The Role of NGOs in Food Security: US vs. Brazil

 

 Hunger and malnutrition: A Human Rights Approach

Children in Senegal's villages consume millet and milk.

All civic, cultural, economic, political, and social rights must be realized in order to ensure a dignified existence for all people.
The 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) presents an unprecedented opportunity to reinforce the indivisibility of all human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights said that the achievement of all human rights - civil, cultural, economic, political, and social - is required to ensure a dignified existence for all people. According to UDHR Article 25, a dignified existence demands that "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, and housing...". Despite the fact that the right to adequate nourishment was recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and later in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), economic, social, and cultural rights were not adequately addressed at the national and international levels for decades. Fortunately, this situation is improving, and a number of factors are currently leading to a clearer awareness of the interdependence, indivisibility, and universality of human rights.
One of the most significant causes for this shift is the growing focus that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) place on economic, social, and cultural rights at both the national and international levels. NGOs and social movements (community-based organizations) are increasingly demanding that their respective governments fully implement the right to food; for example, landless peasants in Latin America demand access to land, indigenous peoples seek security for their traditional land titles, and Asian fishers fight against industrial fleets' destruction of local fishing grounds. The "rights approach" is becoming increasingly significant in many groups' everyday struggles, and this is having an impact on other measures for eradicating hunger and malnutrition. This is not to say that taking a rights-based approach will always be sufficient to address the issues that contribute to hunger and malnutrition; not every hungry or malnourished person is a victim of human rights violations. However, violations occur when nations fail to respect, safeguard, or fulfil the right to food, and this failure is one of the primary causes of hunger and malnutrition. The rights approach, therefore, assists civil society organizations in dealing with this type of problem and policy.

The adoption of the rights approach by NGOs and social movements has grown significantly

 

in recent years, as economic, social, and cultural rights are now more accurately defined than they were previously. Although economic, social, and cultural rights, as well as the right to food, have been widely acknowledged for several decades, the rights themselves have been neglected and discriminated against by both states and the United Nations human rights system. However, the situation has recently changed dramatically as a result of developments such as: a more precise legal interpretation of the rights at issue, which began with the establishment of the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in 1987; improved support from the international law community; and, since the end of the Cold War, states' commitment to the implementation of these rights. Although significant work remains to be done at both the national and international levels to elevate the status of economic, social, and cultural rights to that of civil and political rights, the indivisibility and interconnectedness of all human rights is currently a top priority.
NGO response to the World Food Summit (WFS) has taken Objective 7.4 of the Summit Plan of Action3 extremely seriously. Many NGOs are well aware that promoting the right to food necessitates a clear definition of the basic concept of economic, social, and cultural rights, as well as a continuous process of "unlearning" the reductionist human rights concept, which focuses solely on civil and political rights, and the reductionist food security concepts, which focus only or mostly on agricultural productivity and harvest yields.
NGO action

A Senegalese mom is breastfeeding her kid.

Organizations working on issues such as breastfeeding, health-care access, and child hunger are increasingly focusing on human rights.
The parallel NGO Forum at the WFS drew over 1,000 organizations from 80 nations. NGOs and social movements use a diverse range of practical and legal tactics to combating hunger and malnutrition, and their work is critical to all efforts to address these issues. To gain an understanding of the various approaches to implementing the right to food in concrete situations, it is necessary to distinguish between national and international NGOs and movements that explicitly use a rights approach in their daily work and those that, while working on issues closely related to the right to food, use more developmental, or "implicit" approaches.

Only a few non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have taken an explicit rights approach to food and nutrition concerns on an international scale. 

FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN), the World Alliance for Nutrition and Human Rights, and the Global Forum on Sustainable Food and Nutrition Security are among the rights-oriented non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that attend regular sessions of the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights to report on violations of the right to adequate food is a useful measure of how the rights approach is used. Currently, just a few foreign NGOs use the Committee, but the number is constantly increasing. The most frequent user is FIAN, the International Human Rights Organization for the Right to Self-Feeding. FIAN has a rigorous violations approach, which means it intervenes when states fail to respect, safeguard, or fulfill their commitments to ensure adequate food.
At the national level, a rising number of non-governmental organizations and social movements use economic, social, and cultural rights as a reference or starting point for their activities. At the most recent sessions of the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, an increasing number of national NGOs have reported on food-related violations of economic, social, and cultural rights, with many highlighting issues such as forced evictions of small farmers, insecurity of tenant laws, problems with access to fishing grounds, violations of indigenous land rights, or discriminatory food supply systems.
In addition to documenting country-specific violations, several traditional human rights organizations have begun to report on the general situation of economic, social, and cultural rights in their countries, and these rights are increasingly being recognized on the agendas of national human rights organizations that, in many cases, have focused their work on civil and political rights for decades.