"Life is not a factory"

Technically speaking, it means that every person has the right not having to go hungry. This implies that healthy food must be adequately available and accessible. But in its essence, the right to food is principally about enjoyment. Food is embedded in culture; it embodies memories, family, celebrating festivals and joy.

Indeed. When food is no longer a source of joy; when you have to ask yourself who in your family needs to be fed first; and whether there will be enough food left for you; then it's basically a question of survival. It is mostly the women in the family who are the first to go hungry. Such situations are clear violations of the human right to food.

The most recent change which resulted in the current problem began in the 1960s with the growing industrialisation of our food system. This made a few companies that control seeds, water and land increasingly powerful. At the same time, the food system started to become over-reliant on a small basket of staple foods such as wheat, rice and maize which are produced by a handful of countries for export. The key issue is that food is largely treated as a commodity that can be loaded with more fertilisers and pesticides. But life is not a factory, it is a cycle.

Exactly. The agricultural sector in Ukraine was primarily geared towards exports, not towards feeding its own population. The war has exacerbated food insecurity in countries that were dependent on wheat from Ukraine or Russia. However, there are other countries that have been affected because speculation on the financial markets has driven wheat prices up. Consequently, many countries have had to increasingly rely on the UN World Food Programme (WFP) which in turn obtained half of its wheat stock from Ukraine. This dependency has severely disrupted the global humanitarian aid system and international trade.

Denying access to food is a violation of human rights, so it is a form of violence. To our knowledge, it is always the same groups that are affected first: women, children, the elderly, migrants, smallholder farmers, indigenous peoples, people with disabilities. This means that inequality is built into the system. My report shows that this inequality has been made systemic through dependency relationships and various forms of exploitation. Dependency always points to unequal power relations. When individual countries profit at the expense of others, they exploit nature and destroy traditional ways of life and work. Thus, hunger, undernutrition and malnutrition are forms of violence created by our food systems.

In the short run, I would urgently recommend to continue programmes which were launched during the COVID-19 pandemic. These include free meals for school children, cash transfer programmes for families and targeted measures to support local producers and markets. These proved to be effective during the crisis. I find it frustrating that these programmes are now discontinued. While the pandemic is largely over, the food crisis is not. I therefore advocate for such programmes to be permanently integrated in policy frameworks. In the long term, I believe that we need to transform relationships within the food system. But that’s where it starts to get complicated.

It's all about reciprocal relationships. Agroecology is a very promising concept in this context. It imitates natural processes and enhances diversity instead of destroying it. At the same time, it prioritises relationships between and among people and nature. This is because agroecology has understood that how we treat land is inextricably linked with how we treat people.

To some extent, yes. Currently, the WTO’s Agriculture Agreement promotes exploitative food systems. Even within the WTO, there is consensus that the agreement is outdated, however, there is a lack of vision. This is why I keep calling for the renegotiation of international agreements in my reports! It wouldn't mean the end of trade. There will continue to be countries that export and import, but it would be based on fair structures and relationships.

Here too we can learn lessons from the pandemic: it was the supply chains with stable relationships between sellers and buyers that continued to function. In fact, we have always had a variety of ways to organise ourselves and our resources, such as cooperatives. These approaches can be made more broad-based. The specific solutions in each country would be different, so we need an internationally coordinated action plan to address the food crisis. The right to food provides a normative framework that countries can use as a point of reference.

I see the most potential in the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) as the right to food is enshrined in its vision statement. Following its reform in 2009, the CFS has aimed to include the voices of all civil society stakeholders and indigenous groups in policy debates on food and nutrition. This gives them an opportunity to present their concerns to governments and the corporate sector. The goal now is to mobilise a critical mass of governments for the CFS. This year is crucial because the programme for the next four years will be adopted in October.

My priority is to make sure that the food crisis stays on the international agenda, so as to encourage governments to collaborate. Now is the moment to act, especially when it comes to climate change. I prefer to use the word believe rather than hope. I believe in the power of people to organise themselves and put pressure on governments. Governments must finally start to shift their focus from their relationships with corporations to their relationships with their people. That would be a foundation we could build on.