IRIN interview with UN's rapporteur on food rights

Jean Ziegler is a special rapporteur on the right to food for the UN Commission for Human Rights. Following a 12-day visit to Ethiopia, where this year 7 million people could go hungry unless they receive international food aid, he told IRIN that preventing global hunger and ensuring the right to food should not be a moral obligation, but a legal one.

QUESTION: What does having the right to food mean?

ANSWER: It means exactly what it says. It means there is a new human right to food - the right to have regular, permanent and free access, either directly or by means of financial purchase, to adequate and sufficient food corresponding to the culture and wishes of the consumer.

There are duty bearers and there are stakeholders. Stakeholders mean every human being, because a human right is for every human being. The duty bearers are threefold: the state, naturally; the intergovernmental organisations, which are powerful international actors; [and] the transnational companies, who are the new powerful international actors.

Q: How does the adoption of this right help people?

A: There are three main obligations. The state, the international organisations and the companies, they have to respect, protect and uphold the right to food.

Respect means the state violates the right to food if it does anything that hinders the access to food, or production of food, or production of income that gives access to food. For instance, if the government is expelling peasants from their land without compensation, then that is a key violation of the right to food.

The state has to protect the right to food from outside actors, like municipalities that sell water supplies to private companies and then half the population cannot afford drinking water. This has happened in Bolivia.

Thirdly, the state must do everything to make roads and to rehabilitate land to make access to food possible through buying it or producing it.

The last point is that when there is an exceptional catastrophe where everything fails and people are dying from climatic problems on which the state has no influence, then the state has an obligation to appeal, in kind, to the international community to identify vulnerable groups and facilitate and organise the distribution of food.

Q: Are people taking this right to food seriously if last year 841 million people did not have enough to eat?

A: The right to food meets opposition within the United Nations system, within the states who participate. The majority of the Commission gave my mandate to me, and my reports are approved by a majority of the Commission.

One state is particularly important - the United States of America as well as the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organisation, which do not recognise the right to food on principle.

There are 100,000 people dying from hunger or its immediate consequences every day, according to the World Food report. Every seven seconds a child above 10 dies of hunger. This daily massacre is absolutely scandalous. The same report says that the world can nourish, with some 2,700 calories each day, 12 billion people. There are only 6 billion people in the world, and still you have this daily massacre. So something is wrong.

Q: What is wrong?

A: What is wrong is the functioning of the world community. Neo-liberalism is dominating the world. The masters of the world - the multinational companies and the people who have the financial capital who dominate the Bretton Woods institutions - they do not recognise social, economic and cultural rights.

They say only the market can decide the prices of goods, the price of transport of goods and so on. Then they say if the market is not functioning well, if there are people who are not making a living and are dying of hunger, then there is a moral obligation - but not a legal one - to hand out food to help them.

Q: So what is the solution?

A: There are two world visions: normative development and market-dominated development. The World Trade Organisation, the American government, the Swiss bankers, the Bretton Woods institutions, all the neo-liberals, they say markets alone create riches, and one day these riches reach the bottom - the trickle-down effect.

We say in the Human Rights Commission this idea is wrong, because it creates illegality, exclusion and immense riches in some hands and immense misery, because all social indicators for the 122 Third World countries - and specifically the 42 least developed countries - are in the red. It gets worse and worse: from the 100 poorest countries in the world, 81 in the last five years lost per capita income.

Q: What is the alternative?

A: The alternative is normative development: to fix the goals with a focus on human rights. To say everybody has the right to food as defined here, and that the state has to do a series of things to achieve this - agrarian reform, protection against multinational companies, and infrastructure development to ensure the right to food.