At the World Food Summit, held in Rome, Italy, from June 10- 13, 2002, the United States stood alone among 182 nations in opposing the right to food. In fact the Bush administration used a mix of arm-twisting and other pressure tactics to push other countries to support a much narrower world-hunger agenda focused on a greater role for the private sector, including advancing the interests of biotechnology firms. The Bush administration also supported more trade liberalization, obedience to the dictates of the World Trade Organization, and additional so-called HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Countries) structural adjustment, which includes budget slashing, privatization, and market opening for the world’s poorest countries.
All these positions are highly unpopular in the developing world, as they tend to reinforce the current rules of the global economy, which, from the perspective of many, privilege the rights and interests of transnational corporations over basic human needs.
Furthermore, the United States topped a long list of rich countries whose heads of state did not attend the summit. While the leaders of dozens of Third World countries showed up, the heads of state of 27 of the 29 developed countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development apparently had more important things to do than address the chronic hunger that afflicts 800 million people worldwide.
Conflict at the Summit
At the summit itself, the most tendentious conflicts among delegates negotiating the text of the final declaration were stirred by the U.S. delegation led by Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman. At 3 a.m. on the day those negotiations were scheduled to start, the U.S. delegation announced that it would not sign a final summit declaration referring to food as a human right, or that left out a central role for genetically modified food in ending hunger. Readers may recall that the United States was the only nation that refused to sign the final declaration of the 1996 World Food Summit because it contained a reference to the right to food, which, according to U.S. negotiators at the time, would have “made welfare reform illegal under international law.”
This time around, negotiations managed to go forward only when the U.S. delegation accepted bracketed text (giving it the right to revisit the issue later in the week) on a diluted right to food, apparently in exchange for a grudging but firm commitment from other nations to include positive language about crop biotechnology in the text of the final declaration.
The Right to Food
U.S. opposition to a right to food dominated the entire summit, and raised concerns among United Nations officials. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, said at the summit, “There are profound internal contradictions in the United Nations system. On the one hand, the UN agencies emphasize social justice and human rights. ... On the other hand, the Bretton Woods institutions [the World Bank and the IMF], along with the government of the United States of America and the World Trade Organization, oppose in their practice the right to food … emphasizing liberalization, deregulation, privatization and the compression of state domestic budgets—a model which in many cases produces greater inequalities.”
Ziegler asserted that the right to food is already established in international law, including the 1993 Vienna Declaration from the World Conference on Human Rights, which affirms collective rights, and Article 11 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which cites a right to adequate food. The United States is one of a handful of nations that has not ratified the ICESCR.
In 1999 the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights more clearly defined the right to food when it attached a “general comment” to ICESCR Article 11. General Comment No.12—which was not supported by the United States—defines this right as having physical and economic access to food of adequate quality and quantity, and having the means to obtain it, including access to food via means of production or procurement. Such access also must be sustainable and conserve human dignity. As a human right, the right to food constitutes an individual claim against the state, and generates individual entitlements and related state obligations that eventually may be enforceable in national and international courts.
U.S. Gets Its Way
The United States got most of what it wanted in the World Food Summit’s final declaration, including watered-down language on the right to food in Paragraph 10 of the final text, which refers to an evolving right rather than an existing right to food:
We invite the FAO Council to establish … an Intergovernmental Working Group … to elaborate, in a period of two years, a set of voluntary guidelines to support Member States’ efforts to achieve the progressive realization of the right to adequate food in the context of national food security. Most other countries, as well as civil society organizations (CSOs) from around the world, wanted the summit’s final declaration to contain a mandatory code of conduct referring to an existing right to food, while the European Union supported compromise, voluntary code with similar content. A code conduct, whether mandatory or voluntary, would have applied not only to state actors, but to other important players in the global food system, including corporations.
There are two important functions such a code could play. First, it could address weaknesses on the right to food in existing human rights instruments, such as the lack of precise descriptions of legal content and corresponding state obligations. Second, it could close legal gaps to some extent with respect to the impact of intergovernmental policies (for example, structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and IMF), and private actors (for example, transnational corporations) on the right to food.
However, the United States wanted all references to code of conduct, contained in the earlier draft text, stricken from the final declaration. And that’s what it got, leaving behind only vague references and commitments to voluntary guidelines limited to state actors. Even after getting its way in diluting the right to food and dumping the code of conduct in the final declaration, the Bush Administration, on the last day of the summit, issued an official reservation to the declaration, stating:
The United States believes … that the issue of adequate food can only be viewed in the context of the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR], which includes the opportunity to secure food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services. Further, the United States believes that the attainment of the right to an adequate standard of living is a goal or aspiration to be realized progressively that does not give rise to any international obligation or any domestic legal entitlement and it does not diminish the responsibilities of national governments towards their citizens.
Additionally, the United States understands the right of access to food to mean the opportunity to secure food and not a guaranteed entitlement. Concerning operative Paragraph 10 [in the final declaration], we are committed to concrete action to meet the objectives of the World Food Summit and are concerned that sterile debate over voluntary guidelines would distract attention from the real work of reducing poverty and hunger.
The United States clearly prefers the UDHR formulation of the right to food—which is vague and non-binding—to ICESCR formulation, which provides for a binding, tangible right to food under international law. (President Jimmy Carter signed the ICESCR, which still languishes in the U.S. Senate awaiting ratification.)
Also significant is the U.S. characterization of the right to food as an “opportunity” (rather than an entitlement), which, one might imagine, may be gained by purchasing lottery tickets at the local convenience store. Finally, the Bush Administration would prefer not to talk about the right to food at all, calling it a “sterile debate.” The U.S. stands alone on all these positions, while other nations and the UN assert that the issue of hunger needs firmer grounding in the ethical and social justice implications that a rights-based approach provides.
The NGO/CSO Response
The organizations of farmers, fishermen, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, trade unions, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that attended the NGO/CSO Forum for Food Sovereignty, which functioned in parallel to the official summit, expressed collective disappointment about the official World Food Summit Declaration. In their own final declaration, they stated:
Far from analyzing and correcting the problems that have made it impossible to make progress toward eliminating hunger over the past five years, this new plan of action compounds the error of more of the same failed medicine with destructive prescriptions that will make the situation even worse.
The NGO/CSO declaration also argued:
There will be no progress toward the goal of eliminating hunger without a reversal of [current] policies and trends, but the [official summit] declaration offers no hope of such a reversal. It emphasizes trade liberalization—the greatest force undermining livelihoods around the world—has diluted the concept of the human right to food, proposes more enhanced neoliberal structural adjustment in the guise of HIPC programs, recommends more emphasis on biotechnology and genetic engineering, and fails to support strengthening of production by the poor themselves for local markets, or the radical redistribution of access to productive resources that is fundamental to real change for the better. On the basis of this plan of action, no amount of political will or resources will lead to a major reduction in hunger or the poverty that underlies it.
The fact is that the rather sad goal of the 1996 World Food Summit, which was to halve world hunger by the year 2015, is more out of reach than ever, according to UN agencies. The total reduction in global hunger achieved between 1996 and 2001 was merely one-third of what would have been needed to meet the 1996 summit goals, and 90 percent of the improvement took place in just one country—China. In fact, poverty and hunger have actually worsened in two-thirds of developing nations and in most Northern countries as well. In other words, we are moving in the wrong direction to end hunger. As long as business-as-usual prevails, there is no reason to expect reversal of this trend. Most civil society observers agree that the World Food Summit of 2002 ended with even less promise than the disappointing 1996 summit, and leaves us with only the palest ray of hope that the rights-based approach to alleviating poverty and hunger worldwide will succeed.
The CSOs and NGOs present in Rome, however, have committed ourselves to continue fighting for more effective implementation of the right to food on behalf of the world’s hungry people.
Peter Rosset, Ph.D., is co-director of Oakland, CA-based Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy, and coauthor of America Needs Human Rights (Food First Books, 1999). Additional information on the World Food Summit and the right to food can be found at http://www.foodfirst.org
source: http://www.foodfirst.org/media/opeds/2002/usopposes.html 6jun03
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