Right to food and NWFP
The human right to adequate food is in great demand in Central Africa. Poverty and food insecurity persists while political participation of broad segments of the populations in the national and sub-national decision-making remains weak if not absent.
“The right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has the physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement.” (Source: ICESCR)
Gabon, the Central African Republic, and the Republic of the Congo are among the 157 countries that have ratified the International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural rights (ICESCR) thereby committing the Government to progressively realize the human right to adequate food (RtF).
Participatory development of NWFP is a complex and multidisciplinary task and which includes empowerment, non-discrimination and accountability introduced progressively within a right to food approach. This approach offers one of the few policy options for the region to ensure that its forest resources are managed for the benefit of the forest dependent people as well as respecting the economical interests of the countries. The benefit of the right to food approach is the sustainability of the project by giving people a sense of ownership and creating space for people to have an effective voice in decision-making processes.
The project will put into practice the right to food approach under various ecological and social situations, so that adjustments can be proposed to Governments based on the experiences acquired in the pilot sites of the participating countries for drafting/ improving their related national level legislation and with the elaboration/ improvement of their corresponding application texts. Furthermore, the findings and lessons-learned from work at national and pilot-site levels needs to be generalized for feed-back at the regional level to benefit all ten COMIFAC countries, and hence the need for a strong regional approach by this project for information sharing at the regional level.
The project will further provide technical and financial support to organisations, specialized agencies and NGO to conduct field activities in project sites. Human rights associations will be involved in an effort to strengthen people’s capacity to demand their right to food. The project will have to create the necessary awareness about human right to food issues, strengthen the capacity to assert the right and bridge the communication gap between rights assertion at the village grass-root level and the response by Governments at the sub-national and national level.
The project will use FAO’s right to food Guidelines , approved by the FAO Council in 2004, as a policy tool to assist countries in the implementation of the right to food at national level (http://www.fao.org/righttofood/publi_01_en.htm). In October 2009, the FAO’s right to food Unit published a toolbox to aid in promoting right to food that consists of five volumes providing governments, institutions, civil society and other stakeholders with “How to” Guidelines e.g. how to integrate the RtF into national legislations, how to monitor the RtF, how to assess the RtF situation of a country, how to realize the RtF.
For more information: http://www.fao.org/righttofood/