WHY's own Peter Mann comments
Only the U.S said no to a recent U.N. resolution supporting the right to food, endorsed by 51 countries. What is going on? After all, the U.S. agrees that that it is an intolerable scandal for 840 million people to be chronically hungry in a world full of food. And the U.S. remains the largest world donor of food aid, while American generosity toward the hungry is evident in the soup kitchens and food banks in every U.S. town and city.
So, what is the disconnect? I think it is about fear -- fear that the right to food will bring with it international obligations or domestic legal entitlements, as the American delegation leader Richard S. Williamson admitted. This U.S. position is not new, and it is not just from Republican administrations. I remember the U.S. delegation at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome rejecting the right to food because the Clinton administration might be sued for its Welfare Reform legislation, which took away food stamps from legal residents who were not citizens.
At the time it was a shameful attitude, and it still is, in 2004. This narrow and legalistic position, in the hunger issue as in so many others, makes the U.S. an obstacle to progress instead of a world leader. And this from a country that gave us Roosevelt's four freedoms, including freedom from want, and was instrumental in creating the U.N.'s founding declaration on human rights in 1948.
There is a deeper fear behind the U.S. rejection of food as a human right. It is the fear that we will move from food charity to food justice, with all the social and economic change that implies. Most people don't yet know that they have a right to food. And the vast majority do not yet enjoy this right, for that would mean that governments and courts would be obliged to to protect and fulfill that right.
Once the right to adequate food that is safe, nutritious and culturally acceptable is recognized and implemented, we are on the way toward a just and sustainable food system. Adequate food implies food stamps, living wage jobs, and a sustainable food supply. The right to safe and nutritious food demands real changes in the way we grow and distribute and consume food. Culturally acceptable food means a sharp break with corporate agriculture and its monocultures.
I see the growing recognition of the right to food as a great opportunity for change, and I welcome the U.N.'s appointment of a special rapporteur who will work with governments and civil society to implement this right. I was in Brazil for the 2003 World Social Forum, at which right-to-food special rapporteur Jean Ziegler welcomed the new Brazilian government's decision to make "zero hunger" -- three meals a day for all Brazilians -- a major goal. It was sad to hear the U.S. delegation leader at the U.N. say that his government "could not in any way recognize, support or commend the work of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food."
It is time to end world hunger, and the right to food can become a powerful tool to achieve that goal.
Peter Mann is international coordinator for WHY.
For more on the right to food, read the article by Wayne Roberts, "Digest This," in Alternatives Journal.
