World Hunger Notes -- US Approaches to Food and Nutrition Rights, 1976-2008 by Ellen Messer and Marc J. Cohen

Background

For sixty years, the legal, political, and cultural concept of the human right to food (HRF) has been evolving as a set of universal norms for the United Nations community, its member states, and civil society. Paragraph 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (1948) declares: "...everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being of himself [sic] and his family, including food..." Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) (1966) adds: "State parties to the present Covenant recognize the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger..." and agree "to take steps to the maximum of available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized, including “adequate food.” Some two hundred additional UN instruments and declarations address the right to adequate food and nutrition within civil-political, economic-social-cultural, development, indigenous, women's, and children's rights constructions.

Although food-and-nutrition is considered to be predominantly an economic right, which is linked to rights to land, work (just wages), health, a clean environment, and a just economic order, a decent standard of living depends also on personal security, fulfillment of civil-political rights, freedom from violence, and "freedom from fear." Country case studies across the developing world demonstrate that those denied civil liberties suffer disproportionately from social injustices and material deprivations, including food insecurity, hunger-related disease, malnutrition, and preventable child mortality. The significance of freedom of speech, a free press, and freedom of assembly for the protection of economic rights, including the right not to starve, connects food security to democracy and good governance. Protection against starvation is also treated in the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, which regulate conduct in warfare. The most recent clarifications have occurred in the form of voluntary guidelines for states to support the progressive realization of the right to food in the context of national food security (FAO 2005) and a resource manual on right to food for NGOs (Kunnemann and Epal-Ratjen 2005). Table 1 highlights key milestones in this history.

As a reference point for food security policy, the right to food continues to be broadly embraced. The United States increasingly finds itself an outlier to an emerging global consensus. Presently, 158 states are currently parties to the legally binding ICESCR (this compares to 141 in 1998 and 85 in 1989). Although around 30 UN member states have not yet signed the Covenant, only four signatories besides the United States (Belize, Cuba, Sao Tome and Principe, and South Africa) have not yet ratified it. One of the non-ratifying signatories, South Africa, has nevertheless incorporated the provisions of the ICESCR into its constitution.

Another binding treaty that includes the right to food of children, the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, is one of the most widely accepted international agreements, with 193 states parties. Only the United States and Somalia have signed but not yet ratified it.

In spite of the progress summarized above, country-level and international adherence to legal standards that protect food and nutrition rights remains more aspiration than achievement. Malnutrition is a major cause of death, disease, and lost human potential that costs developing countries billions of dollars and untold human capacities annually. Nevertheless, human rights offer a mobilization theme that unites international, national, and local community actions against hunger.

Attention to hunger concerns, as one among many human rights violations that afflict low-income and marginalized populations, and especially vulnerable women and children, is one "value added" of a human rights approach to food security. The construction of universal norms and focus on the principle of non-exclusion can help shape policies, programs, and projects that respect, protect, and fulfill the nutritional requirements for human dignity of all people, not only members of favored political groups, dominant males, or desired children.

Program designs that specifically use HRF social structural analysis in addition to geographic and income indicators to pinpoint individuals or groups that are exceptionally vulnerable, can help implement strategies to reach them, help improve targeting, and therefore efficiency and effectiveness of nutrition program expenditures.

As NGOs such as CARE, Oxfam America, and Global Exchange have demonstrated, peaceful political mobilization around food issues, including fair-trade and slave- and child labor-free production and marketing methods can be part of a democratization process that improves rule of law and good governance. A human rights-based approach helps empower those vulnerable to food insecurity and malnutrition to hold government accountable; they participate in the democratic process of policy formation and implementation, and are not mere passive beneficiaries of government programs or private charities.

Thus, a human rights approach potentially adds value along the multiple lines of moral good, cost-effectiveness (efficiency), and advance in democracy and governance processes.

In addition, HRF provides a unifying framework for individuals from diverse cultures, especially different religious persuasions, who share essential principles that no human beings should starve, and everyone should have access to a nutritionally adequate diet as part of basic human dignity.

Against this background, it is instructive to consider why the U.S. is not among the nations who have ratified major human rights instruments that promote the right to food, and in what ways U.S. food security legislation is less effective than it might be for these omissions.

US approaches to the right to food

The arguments of US proponents and opponents are summarized in Table 2. Advocates insist that HRF is consistent with the U.S. Constitutional protection of the right to life, and also grounded in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s precedent, "freedom from want." In view of America's food abundance, no one should starve or go malnourished. Opponents counter that the right to food is un-American, and not a legal, political-economic, or cultural value. The Constitution protects only civil-political rights. Although the US generously funds food security programs at home and abroad, these are voluntary, and do not require or admit a human rights framework.

Proponents’ arguments:

• The human right to food (HRF) is consistent with existing Constitutional protection, which protects the right to life (Simon 1975; Sunstein 2005)

• President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s concept of freedom from want, which is a starting point for the HRF, is definitively an American political value enshrined in the US political system (Kent 2005)

• The clarification of food and nutrition policies within a human-rights framework should make programs more cost-effective and reduce expenditures, not increase them (Simon 1975; Eide and Kracht 2005)

• “No hunger” is a chief and overriding American value, and the HRF as “the right to feed oneself” is entirely consistent with American can-do values of self-reliance (Proponents of H.R. 393, US Congress 1976; Beckmann and Simon 1999)

Opponents’ arguments:

• The HRF is not protected by the U.S. Constitution (see Alston 1990; Moose 2001 a,b)
• The HRF is associated with un-American and socialist political systems (see Alston 1990; King 2007)
• Taking on HRF obligations would be too expensive (opponents to H.R. 393, US Congress 1976)
• Culturally, HRF provisions are not the American way, which is self-reliance (King 2007)

Anti-hunger advocates, including those who work in America's Second Harvest food banks, networks of advocates who lobby for increases in eligibility and access to domestic food stamps, and more human rights considerations in the delivery of international food aid, argue that the HRF is central to American culture. They join Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, Global Exchange, Bread for the World, and others specializing in political mobilizations in advocating the right to food.

On the other side, they confront legislators like Steve King (R-Iowa) and their constituents, who insist that "freedom from want" is an FDR invention, and food anxiety is an energizing challenge that can mobilize the needy to surmount their nutritional distress; in King's (2007) words, the food-insecure need to "work hard" and "work smart": "If we are free from fear of want, we will also be free of the ambition to provide for our future wants and needs. If that is the case America will go down dramatically and we will watch this work ethic in our culture collapse." They disparage the notion of HRF accountable government as "nanny government," to be avoided, along with its costs.

This dispute, centering on HRF legal norms and their connections to US political and popular culture, suggests that a substantive approach to achieving HRF might be more effective. Physician-human rights-HIV-AIDS activist Paul Farmer (2006) outlines possible actions with respect to a right to food. These actions begin with analysis (Who is hungry? What are their social characteristics? Why are they hungry?), proceeds to strategies (What can be done to improve their nutritional conditions in the immediate term, and address root causes of food insecurity and malnutrition in the longer term?), and actions to address the causes. Similarly, Americans have been taking steps through community food security coalitions and networks; government can help strengthen and scale up such efforts. Reciprocally, these community agents and networking agencies can help build support for the legal framework, which creates the political will to obligate government to join global efforts to improve access to food for all, in ways that respect and protect human dignity and build toward democratic institutions and good governance.

There are multiple, urgent reasons to focus on the value-added of the legal covenants at this point in time, even though it is possible to advance the substantive matter of everyone accessing nutritionally adequate food in socially appropriate ways.

Most important, the US government and its people participate in a global community based on human rights. It makes no political sense for the US to continue to argue that HRF and other economic rights are "not our culture" when the US pressures other nations to accept and embrace universal civil-political rights that some argue are not their culture. Increasingly, legal, political, and cultural evidence affirm that all classes of human rights are interdependent and indivisible. It is time for the US to take this message and process seriously with respect to the right to food.

(Note: This essay updates Messer (1998) and summarizes information presented in Messer and Cohen (2007).)

Ellen Messer is an anthropologist and specialist in human rights, food security, and religion. Professor Messer is affiliated with Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition and the Brandeis University Program in Sustainable
International Development. Marc Cohen is a humanitarian researcher for OXFAN America.

References

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