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Rome, 13 June 2002


SPEECH OF

MR. JEAN ZIEGLER

UN SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON THE RIGHT TO FOOD

ON THE OCCASION OF THE

WORLD FOOD SUMMIT: FIVE YEARS LATER




Your Excellency, the President,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have the honour to address you today in my capacity as Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

The Commission on Human Rights, in resolution 2002/25, requested me “to contribute effectively to the medium-term review of the implementation of the Rome Declaration on World Food Security and the Plan of Action of the World Food Summit.” It is to serve this mandate that I put forward the following recommendations to this meeting.

1. The importance of the ‘right to food’ which goes beyond ‘food security’

Inspired by General Comment 12 of the treaty Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), the Special Rapporteur uses the following definition of the right to adequate food:

“The right to food is the right to have regular, permanent and unobstructed access, either directly or by means of financial purchases, to quantitatively and qualitatively adequate and sufficient food corresponding to the cultural traditions of the people to which the consumer belongs, and which ensures a physical and mental, individual and collective, fulfilling and dignified life free from anxiety.” (E/CN.4/2001/53).

After three days of intense negotiations, the final Declaration of the World Food Summit: five years later was adopted by consensus in the opening meeting of the Summit. Paragraph 10 of the Declaration calls for the establishment within the next 2 years of a set of voluntary guidelines for the progressive realisation of the right to adequate food.

This will represent significant progress at the international level in the development of the conceptual framework for the understanding and implementation of the right to food. It will provide an important forum for discussion and sharing of experiences to fight hunger and to take real action to meet the commitments that were made in 1996 to halve hunger by 2015. It will be an opportunity for States to take real action in clarifying the right to food as promised in 1996 (in Objective 7.4 of the 1996 Plan of Action).

So what must be done now?

The guidelines must be established with the full participation of all stakeholders. This means that States, as well as other actors, including private actors and non-governmental organisations will therefore have a crucial role to play. It is imperative that there be a full participatory process in the elaboration of the guidelines.

The voluntary guidelines must be founded in a rights-based perspective. Paragraph 10 of the Declaration calls for voluntary guidelines on the right to food, rather than on food security. Paragraph 10 states that the guidelines must be achieved by the FAO in close collaboration with the relevant treaty bodies, agencies and programmes of the UN system. The role and full participation of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights will be fundamental. The guidelines on the right to adequate food must be fully anchored in human rights.

It should be underlined that the ‘right to food’ is much stronger than ‘food security.’ The right to food includes all the elements of food security – availability, accessibility and utilisation of food – but also goes beyond the concept of food security. It goes further by emphasising two points:

· Empowerment of the hungry and the poor;
· Accountability of States and other actors.

A rights-based approach, based on the commitments to which a great number of Governments have already accepted through ratification the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, will promote accountability. Accountability is fundamental to ensure that Governments meet the goals that they committed to at the 1996 World Food Summit. Little progress has been made in reducing hunger and meeting the 1996 commitment to halve hunger by 2015 – a rights-based approach focuses attention on the fact that making progress is an obligation and not just a preference or choice.

2. The development of the Guidelines on the Right to Food

The “voluntary guidelines” are not the “Code of Conduct’’ that many States were fighting for – Norway, Switzerland, the Group of 77, as well as Germany – but they will provide a space for reaffirming the importance of human rights in the fight against hunger and malnutrition.

The guidelines will be as important as a Code of Conduct if the content of the guidelines give them real effective force and relevance.

The content of the guidelines should include (following the useful suggestions of Michael Windfuhr of the NGO, FIAN for the content of a Code of Conduct):

1. Repetition of existing legal obligations
· Emphasising General Comment 12

2. Practical guidelines for national implementation
· Framework law
· Legislation
· Implementation strategy
· Benchmarks and indicators
· Monitoring mechanisms
· Remedies and accountability

3. International obligations and responsibilities of other actors
· Transnational obligations of States
· Responsibilities of international organisations
· Responsibilities of private actors

4. Monitoring provisions
· Make use of existing monitoring mechanisms (e.g. the CESCR, etc.)
· The Committee on Food Security should establish its own mechanism for monitoring compliance

3. Practical recommendations from the work of the Special Rapporteur

As Special Rapporteur, I have made a series of recommendations in my reports to the Commission on Human Rights and the General Assembly. These reports can be found at www.righttofood.org or www.unhchr.ch/html/menu2/7/b/mfood.htm. I would also like these recommendations to be considered in order to provide additional stimulus for promoting actions to reduce hunger and increase respect for the right to food around the world. These recommendations include:

1. Concrete steps can be taken immediately to reduce hunger and malnutrition. Immediate measures to reduce hunger and malnutrition, even in States which have limited resources, should include the following:

(a) Nutritional education. This must emphasise the importance of calories, as well as micronutrients, focusing especially on the importance of vitamins, minerals and iodine;
(b) Universal school lunches. Programmes of food distribution in schools and in nurseries. This is one of the most efficient forms of fighting child malnutrition, in rural and urban areas.
(c) Maternal breastfeeding. It is vital that maternal breastfeeding is encouraged by authorities as the best form of challenging malnutrition in babies. This means that the 1981 World Health Organization (WHO) International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes must be enforced.
(d) Provision of family gardens. Almost everywhere in the world a majority of families in extreme rural poverty could be granted access to a few square metres of land. This would help to develop a local food security strategy to improve nutrition at the household level.
2. Questions of access to food and water must also be immediately addressed to ensure that there is no discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity, gender, religion or otherwise. Monitoring structures should also be put in place to gauge the progressive realisation of improvements in access to food and water for people who are suffering from chronic malnourishment.
3. I also recommend that States take measures to develop national legislation to protect the right to food. As outlined in my previous report to the General Assembly, I also recommend that every State develop a national framework law conforming to the obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the right to food, recognized under international human rights and humanitarian law, and in particular paragraph 29 of the CESCR General Comment No. 12. As recommended by the Third Expert Consultation on the Right to Food, the strategy should make an inventory or checklist of issue areas that require national regulation, such as guaranteeing access to productive resources for the food-insecure and the vulnerable, including land tenure and access to water. In addition, a review of existing legislation should be made to assess whether it contradicts the obligations under the right to adequate food or lacks adequate implementation. As FIAN has argued, this should be an overarching framework that articulates the right to food as a national priority and provides a point of departure to begin the harmonization and revision of diverse laws and sectoral policies so that they all comply with obligations under the right to food.
4. All States should recognise the justiciability of the right to food, along with other economic, social and cultural rights. Enforcement mechanisms should be strengthened at the national level, by ensuring that the right to food can be adjudicated by a court of law. Effective administrative and judicial remedies and recourse procedures should be implemented for everyone whose right to food is violated or neglected. International and regional enforcement mechanisms should also be strengthened to improve the implementation of the right to food. Adoption of an Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights deserves full support.
5. Concrete steps must be taken to ensure that national legislation provides a framework that recognizes the State’s obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the right to food of its people, in peace and in war. Setting benchmarks for food security and for water quality and quantity is vital to measure and monitor the progressive implementation of the right to food over time. International human rights law must be complemented by international humanitarian law that protects the right to food in situations of armed conflict. This must include the prohibition of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and forced displacement, as well as respect for the rules on relief and humanitarian assistance, so that relief is not blocked, diverted or delayed. The right to food, along with other economic, social and cultural rights, must be treated as equal in status and implementation to civil and political rights.

6. I strongly recommend that the decisive negotiations on agriculture and other issues currently underway at WTO take food security into particular account and ensure that trade rules do not conflict with international human rights law. International trade obligations must also be reviewed to ensure that they do not conflict with the right to food. The unfairness of the current regime must be revised and developing countries allowed special protection, as it is in those countries that food security remains a daily struggle. The new WTO negotiations must take into account the suggestions of the developing countries and must consider the need to protect the right to food. Economic policy changes must not endanger life through malnutrition, but guarantee at least a basic minimum that respects at the very least the right to food and the right to life. I recommend that the question of drinking water be given adequate respect, as this is a fundamental component of the right to food to reduce the suffering of many millions of people who suffer from diseases carried in water that are easily eradicable.
7. I am convinced that there are profound internal contradictions in the United Nations system. On the one hand, the UN agencies emphasise social justice and human rights. In Vienna, at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, Member States proclaimed the importance of economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to food. UN agencies, including FAO, UNDP, UNICEF, the WFP and many others do excellent work in promoting development. On the other hand, the Bretton Woods Institutions, along with one very powerful Western Government and the World Trade Organisation oppose, in good faith, the right to food preferring the Washington Consensus which emphasises liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, and the compression of States’ domestic budgets. A model which in many cases produces greater inequalities. As all the United Nations organisations, including the Bretton Woods institutions, have the obligation to report to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, I recommend that these contradictions be addressed by States who are Parties to both the human rights treaties and members of the financial institutions. The contradictory behaviour of States has to be corrected.
8. International agencies, including FAO, WFP, IFAD and others, as well as the bilateral development co-operation agencies, should adopt a rights-based approach in their work of implementing the right to food as set out in paragraphs 40 and 41 of General Comment No. 12.
9. I urge States to reconsider the commitments they made at the 1995 World Summit for Social Development, the 1996 World Food Summit and the 2002 Millennium Goals to halve the number of undernourished people no later than 2015. At a time when it is clear that this goal will not be met, it is urgent that States rethink national and international policies to ensure that it is indeed achieved.

Time is not an abstract entity. Time is life. The silent daily massacre of hunger must be stopped.


Jean Ziegler



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