Over the past two decades the Right to Food Guidelines have played an extremely important role in institutionalizing the right to food in policy and regulations at international, national, and subnational level. It has also provided CSOs, community-based organizations of small-scale fishers and farmers and trade unions with a tool for advocacy and policy intervention that asserts the right to food as a human right and integrates it with a broader set of rights. Of course, widespread hunger, malnutrition and undernutrition remain an urgent challenge in a global food system shaped by excessive corporate power, systemic inequality, and exclusion. The 20th anniversary provides an important opportunity to reassess the lack of progress in many countries to ensure access to the right to food and to create pathways for its realization.
In our submission we call for the inclusion and strengthening of the Guidelines with regards to:
- freedom of association and the right to organize as essential for an integrated human rights approach that ensures genuine collective representation and participation of affected communities, agricultural workers and marginal farmers, women, youth and indigenous communities
- recognition of the role of women in the informal economy and their inclusion in policymaking and decision-making
- recognition of the role indigenous communities, indigenous food systems, and indigenous knowledge and measures to tackle marginalization, discrimination and racism and to protect rights as part of the integrated human rights that underpin the right to food
- measures to stop financial speculation in food and agricultural commodity prices that creates volatility and food price inflation that undermines the right to food and generates systemic food insecurity
Dr Muhammad Hidayat Greenfield, Regional Secretary
International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF) Asia/Pacific
Dr. Muhammad Hidayat Greenfield