The hungry's right to food
Maswood Alam Khan | Monday, 9 June 2008
THE central issues that were focused in the just concluded conference in Rome (June 03-05, 2008) on "World Food Security: the challenges of climate change and bioenergy" were soaring food prices, climate change and bio-fuels. The urgency of the issues resonates with a resolution adopted by the UN Human Rights Council which urges nations of the world to review "any policy or measure which could have a negative impact on the realization of right to food".
"The fundamental right of everyone to adequate food to enjoy freedom from hunger" is a birthright bestowed by God upon every living being including humans---a right, a claim nobody can withdraw, revoke, rescind or rewrite.
If a man dies from hunger due to a policy or a measure taken by a person or a nation, the person or the nation must stand trial for homicide and the punishment for such an offence must not be lesser than what the war criminals in Nuremberg trial were awarded.
In nature, free oxygen is produced by the light-driven splitting of water during oxygenic photosynthesis. Green algae and cyan bacteria in marine environments provide about 70 per cent of the free oxygen produced on earth and the rest is produced by terrestrial plants. If a measure taken by a nation gradually destroys all the green algae, cyan bacteria and the terrestrial plants without a measure taken to replenish the organisms we all will die from air hunger, a process called asphyxia that is used to maim or kill in capital punishment, suicide, torture and warfare. Should not the head of the nation responsible for such cataclysmic deaths of humans stand trial for a pogrom?
Of late, a few nations in the Occident have been tinkering with a lethal tool to snatch food away from mouths of hungry people the world over; they have been producing agro-fuel, more appropriately called biofuel (mainly ethanol and biodiesel), undermining access to food for people on the ground that biofuel will replace fossil fuel (gasoline, diesel etc.) and can contribute to the solution of a range of problems including reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, provide a renewable and therefore sustainable energy source, and increase the agricultural income for rural poor in developing countries.
But, in reality hopes and dreams of such floral achievements have turned out to be nightmares. The cure so prescribed has rather been far worse than the disease itself! Liquid biofuel, mainly extracted from sugarcane and maize and to a lesser extent from wheat, sugar beet, cassava, rapeseed, and palm oil to produce ethanol or biodiesel, has already contributed to the steep increase in food prices without a corresponding increase in income. Large scale plantation of crops meant for biofuel has been causing evictions of vulnerable people, reduction of biodiversity and competition for water.
Most liquid biofuel production, distribution and use leads to as much and sometimes more greenhouse gas emissions than the use of fossil fuel, when both the direct and indirect consequences are taken into account, especially on unavoidable land shifts that will be required by any expansion of such production.
Agrofuel has been one major factor driving the prices of food commodities upwards, because of the competition between food, feed and fuel for scarce arable land. One study estimates that an extra 100 million hectares of land would be required for a worldwide blend of 5.0 per cent of agrofuel by 2015.
Taken as a whole, liquid biofuel meets today around one per cent of the world road transport needs, and yet the share of the total agricultural plant production is huge forcing the world into a "food-versus-fuel" battle or, in other words, a war between a car owner in a developed country and a hungry man in a developing country. A wealthy car owner in America will fill his or her fuel tank of 50 liters with biofuel produced from 200 kilogram of maize, which would have been enough to feed one poor person in Bangladesh for one year.
Brazil is the leader in using parts of its vast sugarcane plantations for the production of ethanol. The second major player is the United States producing ethanol from maize and the European Union (EU) is involved, mainly using rapeseed and to a lesser extent soybean and sunflower oil, for biodiesel production.
Among many physiological needs food security is the prime need for human survival. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) defines food security as a "situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life"
In 1996, heads of states in a FAO-sponsored world food summit promised that they would do their best to eradicate hunger in all countries with a view to reducing the number of undernourished people to half the then level no later than 2015. In 1996, at the time of that summit, the number of undernourished people in developing countries was about 823 million people. Had the commitments made in 1996 been followed up, the number should have been reduced to 583 million hungry people in 2008.
The tragic fact is that the number of undernourished people in the world now is probably over 900 million, in other words, many more than in 1996 when the process to halve the number was started. Another two billion endure malnutrition due to vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Yet, the rich of the world can provide food to feed twice its current population. Therefore, in a world overflowing with riches, hunger is not inevitable; it is a violation of human rights.
Hunger is not caused by scarcity in terms of production capacity, but is due to poverty in terms of income or assets. Starvation and hunger, paradoxically, exists also amidst plenty. The fact that many are hungry in spite of sufficient production capacity means that insufficient measures have been taken to protect and ensure assets or income for food-insecure people. Had resources and income been more evenly distributed, there would have been, even under present circumstances, enough food for all. Food which is now sold as feed for animals, for fish in the aquariums or for pets, would have been bought at competitive prices by people if they had the income to do so.
The Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen says: "What holds up Indian food consumption today is not any operational inability to produce more food, but a far-reaching failure to make the poor of the country able to afford enough food".
The current crisis has been driven by what the World Bank estimates is an 83 per cent rise in overall food prices worldwide over the past three years. As of March 2008, wheat and maize prices were 130 and 30 per cent higher, respectively, than a year earlier. The cost of rice has more than doubled since the end of January 2008.
Right to life is a fundamental right. It includes 'right' to adequate means of livelihood. However, there is no law to prevent hunger. The result is that when a person steals a piece of bread it is a crime, but at the same time omission on the part of the system of governance to prevent starvation is not considered to be a crime. This is the peculiarity of the present system of law. Virtually there is no vicarious liability of the state in matters of preventing hunger.
The 'right to food' should be much more than a slogan only. As propounded by some delegates in the Rome conference, time has come for developing nations like Bangladesh, Indonesia and Ethiopia to frame law to give 'right to food' -- a legal status as a subject that may be tried in a court of law so that in situations such as the current one when the prices of food undergo a sudden increase, the government will not be allowed to remain passive.
Inspiration may be sought from certain existing good practices, for instance the adoption of Famine Codes in India and reliance on those codes by courts, or, in Brazil, the recent national system of food security (SISAN) based on the Law on Food Security in 2006.
Mozambique is also advancing on the 'right to food'. The country's adopted overarching poverty reduction strategy includes rights-based food security as a cross-cutting issue. The latest success is the approval of the revised food security and nutrition strategy in October 2007. This strategy stipulates food security as a matter of right and calls for the implementation of all human rights principles. The strategy calls for administrative and legal recourse mechanisms and suggests developing a 'right to food' law.
The right to food is about freedom from hunger. This can be interpreted in two different ways, associated with different readings of the term "hunger".
In a narrow sense, hunger refers to the pangs of an empty stomach. Correspondingly, the right to food can be understood, roughly speaking, as the right to have two square meals a day throughout the year. In a broader sense, hunger refers to under-nutrition. The right to food (i.e. to be free from under-nutrition) then links with a wide range of entitlements, not only to food itself but also to other requirements of good nutrition such as clean water, health care, and even elementary education.
To eradicate hunger, a byproduct of overall poverty, a second "Green Revolution"---reminiscent of the first "Green Revolution" of 1960s---has to be floated in all the agriculture-based countries through massive investment in agriculture in order to make up for the short-sighted policies of the past.
In China, GDP growth originating in agriculture has been estimated to be 3.5 times more effective in reducing poverty than growth outside agriculture, and for Latin America 2.7 times more. According to the World Bank, cross-country comparisons show that on average, GDP growth originating in agriculture is at least twice as effective in reducing poverty as GDP growth originating outside agriculture.
Poverty, food insecurity, malnutrition, and hunger are inter-related concepts. Poverty is an extremely complex phenomenon, which manifests itself in a dense range of overlapping and interwoven economic, political and social deprivations. These include low income levels, hunger, poor health, insecurity, physical and psychological hardships, social exclusion, degradation and discrimination, and political powerlessness and disarticulation. "Poverty is an insult" said Mahatma Gandhi, "Poverty stinks. It demeans, dehumanizes, and destroys the body and the mind
"The fundamental right of everyone to adequate food to enjoy freedom from hunger" is a birthright bestowed by God upon every living being including humans---a right, a claim nobody can withdraw, revoke, rescind or rewrite.
If a man dies from hunger due to a policy or a measure taken by a person or a nation, the person or the nation must stand trial for homicide and the punishment for such an offence must not be lesser than what the war criminals in Nuremberg trial were awarded.
In nature, free oxygen is produced by the light-driven splitting of water during oxygenic photosynthesis. Green algae and cyan bacteria in marine environments provide about 70 per cent of the free oxygen produced on earth and the rest is produced by terrestrial plants. If a measure taken by a nation gradually destroys all the green algae, cyan bacteria and the terrestrial plants without a measure taken to replenish the organisms we all will die from air hunger, a process called asphyxia that is used to maim or kill in capital punishment, suicide, torture and warfare. Should not the head of the nation responsible for such cataclysmic deaths of humans stand trial for a pogrom?
Of late, a few nations in the Occident have been tinkering with a lethal tool to snatch food away from mouths of hungry people the world over; they have been producing agro-fuel, more appropriately called biofuel (mainly ethanol and biodiesel), undermining access to food for people on the ground that biofuel will replace fossil fuel (gasoline, diesel etc.) and can contribute to the solution of a range of problems including reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, provide a renewable and therefore sustainable energy source, and increase the agricultural income for rural poor in developing countries.
But, in reality hopes and dreams of such floral achievements have turned out to be nightmares. The cure so prescribed has rather been far worse than the disease itself! Liquid biofuel, mainly extracted from sugarcane and maize and to a lesser extent from wheat, sugar beet, cassava, rapeseed, and palm oil to produce ethanol or biodiesel, has already contributed to the steep increase in food prices without a corresponding increase in income. Large scale plantation of crops meant for biofuel has been causing evictions of vulnerable people, reduction of biodiversity and competition for water.
Most liquid biofuel production, distribution and use leads to as much and sometimes more greenhouse gas emissions than the use of fossil fuel, when both the direct and indirect consequences are taken into account, especially on unavoidable land shifts that will be required by any expansion of such production.
Agrofuel has been one major factor driving the prices of food commodities upwards, because of the competition between food, feed and fuel for scarce arable land. One study estimates that an extra 100 million hectares of land would be required for a worldwide blend of 5.0 per cent of agrofuel by 2015.
Taken as a whole, liquid biofuel meets today around one per cent of the world road transport needs, and yet the share of the total agricultural plant production is huge forcing the world into a "food-versus-fuel" battle or, in other words, a war between a car owner in a developed country and a hungry man in a developing country. A wealthy car owner in America will fill his or her fuel tank of 50 liters with biofuel produced from 200 kilogram of maize, which would have been enough to feed one poor person in Bangladesh for one year.
Brazil is the leader in using parts of its vast sugarcane plantations for the production of ethanol. The second major player is the United States producing ethanol from maize and the European Union (EU) is involved, mainly using rapeseed and to a lesser extent soybean and sunflower oil, for biodiesel production.
Among many physiological needs food security is the prime need for human survival. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) defines food security as a "situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life"
In 1996, heads of states in a FAO-sponsored world food summit promised that they would do their best to eradicate hunger in all countries with a view to reducing the number of undernourished people to half the then level no later than 2015. In 1996, at the time of that summit, the number of undernourished people in developing countries was about 823 million people. Had the commitments made in 1996 been followed up, the number should have been reduced to 583 million hungry people in 2008.
The tragic fact is that the number of undernourished people in the world now is probably over 900 million, in other words, many more than in 1996 when the process to halve the number was started. Another two billion endure malnutrition due to vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Yet, the rich of the world can provide food to feed twice its current population. Therefore, in a world overflowing with riches, hunger is not inevitable; it is a violation of human rights.
Hunger is not caused by scarcity in terms of production capacity, but is due to poverty in terms of income or assets. Starvation and hunger, paradoxically, exists also amidst plenty. The fact that many are hungry in spite of sufficient production capacity means that insufficient measures have been taken to protect and ensure assets or income for food-insecure people. Had resources and income been more evenly distributed, there would have been, even under present circumstances, enough food for all. Food which is now sold as feed for animals, for fish in the aquariums or for pets, would have been bought at competitive prices by people if they had the income to do so.
The Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen says: "What holds up Indian food consumption today is not any operational inability to produce more food, but a far-reaching failure to make the poor of the country able to afford enough food".
The current crisis has been driven by what the World Bank estimates is an 83 per cent rise in overall food prices worldwide over the past three years. As of March 2008, wheat and maize prices were 130 and 30 per cent higher, respectively, than a year earlier. The cost of rice has more than doubled since the end of January 2008.
Right to life is a fundamental right. It includes 'right' to adequate means of livelihood. However, there is no law to prevent hunger. The result is that when a person steals a piece of bread it is a crime, but at the same time omission on the part of the system of governance to prevent starvation is not considered to be a crime. This is the peculiarity of the present system of law. Virtually there is no vicarious liability of the state in matters of preventing hunger.
The 'right to food' should be much more than a slogan only. As propounded by some delegates in the Rome conference, time has come for developing nations like Bangladesh, Indonesia and Ethiopia to frame law to give 'right to food' -- a legal status as a subject that may be tried in a court of law so that in situations such as the current one when the prices of food undergo a sudden increase, the government will not be allowed to remain passive.
Inspiration may be sought from certain existing good practices, for instance the adoption of Famine Codes in India and reliance on those codes by courts, or, in Brazil, the recent national system of food security (SISAN) based on the Law on Food Security in 2006.
Mozambique is also advancing on the 'right to food'. The country's adopted overarching poverty reduction strategy includes rights-based food security as a cross-cutting issue. The latest success is the approval of the revised food security and nutrition strategy in October 2007. This strategy stipulates food security as a matter of right and calls for the implementation of all human rights principles. The strategy calls for administrative and legal recourse mechanisms and suggests developing a 'right to food' law.
The right to food is about freedom from hunger. This can be interpreted in two different ways, associated with different readings of the term "hunger".
In a narrow sense, hunger refers to the pangs of an empty stomach. Correspondingly, the right to food can be understood, roughly speaking, as the right to have two square meals a day throughout the year. In a broader sense, hunger refers to under-nutrition. The right to food (i.e. to be free from under-nutrition) then links with a wide range of entitlements, not only to food itself but also to other requirements of good nutrition such as clean water, health care, and even elementary education.
To eradicate hunger, a byproduct of overall poverty, a second "Green Revolution"---reminiscent of the first "Green Revolution" of 1960s---has to be floated in all the agriculture-based countries through massive investment in agriculture in order to make up for the short-sighted policies of the past.
In China, GDP growth originating in agriculture has been estimated to be 3.5 times more effective in reducing poverty than growth outside agriculture, and for Latin America 2.7 times more. According to the World Bank, cross-country comparisons show that on average, GDP growth originating in agriculture is at least twice as effective in reducing poverty as GDP growth originating outside agriculture.
Poverty, food insecurity, malnutrition, and hunger are inter-related concepts. Poverty is an extremely complex phenomenon, which manifests itself in a dense range of overlapping and interwoven economic, political and social deprivations. These include low income levels, hunger, poor health, insecurity, physical and psychological hardships, social exclusion, degradation and discrimination, and political powerlessness and disarticulation. "Poverty is an insult" said Mahatma Gandhi, "Poverty stinks. It demeans, dehumanizes, and destroys the body and the mind