Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Professor Jean Ziegler (2006), defined the right to
food as:
the right to have regular, permanent and unrestricted access, either directly or by
means of inancial purhases, to quantitatively and qualitatively adequate and
suicient food corresponding to the cultural traditions of the people to whih the
consumer belongs, and whih ensures a physical and mental, individual and col-
lective, fulfilling and dignified life free of fear.
In the human rights jargon, when identifying the core content of the right to
food we speak about availability and accessibility. Food needs to be
available
in 'a
quantity and quality sufficient to satisfy the dietary needs of individuals, free from
adverse substances, and
acceptable
within a given culture'; and it needs to be
ac-
cessible
'in ways that are sustainable' (Commitee on Economic, Social and Cultur-
al Rights, 1999, para 8). As the UN Special Rapporteur concludes 'the right to food
is, above all, the right to be able to feed oneself in dignity' (Ziegler, 2008, para 18).
This encompasses the right to have access to resources and to the means to ensure
and produce one's own subsistence, including land, small-scale irrigation and seeds,
credit, tehnology and local and regional markets, a suicient income and access to
social security and social assistance. Access to safe drinking water is also an element
of the right to food.
Most governments have ratiied the international treaties whih proclaim the
right to food, including not only the International Covenant on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights, but also the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Consequently,
these governments have accepted their obligations to
respect, protect
and
fulfil
the
right to food. The UN Special Rapporteur has explained what these obligations entail
in many of his reports (for example, Ziegler, 2006, paras 22-4; Ziegler
et al
., 2011).
he
obligation to respect
is often called a negative obligation. In other words,
governments should abstain from doing something. In the context of the right to
food, it means governments should not arbitrarily take away people's right to food.
For example, a government should not arbitrarily evict someone from his or her land
especially if that land represents the main source of food production.
he
obligation to protect
has increasingly gained significance in today's glob-
alized world. It means that governments have to enact and enforce laws aimed at
preventing third parties - be they individuals, organizations or corporations - from
violating the right to food. A series of related 'due process' issues arise here also,
