The Human Rights Council Advisory Committee
Fifth session, Geneva, 2 to 6 August 2010
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The Advisory Committee (AC), composed of 18 experts, serves as think-thank for the Human Rights Council (HRC) providing research-based advice and studies on thematic issues requested by the HRC. The main themes reviewed at this session were discrimination against people with leprosy, best practices regarding missing persons, discrimination in the context of the Right to Food and a draft report of human rights education. The right to peace is among the other themes to be studied. The session was attended by few observers.
This note will concern only the Right to Food.
Although various aspects of the Right to Food have been considered at the HRC in the past and reported on, the issue is likely to remain on the agenda for a long time, as discrimination in this context constitutes one of the most serious of injustices.
At every session on the Right to Food during the past few years, Professor Jean Ziegler has been making similar statements:
“Figures were getting worse, year in and year out. Every five seconds, a child under the age of 10 died from hunger, and more than one billion people were permanently, seriously undernourished, …although the world could feed more than 12 billion people. A child dying of hunger was a child who was murdered.”
Mind-blowing figures, but figures the world has got used to. As Stalin is quoted to have said, “One man killed is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.”
Professor Ziegler also suggested that climate change should be factored into the study on food. Drought and wildfires in Russia coupled with floods in Pakistan, may not officially be attributed to climate change, but they could be the beginning.
The Right to Food
The Preliminary study of the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee on discrimination in the context of the Right to Food, which had already been presented to the HRC, was now in the process of integrating contributions and comments made by stakeholders, e.g., States, international agencies, NGOs, the private sector etc., in order to prepare a final report. There were only a few comments. Those by Canada were referred to most often by the experts.
In addition to this study, the Advisory Committee has been asked to continue its work on discrimination regarding food and to undertake a preliminary study on ways and means to further advance the rights of peasants, including women, and those living from fishing, hunting and herding.
A very brief overview of the preliminary report follows:
I. The Introduction presents the international legal framework concerning the Right to Food and non-discrimination. States are bound to respect, protect and fulfil the Right to Food.
Three parts follow:
II. Discrimination
Regional inequalities persist and the marginalization of the most vulnerable groups has increased: there has been little or no improvement in the situation of the poorest regions where hunger has increased, especially in the Asia-Pacific and sub-Saharan Africa regions. Despite the best MDG, efforts the number of underfed people worldwide has now risen to reach one billion. See new website http://www.wfp.org/produced by the World Food Programme.
While higher market prices have been a major reason for the increase in underfed people, they have not led to increased production in the developing world as small farmers cannot benefit from them under the present system.
The role of agricultural trade. Discrimination in the context of the Right to Food also results from subsidies paid to farmers in the rich countries: the current international trade regime favours them. The developed countries’ highly subsidized production finds its way to poor countries, especially in Africa, thus discouraging local production unable to compete with imported goods and distorting the general pattern of production. Dumping practices by some transnational corporations with a high degree of integration are also a serious challenge.
Discrimination against peasants. Hunger is predominantly a rural problem affecting mainly those farmers who are small landowners and landless workers. Farmers need seeds to replant, sell or exchange but they have been losing control over the seeds of their own crops as corporations take over the market, Monsanto and others.
Single crop production introduced in colonial times favours the interests of large scale farmers and transnational corporations to the detriment of the small cultivators. Another major concern in recent years is the phenomenon of “local land grab” whereby, motivated by bio-fuel production and the food shortage, governments or companies from richer countries buy or lease productive land in poorer countries. A well-known case is Daewoo which has leased one-third of Madagascar’s arable land. In some countries farmers are driven out of their land by their own governments in their drive towards industrialization.
Discrimination against those living from traditional fishing, hunting and herding. Their way of life is often threatened and they make up about 10 % of the hungry. Fishfarming as opposed to fishing tends to become industrialized, privatized and export oriented. Hunters and gatherers like some indigenous tribes are barred access to their grounds which are turned into natural parks, tourist sites, etc. whilst herding and pastoral grounds are being taken over by farmers.
The Right to Food and the urban poor. With the increase in urban population worldwide, the number of urban undernourished poor continues to rise. The situation can get critical in periods of shortages and high price volatility unless special measures are taken.
Discrimination against women. Globally, women cultivate about 50% of all food grown but represent 70% of the world’s hungry. They are disproportionately affected by malnutrition and food insecurity and are among the world’s poorest as access to land, property and markets is impeded by gender discrimination in the form of inheritance laws, marital status, tradition etc
Discrimination against children exists in situations where their families are dominated by stronger groups: almost 9 million children die under the age of 5 every year, about a third from malnutrition. It is in rural areas that child labour is the most common; starting at a young age children are denied the hope of education.
Discrimination against refugees. For refugees in camps discrimination is mainly caused by difficulties in finding funds to maintain adequate nutrition standards.
“Hunger refugees” fleeing hunger mostly from sub-Saharan Africa and attempting to reach Europe are usually rejected. They are not migrants and there should be a special status to protect them as they are fleeing for survival.
Indigenous peoples tend to suffer from malnutrition when their traditional ways of life are interrupted and their access to land for agriculture is lost.
Minorities, generally speaking, are always the last to be served.
III. Anti-discriminatory policies and strategies
Land and agrarian reform when transformative and redistributive have shown good results in realizing the Right to Food in many countries where land has been distributed to the landless and poor peasants and security of tenure established.
Promotion of different forms of cooperation and association; vertical and horizontal networks between producers and consumers.
“To address the ever increasing inequalities caused by the current world trading system, civil society organizations are promoting new forms of cooperation and association, vertical and horizontal networks between producers and consumers. The most important movement in this field is the movement for food sovereignty,” reads the document.”
The very interesting concept of food sovereignty was created by La Via Campesina in 1996, in response to trade liberalization in agriculture. Food sovereignty underlines the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food through ecological and sustainable methods. “It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of the food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations…” It empowers the peasants, fishermen, hunters and herders who, according to a recent study, are in many parts of the world the first victims of the violations of the Right to Food.
In 2008, La Via Campesina adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants supported by some 500 people from 80 countries working on the land or fishing. It is a noteworthy example of an anti-discriminatory strategy which could protect the Right to Food.
Legal and social protection of rural women and children. Obviously much needs doing to eliminate discrimination against peasant women, not only changes in institutions, laws and regulations but also in traditional cultural practices and health care. Undernourished women give birth to underweight children. About 178 million children around the world suffer from stunted growth. About 20 million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition, a condition characterized by extreme stunting and wasting which recently has been cured rapidly without hospitalization by Plumpy’nut , a peanut-based paste, but it has become available to only a fraction of the sick children whilst intellectual property rights are being sorted out.
Legal and social protection of other groups. Children in poor families need special care. Longer periods of breast feeding are being recommended; school lunch programs have been a success.
Indigenous peoples have suffered a long time from the loss of their sources of food, land and hunting grounds, but they are now being protected by UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which recognizes their rights over land and resources.
IV. Good Practices will follow the Experts’ Discussion.
The Experts’ Discussion
Expert Ziegler, Chairman of the drafting group of five, presented the report. The study, he said, revealed 2 key issues:
One was the grabbing of land especially in Africa where millions of farmers were robbed of their means of livelihood, a clear violation of their human rights which should be addressed by a convention to protect farmers and peasants. A recent example was the purchase of a transnational company which had acquired 28,000 hectares in Sierra Leone to be transformed into ethanol thus chasing 9,000 peasant families to swell the city slums. It was outrageous that these grabs were being supported and even financed by the World Bank.
The second issue was that peasant rights could contravene international obligations under the World Trade Organization (WTO). This is what Mr. Ziegler calls schizophrenia within the UN system whereby the developed countries defended human rights at the HRC and took decisions at the WTO which denied these rights as production and export subsidies in their countries (349 billion last year for the developed OECD countries) led to dumping in Africa and to the destruction of their economies.
Expert Bengoa spoke mostly about Canada’s written comments which were critical of the preliminary report. He was surprised that food sovereignty should be considered to be ideological and at the aggressive tone of the note.
Canada’s view was that the mandate had been distorted to focus on a range of ideological arguments related to global inequalities and trading systems, macroeconomic systems and policies and environmental concerns. “Hunger refugees” were outside the scope of the study. “Food sovereignty” was an ambiguous notion and questionable when it comes to ensuring food security unlike specialization of agricultural production and open trading systems which provide affordable prices for all. Canada does not approve of the Declaration of Peasants’ Rights adopted by Via Campesina being annexed to the preliminary study, objecting more specifically to the section on the right to biodiversity i.e. the right to reject patents and intellectual property rights on resources and knowledge owned by the local community.
The European Union took the floor to support Canada’s views that the report needed to be revised and also objected to the concept of “hunger refugees”.
North-South XXI which was the only NGO to take the floor suggested that more effort be placed on considering the effect of climate change as the most vulnerable were the most at risk and its consequences were already felt in sub-Saharan Africa.
Expert Chung found that the “hunger refugees” concept was important and was not to be confused with migrants who were normally not threatened by starvation. Another expert, Expert Brockmann also supported the authors as regards the notion of food sovereignty which implicates the structures of the international economic systems and financial channels: these obstacles to the Right to Food require further study.
Regarding current economic and trading systems, Expert Decaux remarked that farmers from the North and the South need not be pitted against each other as there were alternative ways to support farmers of the rich countries i.e. by direct payment, without destroying African agriculture. But the full realization of the Right to Food in any country also depends on its own economic and social system.
Expert Chen suggested the introduction of the new concept: the right to safe and healthy food. Just the quantity of food was not enough. This issue was not part of AC’s mandate but it would make an interesting study as there are serious health concerns which include the presence of pesticide residues, heavy metals, hormones and antibiotics and food additives in the food chain as well as risks related to large-scale livestock and fish farming. Also, the availability of too much of the wrong food is leading to obesity and heart disease.
Expert Ziegler described the terrifying phenomenon of “hunger refugees” whereby thousands of men, women and children attempt to reach the shores of Europe in leaky boats paying all their savings to profiteering intermediaries. There should be a new norm to cover these refugees and ensure “non refoulement”. Thousands of bodies lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean; some have been washed up on the sandy tourist beaches of Spain’s Costa del Sol.
Other suggestions of interest for inclusion in the report were the situation of the poorer people in the rich countries, especially the elderly and disabled, and land grabbing from indigenous peoples.
Ms. Purificacion V. Quisumbing, Advisory Committee Chairperson, said she was very impressed with the way the Drafting Group had proceeded. The Right to Food went to the very essence of the right to life. This study would be one of the more important possibilities for the Committee to contribute to the advancement of human rights.
The discussions reflected two different ways to feed the world: specialization and large scale agriculture accompanied by free trade in agricultural products and going hand in hand with transnational corporations and the development of biotechnologies such as changing the genetic code of living organisms. The patenting of these modifications leads to the concentration of ownership of resources and undermines local farming for which the saving of seeds is of vital importance.
This method has had a high environmental cost and has been unable to ensure food for all. A human rights approach should dominate all other considerations. As civil society is well aware, small scale farming, if protected and aided in various ways, is more adapted to the sustaining of natural resources, and more capable of producing nutritious food and improving rural livelihoods.
The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) in its (deliberately?) little publicized Report of 2008, which addresses how to make better use of knowledge and technology to reduce hunger and poverty and attain equitable and sustainable development, joins up with the human rights approach in its conclusion. The report was sponsored by the UN and the World Bank and involved 5 UN Agencies, the FAO (Food and Agriculture), UNDP (Development Programme), UNEP (Environment Programme), UNESCO and WHO. It represents a three-year effort by 400 experts from around the world working under the auspices of 30 governments and 30 civil society representatives. Approved by 58 States; not fully approved by 3: Australia, Canada and the US.
IV. Good Practices
Many peasant movements in addition to La Via Campesina have been formed to fight global hunger: cooperatives, associations, trade unions and cooperatives of women producers/consumers.
There are also a number of organizations and international networks attempting to limit the use of chemical pesticides. Efforts are also being made to control the use of genetically modified seeds.
There are national programmes to educate women on nutrition and cooking methods. School lunch programmes are run not only in the poorer countries but also in the US where the US Dept of Agriculture feeds 30.5 million children.
Microfinance for women has developed in Africa for food production.
Three letters in a footnote—DDS—acted on me like the madeleine on Proust… The letters took me back to 1995 when we attended the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen for SDI and met the charming and generous Subud member from India, Gurdip Aurora, a professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore and one of the founders of the DDS, the Deccan Development Society, an NGO active among the poor, especially the Dalits, of the semi-arid drought-prone plateau of the Deccan in Andhra Pradesh.
Gurdip’s description of a pilot project in the village of Pastapur which combined agriculture, schooling and the empowerment of women sounded so attractive that at the next opportunity, I visited it.
The large site was well-laid out with a big shady welcoming tree, and further along were several small temple-shaped classrooms built from the soil’s red laterite with little boys in them arranging trays of seeds, and in the fields and elsewhere women in colourful saris were busy, one of them carrying a big video camera. But the most striking part was the land cultivated by using permaculture techniques which looked like a bit of paradise, with a rich mixture of cereals and vegetables, fruit trees and flowers watered by tiny gurgling streams running in all directions. A brilliant example of how to grow food without chemicals.
Not far from there, in early 1998, almost every day the local paper was reporting that desperate debt-burdened cotton farmers were committing suicide. These suicides—usually by swallowing pesticides—were to increase markedly in the main cotton growing states of Andhra Pradesh and Maharastra after the introduction of the genetically modified Monsanto Bt cotton. The Indian peasant also suffered from a drop in cotton prices resulting from trade liberalization and subsidized US cotton exports.
Lawrence Fryer and Raphael Bate were also visiting Pastapur about the same time and SDG was funding a biogas plant and buffaloes plus a buffalo shed.
When I asked Gurdip how we in France with limited means (coming only from members) could support the project, he suggested we participate in the building of a shelter for women on the piece of land next to the project donated by his family trust. Many young, and sometimes very young, Dalit women who had fled from their homes where they were exploited and battered by husbands and mothers-in-law needed a safe haven. That sounded just the right type of women to women project for the SD French bureau composed only of women at the time.
A year or two later I was able to admire the almost finished big strong shelter, photograph it and meet the girls etc. It all worked out so smoothly.
The DDS has many programmes for women and children including radio broadcasting and video making, but the central one concerns food security. In addition to Gurdip, the success of the project is also due to Satish, another genius in agriculture.
Dozens of women’s groups have been taught how to produce nutritious organic food, completely chemical free, and are proud of their seed banks. Satish has encouraged the cultivation of millet, well adapted to the land and new recipes for preparing it have been invented.
The DDS could provide a great many ideas of good practices, and so, no doubt could many other NGOs working in the field.
Conclusion of the Report
As might be expected, the conclusions are pessimistic. “Existing inequalities between the world’s regions and the vulnerability of the poorest members of developing countries are deepening as a result of three concomitant crises: the food crisis, the economic crisis and the environmental crisis.” The plight of small landowners, rural women, children and the marginalized needs urgent attention.
The Declaration on the Rights of Peasants by La Via Campesina is the most important new development in protection against discrimination. The AC suggests it may be time to consider the possibility of a new instrument on the rights of peasants and others working in rural areas.
Professor Robert Watson, Director of the IAASTD Secretariat, warns against the same fate:
“If we do persist with business as usual, the world’s people cannot be fed over the next half century. It will mean more environmental degradation and the gap between the haves and the have-nots will further widen. We have an opportunity now to marshal our intellectual resources to avoid that sort of thing. Otherwise we face a world no one would want to inhabit.”
K.C. 19.9.2010
Footnotes
- From a leader in The Economist, September 11th to 17th 2010 : “On the current best guesses of scientists, climate change is likely to produce more events like heat wave in Russia. These will disrupt harvests and make prices more volatile still. And climate change will probably shift patterns of production; some marginal land will become infertile; land now barren will come into production; some countries will import more, others export more.”
- A/HRC/13/32 dated 22.2.2010, attached
- Attached; it no doubt also reflects the views of other developed countries
- “Is this beneficial foreign investment or neocolonialism?” asks The Economist of 21 May 2009
- The full text of the Declaration is annexed to the document.
- Invented by a French doctor, André Briend, who himself has no interest in patents and money-making. International Herald Tribune, 4/5 September 2010.
- http://www.agassessment.org.
- In the 12 year period of 1997 to 2008 the number of suicides of farmers in India reached almost 200 000, a figure which is believed to be underestimated as women farmers are not counted.
- GreenFacts summary leaflet of the IAASTD report, attached.