- Do you have any comments on the background and analysis provided in the political declaration (paragraphs 4-20 of the zero draft)?
We would like to support the statement in para 19:
The United Nations system must work more effectively together to enhance international cooperation and solidarity to improve nutrition and support national efforts to accelerate progress against malnutrition
In this light and for an appropriate focus on both food and nutrition security ETC suggests to incorporate the rights angle taken by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food – see http://www.srfood.org/en/official-reports. In his recent final report the rapporteur includes a sector-by-sector list of recommendations and in so doing addresses various comments on the ICN2 Zero Draft.
His conclusion says:
The eradication of hunger and malnutrition is an achievable goal. Reaching it requires, however, that we move away from business as usual and improve coordination across sectors, across time and across levels of governance. Empowering communities at the local level, in order for them to identify the obstacles that they face and the solutions that suit them best, is a first step. This must be complemented by supportive policies at the national level that ensure the right sequencing between the various policy reforms that are needed, across all relevant sectors, including agriculture, rural development, health, education and social protection. In turn, local-level and national-level policies should benefit from an enabling international environment, in which policies that affect the ability of countries to guarantee the right to food – in the areas of trade, food aid, foreign debt alleviation and development cooperation – are realigned with the imperative of achieving food security and ensuring adequate nutrition. Understood as a requirement for democracy in the food systems, which would imply the possibility for communities to choose which food systems to depend on and how to reshape those systems, food sovereignty is a condition for the full realization of the right to food. But it is the paradox of an increasingly interdependent world that this requires deepening the cooperation between States.
Texts such as the above in our opinion rightly stress the urgency of the matter and also convincingly argue that “business as usual” will not do.
Arine Valstar and Joanne Harnmeijer