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Issue 2020

Overcoming Ecological Crises: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Human Rights


The 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.

Food not only keeps us healthy and enables us to respond to global threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic, it is also central to our human nature as social beings. Yet the modern world, marked by capitalism and by patriarchy, treats humans and the rest of nature as two separate spheres. There are deep-seated links between the ways in which societies violate human rights and mistreat nature. Our current economic and political system feeds on the exploitation of humans and nature to generate profits, which manifests most clearly in the perpetuation of ine-qualities, global warming and the rapid loss of biodiversity.

This year’s Watch brings us back to the source of the illusion of separation between human societies and the rest of nature, which serves the power of a few over the many. Authors in this issue invite us to join the dots, and explore a new generation of human rights and environmental law that reimagines interrelatedness. They provide answers on how we can collectively shidt ̧ the paradigm from separation to connection through an ongoing convergence of struggles.

The articles in this edition call for an overhaul of how we produce, distribute and eat food – if we are to regain control and radically transform our societies – but also, of how we collectively resist the exploitation of nature. Building upon longstanding struggles of small-scale food producers’ organizations and Indigenous Peoples for food sovereignty and agroecology, today’s movements show us that ecological concerns are inseparable from socio-economic realities, including the political and ecological roots of our food systems. In these struggles, a fundamental approach will be to embrace diversity, build strong alliances and make peoples’ voices heard in all of the spaces where decisions are made.

For the third consecutive year, the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch includes a supplement with infographics that you can access here.