternative solutions for finding our way out.
As discussions on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals kick off today at the UN High-Level Political Forum, the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition launches a human rights-based monitoring resource. Parallel to the UN High-Level Political Forum (HLPF), the human rights-based resource is being released to foster monitoring and accountability exercises that ensure, protect and promote people’s sovereignty, somewhat disregarded in the 2030 Development Agenda. Currently in its initial stage of development, People’s Monitoring for the Right to Food and Nutrition aims to present a critical view and the diverse dimensions, triggers and consequences of hunger and malnutrition.
With the conviction that it is fundamental to converge, deepen ties and develop common principles to strengthen the struggle, the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition (GNRtFN) held its fourth global meeting in Viotá, Colombia. With representatives from 23 organizations from 16 different countries, the members and supporters of the GNRtFN pointed with concern to the shrinking commitment by States and institutions to safeguard the right to food, as well as to the increasing corporate power over people’s diets and lives. As false solutions to hunger and malnutrition are on the rise, is in unity where the strength of the struggles lies.
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