The Ecology of Food and Nutrition, Vol.42, No.3, May/June 2003.
The Situation
The Challenge: what now has to change
The Right to adequate Nutrition
The key issues to fight for
The Situation
1. One of the key question perhaps not yet clearly answered in nutrition circles is: Why is the commitment of nutrition professionals to a Human Rights approach, although sorely needed, still not a reality?
2. Such a commitment was and is seen as needed as our reaction with the best chance for success to counter the increasingly perceived (and additive) negative impacts of the relentless process of Globalization. Globalization is creating and is accelerating poverty – most often with malnutrition as an accompanying outcome. This, at the same time that the negative effects of Globalization are creating growing disparities, exclusion, unemployment, marginalization, alienation, environmental degradation, exploitation, corruption, violence and conflict, all – in one way or another – impinging on nutrition.
3. People who are being marginalized by Globalization today are really being pushed to the limit and they do need to channel their frustrations into positive action. But in real terms, the poor are still being offered top-down social services and thus are not really active claimants when it comes to ensuring their perceived needs are met. So the Human Rights approach comes to introduce or reinforce a crucial missing element in development work, i.e., people forcefully demanding de-facto accountability; and this is its added value in all work being done in the area of nutrition. One wonders why the approach has not generated more enthusiasm.
4. Because the rights-based approach takes the entitlements of those being marginalized as its starting point, to be sustainable, it must be based on equity. Human Rights and equity go hand in hand. The rights-based approach thus focuses on the basic and structural (macroeconomic) causes of poverty, the main determinant of ill-health and malnutrition.
5. Historically, there has been much circularity in the discussion of Human Rights. There is still a segment of the Human Rights community that thinks that one can settle world order issues without settling the power issues still slanted against the welfare of the majority of the marginalized. But this is almost a contradiction. In this day and age, more concrete actions directly empowering the poor need to be identified and indeed carried out.
6. The worldwide halving of malnutrition rates by 2015 will simply not be achieved through the piling up of yet more ‘benevolent’ changes centered around Free Market solutions carried out by those who, through their power, control it. We are being sold a utopia, one that extols the ultimate benefits of Globalization. This utopia is made of a similar, but dangerous mythical belief that ultimately a global free market will cater to everybody’s needs and make everybody happy. How much nutrition professionals are influenced by this myth has never been assessed.
7. Be it as it may, the Human Rights approach is here to set limits to the vicissitudes and sways of the (socially insensitive) market.
The Challenge: what now has to change
8. Because of the gross flaws of Globalization, particularly in the social realm, a more humane global governance is now needed – more than ever.
9. It is a fallacy to focus on whether Globalization OR bad governments is the most important cause of Human Rights violations. The Human Rights approach shows us what states should do or should not do. When they fail the test, many governments actually use the Globalization argument – of being victims of a global process – as an excuse for stalling and not implementing their obligations.
10. But, in fact, in the implementation of rights, one more often finds considerable softness in the commitment of the governments themselves. Often, a rights-based approach is not even on their radar screens. So both the individual duty bearers, as well as the system, are to blame and to indeed be held accountable.
11. For all governments (in rich and in poor countries), how much of their general budgets they devote to nutrition, to health, to food security, to education and to poverty alleviation is indeed of substantive Human Rights concern. Further, one should look at how the various existing expenditures are distributed among the various socioeconomic population groups. Governments do violate Human Rights when they fail to offer adequate and participatory health and nutrition services to the poor.
12. To take a very real and current issue as an example, should the provision of such services be privately organized, governments still remain responsible for the egalitarian and adequate provision of the same. But, are they? They most often are not; one just needs to look at the existing evidence to see that. Civil society watchdog groups should be monitoring these developments and denouncing its shortcomings more proactively.
13. A Human Rights-focused analysis of statistical data should examine the extent to which various expenditures in nutrition and other social services are distributed among the diverse socioeconomic groups according to need. The same watchdog groups have a role in scrutinizing the actions funded to make sure they ‘respect, protect and fulfill’ the Human Rights of the poorest – and they should protest if that is not the case. In so doing, they will actually be addressing the whole gamut of government Human Rights violations.
14. But are governments the sole holders of Human Rights duties? Legally, the answer is yes (they are the actual signatories of the respective Covenants). But, in reality, there are indeed other duty bearers.
15. The example of children as rights holders helps us illustrate this point: The duty bearers of children’s rights are, first and foremost, the immediate care-giver (the mother or other), followed by the family/household members, the community and neighbors, local, sub-national, national and international institutions – all linked in a web of complementary duty bearers. The case of nutrition and the responsibility of its professionals could not be more illustrative in this regard: Together with empowered community leaders, they need to seek effective duty bearers’ responses at all these levels.
16. But this is the theory. The challenge right now is to convert these concepts into working programs, where people’s claims are more forcefully exerted as their inalienable right.
The Right to adequate Nutrition
[Preamble: Human Rights concepts applied to nutrition have evolved in the last 20 years. Early thinkers in this area began talking of an inalienable ‘right to food’ of all human beings. But after the worldwide adoption of the UNICEF-proposed conceptual framework of the causes of malnutrition, it became clear that food security was only one element of nutritional wellbeing. This lead to the coining of the concept of the ‘right to nutrition’ (here emphasized as the right to adequate nutrition) which addresses all determinants of said conceptual framework. Not surprisingly, this led others to pursue yet a more ambitious ‘right to development’ goal. But the latter has encountered powerful detractors in the ranks of the developed countries, particularly the US. In the same vein, it has to be said that the overall US views on Human Rights differ substantially from much of the rest of the world: To successive US administrations, civil and political rights somehow carry more weight than economic, social and cultural rights. The US particularly objects to the responsibilities the developed countries bear in relation to the rich countries having, for long, infringed the economic and social rights of developing countries].
17. Although the recognition of the fundamental right to adequate nutrition of all humanity is the ethical and political basis of the overall approach nutrition professionals should embrace, really understanding this right has largely, so far, been confined to Human Rights institutions, especially the UN agencies. How much should/can one rely on these agencies then to be instrumental in shifting the focus of current and upcoming nutrition programs to a Human Rights focus? For the time being, perhaps quite a bit. This serious gap simply needs to be bridged as soon as possible – and this is the purpose of this Reader.
18, The first challenge will be to help create a common language to be shared by agencies, governments, NGOs and beneficiaries – a language primarily based on social commitments to Human Rights and on raising the level of responsibility of the different actors (both as more active claim holders and as more responsive duty bearers).
19. The second challenge is to make the Human Rights approach concrete and give it substance (the how)…and the field of nutrition is, for sure, an inescapable candidate.
20. Unfortunately, as of now, most governments fear that the recognition of this right to adequate nutrition would interfere with their current policy choices. They need to be appeased about this fear and made to understand that certain aspects of the rights approach may be subject to progressive (gradual) realization. But they also need to be made to understand that there is a minimum core of rights that all states simply have to uphold! In the case under discussion here, states have already signed Covenants that guarantee the respect of the right to adequate nutrition under any circumstance, irrespective of the magnitude of the resources available to them.
21. In concrete terms, what this means to nutrition professionals is that, as soon as possible, Human Rights objectives in nutrition need to be better singled out, defined and refined to more explicitly establish specific local action priorities. The right to adequate nutrition has yet to acquire a more operational meaning for people as well, and that is a major political responsibility all nutrition professionals have to deal with now.
22. Put another way, in operational terms, effectively mainstreaming Human Rights in all nutrition activities remains a challenge of enormous dimensions – and the challenge is a political one. Certainly, operationalizing the right to adequate nutrition is a priority called for to quicken the current snail’s pace; the main challenge here though is to, first, achieve consensus among nutrition actors on such an operationalization.
The key issues to fight for
23. What will become central in this urgently needed debate to be followed by action is to understand that mainstreaming Human Rights in nutrition work means the right to demand a whole series of things. Among them:
– that economic and physical access to basic community-based nutrition services is equally guaranteed for girls, women, the elderly, minorities and the marginalized,
– that steps be taken to progressively achieve all Human Rights (the right to adequate nutrition being only the point of departure for nutrition professionals),
– that the private sector (national and transnational) also be made to comply with Human Rights dispositions,
– that expeditious and verifiable actions be undertaken towards realizing this right -starting now,
– that accountability, compliance and institutional responsibility be required from relevant duty bearers in all processes under implementation aimed at improving nutrition,
– that administrative decisions in nutrition programs are in compliance with Human Rights obligations,
– that governments’ resilience to embark in meaningful nutrition interventions be differentiated from their inability to comply,
– that -if unable to comply- the burden of proof be put on governments to convincingly show that there are reasons beyond their control to fulfill their right to adequate nutrition obligations,
– that national strategies on the right to adequate nutrition be adopted defining clear, verifiable benchmarks,
– that the implementation of national nutritional strategies or plans of action be transparent and decentralized, and include people’s active participation,
– that the same plans progressively also move towards eliminating poverty -the main determinant of malnutrition,
– that new legislation on the right to adequate nutrition be developed involving civil society representation in its preparation, enforcement and monitoring (!).
24. If the above demands are met, the added value of the rights-based approach to nutrition will be such that:
– beneficiaries will become de-facto active claimants of their nutrition rights,
– the respective imperatives will be made more forcefully (making governments effectively liable),
– the process will underline the international and later national legal obligations of states,
– the right to adequate nutrition will become the principal framework used to make relevant program decisions,
– the process will move the debate from charity/compassion (where there already is fatigue) to the language of rights and duties (accountable to the international community) with its corresponding compliance indicators that can be monitored.
25. It is in this light that the Human Rights approach enhances the scope and effectiveness of nutritional, social and economic corrective measures by directly referencing them to (close to) universally accepted obligations found in related UN Covenants.
26. These obligations, let the reader be reminded, are in competition with obligations stemming from other rights, especially when resources are scarce. Nevertheless, one always has to keep in mind that the duty to fulfill the right to adequate nutrition does not depend on an economic justification and does not disappear because it can be shown that tackling some other problems is more cost-effective.
27. To put things in a historical perspective, in the Basic Human Needs-based approach, beneficiaries had no active claim to their needs being met. The ‘value-added’ flowing from the Human Rights-based approach is the legitimization of such claims giving them a politico-legal thrust.
28. Going back to the example of the child, in the Basic Needs approach, the malnourished child was seen as an object with needs (and needs do not necessarily imply duties or obligations, but promises). In the Rights-Based approach, the malnourished child is seen as a subject with legitimate entitlements and claims (and rights always imply and are associated with duties and obligations).
29. This, in a nutshell, is WHY nutritional professionals have to step into the new age of the Right to Adequate Nutrition, picking up more of a hare’s rather than a snail’s pace.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
schuftan@gmail.com