[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about a HR understanding of how we eat is determined by illegitimate forces. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Note: You can easily translate the Readers to many languages. Use the app deepl.com and it is done instantaneously. It takes seconds to download the app into your computer or phone and translations are of high quality.
1. Nutrition as a human right (HR) implies understanding that the act of eating goes beyond covering the nutritional needs of an individual. It implies understanding nutrition from the collective essence that integrates economic, social, political, cultural and environmental factors, all at the base of a life in dignity. From this understanding are to be launched the needed processes of mobilization of claim holders, public interest CSOs and social movements that must have at its core identifying all socially relevant problems that require a commensurate political action totally free of conflicts of interest.
2. The above requires claim holders make a commitment to political action (for instance to decommodify land and food). And for this, a HR approach requires following-up on the activities of the legislative, the executive and the judiciary branches to monitor their action or inaction on right to food (RTF) issues. (FIAN Colombia)
3. Country ‘ownership’ of the RTF needs to be much more than simply adopting a National Nutrition Plan. The development of a stronger sense of country ownership ought to be facilitated by:
- promoting the engagement of domestic public interest civil society (rather than international charities),
- working with the communities who bear the malnutrition and disease burden caused by the unfair social system; and
- we are also talking of investing in the development of the domestic workforce across the full range of skill sets that are needed for nutrition in each country,
- as well as investing in domestic research capacities, including in laboratory, in surveillance and in clinical skills, not forgetting on notions of the political economy of nutrition and its social determination. (PHM)
4. No country should, therefore, listen to the IMF, the World Bank and/or other global agencies that tell them:
- to focus only on exports, especially of cash crops at the expense of growing local staple foods.
- deceivingly pontificating “Get rich from those and you can buy all the food you need“. (Ted Greiner)
The field of international nutrition has been described as having a technical bias and too often avoiding the political and power issues inherent to HR work.
5. Two contemporary international nutrition paradigms have been in competition:
- the ‘investment-in-nutrition paradigm’ (proposing allocating more money to technical nutrition interventions to scale-up service provision to larger populations implying this will speed improvements in malnutrition outcomes); and
- the ‘human-rights-approach-to-nutrition paradigm’ (proposing that political action towards greater entitlements-to and accountability-for good nutrition will be required to catalyze improvements in both process and outcomes). (Urban Jonsson)
6. It is clear that both approaches are needed to span the rhetorical, legal and practical aspects of rights. Too many colleagues are skeptical of the value of combining activities in both fields, considering the second approach to be a ‘window dressing’ to hide lack of managerial skills to foster measurable ‘bread and butter’ change.*
*: Academic nutrition research and analysis is full of troubling language on power dynamics and on neocolonial discourses; this does not allow space for taking action on the broader structural perspective of the political determination of nutrition. (Alison Phipps)
…and then there is corporate capture
7. After the signing of the strategic partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum (WEF), the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) held in September 2021 represented a benchmark of corporate capture fostering multistakeholderism against all opposition. (Multistakeholderism implies that all actors that have a ‘stake’ in an issue have an equal say, not allowing the assignment of weighted roles and responsibilities that condone power imbalances among them). This presents us with a situation where the most powerful actors can and do impose what they want and accountability disappears.
8. Despite its non-negotiated outcomes, the UNFSS includes a massive follow up mechanism that includes the creation of a new parallel structure in the UN system (housed in FAO). Furthermore, at the heart of the UNFSS outcomes are the so-called Coalitions of Action. A list of the many ones set up can be found in https://foodsystems.community/?attachment=11381&document_type=document&download_document_file=1&document_file=779 . All these coalitions are set up as loose multistakeholder alliances that emerged in the run up to, during and after the Summit in an opaque way. Many of the Coalitions of Action stem from earlier WEF initiatives that will now deliver(?) private sector solutions under the guise of the UN. They create new spaces to address food systems issues with neither transparency and accountability mechanisms, nor with meaningful ways of participation for claim holders, while giving special power to those who can fund and influence the coalitions. (FIAN, Corporate Accountability)
Bottom line
9. This changed governance approach must be resisted at all cost, because it affects a broad range of HR-related areas –and many groups are now engaged in this David-against-Goliath struggle.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com