A Common Sense Approach to the Right to Food

Abstract

Despite the growing activism and debate around the right to food in the past decade, there has been little exploration of what the right means in everyday life and in the routine encounters between states and citizens. This paper draws together original qualitative research in nine African, Asian and Latin American countries on how people talk about the right to food. It does so on the assumption that accountability for hunger depends on people being aware of that right. The paper explores what people at risk of hunger have to say about what the right to food means in their location; its source and origins; and responsibilities for upholding it. It concludes that while ideas of the right to food do not generally use international human rights language, an understanding of innate or natural rights to food is 'common sense': shared across contexts and groups, and part of how people negotiate their right to food in everyday life. Among other findings, the paper concludes that in a period of rapid economic and social development, the right to food of older people looks particularly fragile, and merits special attention.

Addressing Malnutrition: The Importance of Political Economy Analysis of Power

“…95 There is academic work describing what this framework might look like for nutrition, 96 and how it might be considered of use to citizens and policy-makers. 97 Successive United Nations Rapporteurs on food and nutrition have also called for placing power as a central consideration of food systems using human rights as a mechanism, 98 which thus provides a focus not only on better outcomes but also on more equitable processes in the drive for better population nutrition.…”

Food Riots, Food Rights and the Politics of Provisions

“…The costs of such adjustments are real and enduring, and may be adverse for long-term wellbeing. For instance, as Sneyd explains in Chapter 5 and we also learned through our work on the Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility project (Hossain et al 2015;, some of these adjustments indicate moves towards reliance on increasingly industrialized, low-nutrition foods -suggesting a potential hazard, now or soon.…”

“…High and rising food prices worsened the imbalance between work and earnings among the already low-waged. Rising fuel prices also increased the costs of farming and provided a source of particular grievance to people on low incomes who had to travel for their livelihoods (Hossain, King and Kelbert 2013;Hossain et al 2015). Volatility and low wages are built into the corporate food regime, evidence of the 'freedom' of global markets at work (McMichael 2009a).…”

“…It is also important to clarify that when we define food riots as a process of claiming the right to food we are speaking of that right in a broad or 'common' sense, rather than as specifically in relation to that right as established under international law (Hossain, te Lintelo, and Wanjiku Kelbert 2015). It is true that the riots and protests illustrated in this volume called for a specific contemporary version of the right to food: the right to be protected against undue volatilities in the price of food, in a market-based food system.…”