The definition of food security now most commonly used, that of the 1996 World Food Summit, bears considerable resemblance to the definition of the right to food. Yet a right-to-food based approach to food security is distinct from other approaches to reducing hunger and malnutrition and complements food security considerations with dignity, rights acknowledgment, transparency, accountability, and empowerment concerns. It is based on an a priori commitment to the value of human dignity and makes the individual an agent of change in a way that enables him or her to hold governments accountable and to seek redress for violations of his or her rights. A right-to-food approach is not based on vague and replaceable policy goals subject to periodic redefinition, but on existing, comparatively specific and continuously becoming more precise obligations undertaken by governments. Therefore, the right to food cannot only be regarded as a means to achieve food security, but must be seen as a wider, more encompassing, and distinct objective in itself. Realizing the right to food should, furthermore, be part and parcel of rightsbased approaches to development that aim to implement all human rights obligations which States have committed themselves to under human rights law.

Legal frameworks play a crucial role for effective groundwater governance. They flank and support water policy and provide users and the administration with rights and obligations to use, manage, and protect vital resources in order to achieve the overall goal of equitable and sustainable water use. This paper discusses key challenges that have to be addressed in water law to manage and protect groundwater effectively. It will provide an overview of established practice in groundwater legislation and discuss recent trends and developments in light of current challenges. It focuses on permit-based systems of administrative water rights but will to a limited extent also deal with customary, community-based, and informal arrangements. It will show that increasingly domestic groundwater legislation is strengthened and ranked on a par with surface water regimes, ideally by dealing with all water resources in an integrated manner.

More than one-half of the world's population is dependent on it for its basic needs. Accelerated population growth in the latter half of the twentieth century has coincided with improvements in pumping technology and has led to a greater and greater use of, and reliance upon, this resource, especially in the arid and semi-arid regions of the world. In consequence, over the last fifty years, groundwater resources and the social, economic, and environmental systems dependent on them have come under threat from over-abstraction and pollution. 3 International law has only rarely taken account of groundwater. While surface water has been dealt with in numerous international agreements and other instruments, groundwater is either nominally included in the scope of these instruments, primarily if it is ''related'' to surface waters or part of a ''system of surface and groundwater'' (see the United Nations Convention 1 Groundwater can be defined as ''subsurface water occupying the saturated zone'', (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization [hereinafter UNESCO]/World Meteorological Organization [hereinafter WMO], International Glossary of Hydrology, 133 (1992)) or as ''all water which is below the surface in the ground in the saturation zone and in direct contact with the ground or subsoil''

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On 11 December 2008 the UN