ALL RTFN WATCH ISSUES
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2024People's Ecological Alternatives to Corporate Greenwashing
moreThe latest edition of the annual Right to Food and Nutrition WATCH examines the causes, impacts and responses to the food, climate and ecological crises. It challenges false, for-profit solutions and presents alternatives anchored in the right to food and nutrition, eco-social justice, agroecology and food sovereignty.
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2022Stewards of our Waters and Seas – Time to Recognize and Support Small-Scale Fishers
moreAs 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
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2021Not Our Menu: False solutions to hunger and malnutrition
moreIf someone were to spontaneously ask you where your food comes from, would you know the answer? Do you know who grows it and how? The steps taken and the ingredients used to turn your food into meals? How it reaches markets and stores before it finally finds its way onto your plate?
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2020Overcoming Ecological Crises: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Human Rights
moreThe production and availability of nutritious, healthy and culturally adequate food depends on functioning ecosystems, but also on our ability to recognize human rights and the intrinsic values of other living beings, from animals and plants to microorganisms.
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2019Women's Power in Food Struggles
moreIn today’s context of rising hunger and ecological collapse, women and all those who seek to reimagine food, environment and economies, face ever-increasing attacks. This edition of the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch addresses key issues of power, and expose the structural violence that degrades both women and the environment.
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2018When Food Becomes Immaterial
moreOver the past few decades, public goods, such as water, education and health – the pillars of human rights – have increasingly been transformed into tradable commodities. Food, of course, has been traded for centuries, yet the recent failure in market regulation has led to its full commodification. As a result, it has contributed to the dispossession of productive resources. This affects peasant communities, damages the environment and changes our diets for the worse. The weak market regulatory framework has generated an ever-increasing gap between what is considered legal and what is actually sustainable and coherent with human rights.
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2017The World Food Crisis: The Way Out
moreWhen 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.
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2016Keeping Seeds in Peoples' Hands
moreDespite feeding the world and providing resilience to natural disasters, peasant seed systems face severe threats due to the appropriation of nature by corporations and the accelerated destruction of agricultural biodiversity. Increasingly, seed and agrochemical businesses seek to privatize, monopolize and control seeds by patenting and commodifying this very source of life. Meanwhile, peasant and indigenous communities, who have been the developers and guardians of seeds for millennia, are finding their rights to save, use, exchange and sell seeds overshadowed by a corporate agenda that prioritizes profit over human rights and the sustainable maintenance of nature.
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2015Peoples' Nutrition Is Not a Business
moreCommonly referred to as ‘corporate capture’, the increasing control of businesses over food systems and resources, institutions, policy spaces and governance structures, is putting human rights at great risk. The world is witnessing this reality from the Americas to Asia, particularly since the 2008 world food crisis that shook societies across the globe. It is clear that the present economic model cannot guarantee the conditions for national governments to fulfill their human rights obligations, including the right to adequate food and nutrition.
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2014Ten Years of the Right to Food Guidelines: Gains, Concerns and Struggles
moreArguably the single most violated human right in the world, the right to adequate food and nutrition is contending with the emergence of growing threats posed by corporate and economic interests that are increasingly gaining influence in policy spaces and taking control of food systems and natural resources worldwide. In view of this alarming trend, social mobilization and resistance are more critical now than ever before.
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2013Alternatives and Resistance to Policies that Generate Hunger
moreThe overarching goal of realizing all human rights for all, and in particular the right to food and nutrition, can only be achieved through strong, human rights-based accountability systems. There is a clear need to articulate feasible and culturally acceptable alternatives to dominant policies in the areas of agriculture, food and nutrition.
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2012Who Decides about Global Food and Nutrition? Strategies to Regain Control
moreThe right to decide and to control which food to have is inherent to the human right to food. The Right to Food andNutrition Watch 2012 addresses the decision making process on global food and nutrition from this human rights perspective.
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2011Claiming Human Rights. The Accountability Challenge
moreAccountability is currently the most pressing challenge in the struggle for the right to food and nutrition. Without a clear accountability mechanism, declarations of political will to fight hunger and malnutrition remain ineffective.
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2010Land grabbing and nutrition. Challenges for global governance
moreIn 2010 the global situation of the right to food and nutrition is dire. The consequences of the climate, energy, financial and food price crises have been felt around the world. In 2009, for the first time in history, the number of undernourished people surpassed the one billion mark, and there is no sign that this unacceptably high number will be reduced any time soon. At the current pace, it will be impossible to achieve the first of the Millennium Development Goals, to halve the percentage of undernourished people in the world by 2015, without a profound change in national and global policies and governance.
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2009Who controls the governance of the world food system?
moreThe gap between promises and reality is increasing. In 2009, the number of undernourished people in the world reached the historically high figure of 1.02 billion people, about 100 million more than in 2008.
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2008The World Food Crisis and The Right to Food
moreNational and global political decisions that fail to take the human rights obligations of states and intergovernmental organisations into account are the main reasons why hunger still persists. One of the most essential instruments to increase public pressure with which it is possible to hold governments and intergovernmental bodies accountable for their policies and programmes is the establishment of monitoring tools to check that states meet their obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the human right to adequate food of every person globally.