November blog

Claudio Schuftan

Geneva. Here I am (or was, recently) in beautiful Geneva, with its serene lake shown above, home to the World Health Organization. Yes, I was working, and that's what the first part of this column is about. Then I ask you a whole lot of questions.

On the human right to nutrition
and people-driven justice and equity


Geneva. Flavio Valente of FIAN and Huguette Akplogan-Dossa from Benin, with others, addressed the launch of 2012 Right to Food and Nutrition Watch

Representing the People's Health Movement, at the end of September, I attended a meeting in Geneva called by the global Food Information Action Network (FIAN). It was held at the relaxing John Knox Centre. The meeting brought together 23 social movements and civil society organisations working on right to nutrition issues from all over the world. The purpose was to formalise a network among us that will coordinate and potentiate our actions, from local to global, that will advocate for the respect, protection and fulfilment of this right. Four documents on the principles and organisation of the network were worked on during the meeting. These are a charter, a network call for action, criteria for membership, and working procedures. They will be posted on a new website in late November. Please, will all readers linked with organisations engaged in right to nutrition work, join the network. You can get advance copies of the documents from Martin Wolpold-Bosien.

Also in Geneva, a day after the meeting was over, three of the organisations present launched the 2012 Right to Food and Nutrition Watch at a well attended media conference. It is entitled 'Who decides about global food and nutrition?: Strategies to regain control'. Please download it here. Many media picked up on the news. Box 1 is an extract from a report in The Guardian.

Up to the end of this year, over 20 formal launches of the Watch are planned in cities the world over. These Watches have come to complement the now older People's Health Movement Global Health Watch. People around the world are indeed paying attention to what civil society coalitions --as different from multilateral agencies-- have to say about the 'bruised' state of the world's nutrition and health, and the participatory and more democratic measures that are now needed.

Box 1

The Guardian on the right to food and nutrition

An extract from The Guardian report on 26 September. Human rights are the most powerful tool to ensure efforts against hunger and malnutrition tackle structural causes and are not reduced to short-term strategies, civil society groups said in a report published on Tuesday. Who Decides About Global Food and Nutrition? – Strategies to Regain Control argues that it is impossible to combat the causes of hunger while keeping existing power relations untouched.

'Food and power are related. It is almost impossible to find one person among the powerful in society and politics worldwide who does not have enough to eat," said Huguette Akplogan-Dossa, regional co-ordinator of the African Network on the Right to Food. 'The tendency is for exclusion from economic and political decision-making to go hand in hand with incidences of hunger and malnutrition.'

The report expresses particular concern about the increasing influence and control of agribusinesses and financial companies over food and nutrition…

The report points to a faultline in how to deal with food security and with access to safe and nutritious food. There is the 'mainstream approach' favoured by governments and international organisations, such as AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, and backed by the Gates Foundation, which focuses on technocratic approaches…

However, the civil society groups behind the fifth annual report on the right to food and nutrition put the emphasis on a rights-based approach. They say an agricultural system that features large US and EU farm subsidies, along with a concentration of power among a few grain giants, such as ADM, Cargill and Bunge (the main corporations benefiting from US food aid), contribute to food insecurity in poor countries.

'Allowing decision-making to be in the hands of a powerful, but reduced group has led to a centralised model of food supply which in many cases results in famines, political abuse or infringement on the state's basic obligations when it comes to human rights: to respect, protect and fulfil them,' the report says.

The report sees negative corporate influences at work in the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) initiative, involving a $2.9 billion plan to promote good nutritional practices with $6.2 billion going to preventing and treating malnutrition with special foods. Backed by the UN, the scheme has the support of GAIN, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. GAIN's partners include food giants such as PepsiCo, Kraft and Danone.

The UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier de Schutter, while welcoming progress on SUN, has pointed out how the private sector tries to use technical solutions for what are fundamentally social problems. De Schutter has called on countries committed to scaling up nutrition to begin by regulating the marketing of commercial infant formula and other breastmilk substitutes. He has also noted the tension between a strategy that promotes processed foods, enriched with nutrients to the point that diets become 'medicalised', and one that promotes local and regional food systems, as well as a shift towards less heavily processed and more nutritious food.

A chapter in the report, written by Marcos Arana Cedeño and Xaviera Cabada, cites the vigorous promotion of soft drinks on school premises in Mexico by companies – endorsed by many school authorities which provide space for sales and advertising in exchange for school supplies or financial benefits. They note the serious problems in Mexico's regions with large indigenous populations, where obesity rates are growing faster within the poorest quintile. 'It is precisely in these indigenous regions where the most aggressive and unregulated marketing practices of sweetened soft drinks take place,' the authors write. These practices include a 35% price cut, promotion in Spanish and indigenous languages, and numerous sales outlets within and around schools.

Civil society groups are making themselves heard on the issues surrounding food security and hunger. The UN Committee on World Food Security now endorses voluntary guidelines on the responsible governance of tenure of land, fisheries and forests in the context of national food security.

The guidelines promote secure tenure rights and equitable access to land, fisheries and forests as a means of eradicating hunger and poverty, supporting sustainable development and enhancing the environment. They contain provisions to protect local communities, indigenous peoples and vulnerable groups from land speculation and land concentration. 'With the reform of the Committee on World Food Security, an innovative way of inclusive governance has been established. It has been a breakthrough for those civil society groups that traditionally have been excluded from decision-making processes on all levels,' said Flavio Valente, secretary general of advocacy group FIAN International.


Associated with the two events I am bringing to your attention is the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's Committee on World Food Security, mentioned in Box 1. Its work in progress includes a global strategic framework for food security and nutrition being negotiated with full, formal representation of civil society, FAO and member states. In no other UN agency does civil society have such an active and formal involvement in the preparation of policy.

The first draft, of a framework to be adapted as time goes by, is almost finished. Participating civil society organisations have prepared a draft note that identifies the most important achievements for civil society organisations in the first version of the framework. The note also identifies challenges not included in the framework's first version due to the lack of international consensus which are nevertheless central to civil society participants. So far, very good.

Everything you need to know, but may not have asked, about food and nutrition security and food sovereignty

Following the three news items above, let me share with you some thoughts about food security. Some of you may think you know all about food security, but do you really? To elucidate this, let me try a novel approach. Here below is a mix of facts and (perhaps sometime rhetorical) questions you may not actually have asked yourself. I thus classify the rest of this column as an eye opener cum informal quiz, about the myriad connections food security has to many 'macro' considerations. If some of the questions I ask leave you without a clear answer, use the response facility under the column. I could then pool some responses and post them.

First thought. Food security cannot be separated from food sovereignty, from the right to nutrition, and from nutrition itself.

The concept of food security should actually be replaced by that of food sovereignty which includes food security, together with the social determinants of population nutrition status plus other factors (1, 2). The concept of food sovereignty has come to displace the concept of food security. Why? Because it is more people-centred, as it refers to the right of people to define their own food, agriculture, livestock and fisheries systems --in contrast to having food treated as a commodity often subject to international market forces.

The right to nutrition (3) and women's rights are central elements to food sovereignty; as you know, both are legally binding by international human rights law. Key here is the assertion 'legally binding' for governments/nation states. Because of this, we at the People's Health Movement have, from early on, been critical of the report on Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Food, issued by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in 2008. Voluntary guidelines do not work. You are all aware of the situation with the marketing of breastmilk substitutes. As another example, the European Union heavily subsidises sugar, and this is responsible for violating the subsistence rights of sugar farmers in impoverished countries – and no action is in sight of being taken (not even voluntary). The question then is: Why is it that politicians, high level decision makers – and businesses with related interests – feel they can do abroad what they must not do at home?

A state violates the right to nutrition not only when it destroys people's access to food in a foreign country, but also when it avoids preventing others, on whom it has influence, from doing so. Take, for instance, the aggressive overseas activity of transnational agro-businesses and the land grabbing going on in poor countries by corporations operating from their base countries in the global North.

As a corollary of what I said above, women's empowerment is crucial for food sovereignty. Food security thus needs to be engendered since women are crucial food producers, but often have no land ownership rights, no access to resources and no opportunities for receiving agricultural extension training or to apply for loans, and have poor access to health for them and their children.

Let me quickly check your knowledge about some relevant questions in the context of food security. What do you think is meant in the literature by:

And what about these further questions? Do you think they are important?

Why is public and private national investment in the food sector of agriculture (as opposed to investing in cash crops) in decline? Do we see this changing in the last ten years and even today?

Are most big investments in agriculture environmentally sustainable? Do we need safeguards against such investments especially those associated with land grabbing? Are you familiar with what 'land grabbing' is?

Small farmers, agricultural workers, pastoralists and fisherfolks, need to be the focus of food security policies since they have un-postponable special and additional needs. Why are these needs not being addressed?, we have to ask. These groups are particularly affected by the price volatility of the agricultural inputs and the transport they need. They are subjected to insecure land tenure and restricted access to land and fishing grounds, as well as to other related production resources. They are discriminated against and are not properly linked to markets. They have no access to alternative employment and are pushed to marginal lands by land grabbing and then migrate to the cities where they change their patterns of food consumption. To diets made up of what? Moreover, their women abandon breastfeeding. Why?

More and more, big farming is into cash crops, into genetically modified crops (with a loss of genetic diversity); into biofuels, into agrochemicals and into mono-cropping. What is bad about this? What has been called 'vertical integration' in agriculture? What do you know about Monsanto, Dupont, and other agricultural transnational corporations?

How seriously do you think the following problems affect food security?

If serious, what are we doing about these? What should we? Moreover...

Given all these implications, civil society organisations cannot but increase the level of empowerment and mobilisation of its members; they cannot but increase the pressure on governments and on transnational corporations to stop violations of the right to nutrition and, at the same time, hold them accountable, by being de-facto watchdogs.

As such...

If you agree with much of what is said and what is implied through the key questions above, let me share with you some of the options I see will be needed to reach food security. As elsewhere, in the food security debate, it is not only about having good policies, but about their actual implementation. When weighing policy options and the actions they prompt, there are vital differences between 'may', 'can', 'should', and 'will'.

I see the urgency to pursue the switch from food security to food sovereignty as part of what we actually pursue. Also, those who produce, distribute and need food must become key participants in policy making. It is the changes that are needed for this that ultimately matter the most. So as well-meaning and well-informed professionals, we should:

All this, among other, implies actively supporting agrarian reform processes. (To you, what does this mean and involve?)

Furthermore, we should do what we can to achieve the following (and in reading, check that you are sure what terms like 'dumping' and 'enabling environments' and 'safety nets' really mean):

All these actions and needs require human rights learning and social mobilisation so that claims can be effectively made and placed in front of relevant duty bearers to achieve the right to nutrition.

Finally, the unavoidable question:

What do we do about international food aid? In acute cases, we need to increase the resilience of its recipients to help them in the transition from food aid, to food self-sufficiency, to the production of food surpluses for the market. What to do in chronic food aid cases is a tough question. Local contexts should dictate what needs to be done, always provided that the recipients are actively involved in the decision-making process.

Notes

  1. It was La Via Campesina that started advocating for food sovereignty in the mid-1990s, through which communities have the right to define their own food and agriculture policy. Food sovereignty gives back to land its social function as a producer of foods that sustain life. It avoids the degradation of the soil, puts food production and local processing at the centre, puts an end to mono-cultures and provides a fair source of occupation and employment. It gives human beings another way to relate to nature, based on an agro-ecological approach to agricultural production.
  2. Food insecurity is only one of the underlying causes of malnutrition with health, sanitation and care being inseparable from it; the three of them are necessary but not sufficient.
  3. As I point out in an earlier column, I choose to speak of the 'right to nutrition', not 'the right to food and adequate nutrition', which is like saying 'apples and fruits'. The right to nutrition includes the right to food, the right to health andsanitation, and the care of mothers and children.

cschuftan@phmovement.org
www.phmovement.org
www.humaninfo.org/aviva

Acknowledgement and request

Conflicting or competing interests: I am a member of the Council of the People's Health Movement. I do not regard this as a competing interest. This commentary has been reviewed by Geoffrey Cannon.

Readers may make use of the material in this commentary if acknowledgement is given to the Association, and WN is cited. Please cite as: Schuftan C. On the human right to nutrition and people-driven justice and equity [Column]. Website of the World Public Health Nutrition Association, November 2012. Obtainable at www.wphna.org

All contributions to this website are the responsibility of their authors. They should not be taken to be the view or policy of the World Public Health Nutrition Association (the Association) or of any of its affiliated or associated bodies, unless this is explicitly stated.

2012 November blog: Claudio Schuftan

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