CLAUDIO SCHUFTAN
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Let’s face it, elites are not really interested in the development of rural infrastructures that can and will eventually lead to local and national food security. Expressing such an inconvenient truth may be unpopular, but it is indispensable if there is to be a call for change. The sense of urgency over the growing hunger and malnutrition situation has to sink into the heads of still unwilling leaders. The time for declarations of intent is over. Ultimately, what we have to tackle is the lack of democratic structures, which is putting both remedial and preventive actions on hold. Considering the dire consequences, the question is not whether the needed solutions are too expensive, but whether it will be too expensive not to 3 do anything. Governments have to protect, respect and fulfill the human right to nutrition of their own citizens – and they are not going to do so without some mechanism to hold them accountable.
The Roots of the Crisis
The latest and ongoing concomitant financial and food crises are the result of an economic and political system that favors economic growth over equitable social and economic development. They highlight some of the most shameful contradictions of our time: The year 2008 saw more than 854 million poor people living in hunger at a time of record global harvests and profits for the world’s major agribusiness 4 corporations. To date, more than a billion people do not have enough to eat.
The still lingering global food crisis is not being caused by actual food shortages, but is more a crisis of food-price inflation that has exacerbated already existing hunger and poverty and has created new vulnerabilities. The soaring prices of staple food hit not only the urban poor, but also the numerous poor farmers who are net food buyers as well. Contrary to what one might think, higher prices have not benefited small farmers. They are in no position to respond to market signals and will face new challenges as the value of land rises and competition increases. Further investments in agriculture have always been asked for, but purely speculative investments are hardly what the development community had in mind.
Several causes of this ongoing trend can be identified: the protectionist strategy imposed in Europe and the United States incorporating massive subsidy payments to their agribusiness corporations, the emergence of a middle class in India and China, which has led to a significant change in diets, including more meat consumption, on a large scale. Other causes include: the increase in oil prices, which are passed on to consumers and make agricultural inputs and production more expensive, the growing demand for agro-fuel, water scarcity, the loss of arable land, and the speculation in food markets.
Impact on the Lives of Poor Families
The food crisis is generating reallocations in household spending, which are having a cascading effect, especially, on the lives of poor families. Vulnerable groups like children, women and minorities are particularly affected.
Their access to food, health services and education is compromised. Some other probable consequences could involve damage to the social fabric due to the effect of the crisis on family support systems, increased domestic 5 violence, child neglect, as well as abandonment of children by families no longer able to cope. Rising food prices lead to low household food purchasing power and reduce households’ dietary diversity. This results in increased micronutrient malnutrition. Consumers are forced to spend a much larger share of their income on food. The same is true for the numerous developing countries that import a sizeable part of their grain
needs. This higher expenditure affects their national budget and consequently the supply of services to the poor segments of the population. These countries’ options are restricted by their limited access to foreign financing, low reserve cushions and high external or public debt burdens. However, only insignificant external financing which could help them adjust has been made available. This is further exacerbated by the cuts in funding of food aid agencies, which has forced them to reduce their activities. This has had very serious nutrition and public health
implications and is clearly a threat to the right to nutrition.
The food crisis has had widespread detrimental effects on the health of many individuals worldwide. Reduced micronutrient and calorie intake have resulted in well-known problems, such as iron deficiency, anemia, low birth weights, stunted growth of children, and their consequences on wellbeing. The consequences are strongest for breastfeeding mothers, resulting in declines in maternal nutrition. It is important to note that the adequacy of nutrition of young children cannot be separated from the adequacy of their mother’s diet.
The Crisis Seen Through a Human Rights Perspective
The global food crisis must be treated, not as a natural disaster, but as a threat to the right to nutrition for millions of individuals. It is thus essential to focus on the root causes underlying the lack of access to food and inadequate nutrition, as well as pay more attention to the negative repercussions of the current situation on specific groups, not only children, but the elderly, the marginalized, minorities, and people living with disabilities.
The human rights framework compels us to identify the most vulnerable groups in society by studying patterns of discrimination, as well as the relevant actors (rights holders and duty bearers, including those in the private sector) and the gaps in their authority and resources. It also requires us to analyze the underlying social determinants of vulnerability (exclusion from policy formulation, no access to land, to property and to inheritance; lack of productive and economic resources; unemployment; no access to credit; gross social protection gaps; etc.), as well as the programs in place that either enable or constrain the realization of one’s right to food.
This process calls on us to strengthen the capacity of duty bearers, so that they can fulfill their obligations to respect, protect and fulfill the right to nutrition of their citizens. On the other hand, rights holders have to be empowered to claim their rights. This requires monitoring progress on the implementation of ad-hoc interventions using clear, targeted indicators and benchmarks that ensure the accountability of all duty bearers and access to remedies for victims of violations of this right.
To address the looming crisis, governments must be responsible for their citizens and their taxpayers. They cannot act on the basis of charity or isolated interventions, since these do not really fulfill their obligations. National governments have a major role to play and should not pass the responsibility on to foreign aid. They need to increase their investments in the food and nutrition system, not only to raise agricultural productivity (by improving rural infrastructures and market access for small farmers), but also to act on the economic and social determinants of rural poverty and malnutrition. They can do this by expanding social protection interventions, especially in relation to maternal and child nutrition, to health and to care. Seeking international loans and grants can seem attractive in this emergency, but it will ultimately increase the debt burden, which will prevent governments from providing social protection in the future.
The Time to Act Is Now
A myriad of concrete responses for preventing hunger and malnutrition can be found in the literature, for example, supporting the poorest people via cash transfers or vouchers, risk mitigation and insurance schemes to help farmers dealing with unpredictable price drops, reviewing the debts of food importing countries so as to provide them with budget support, scrapping food import tariffs, targeting food price subsidies, facilitating access to credit,
and creating employment. Furthermore, some measures are specifically designed to improve nutrition, for example, food supplementation during the last trimester of pregnancy and during lactation, promotion of breastfeeding to 24 months (exclusively, for the first six months), complementary feeding for the age group 6-24 months, a higher number of daycare centers with child feeding capacity, access to primary health care and to clean water, public awareness campaigns (especially on immunizations and sanitation issues), mechanisms to reduce existing gender imbalances especially in intra-household access to food, subsidized vitamin, mineral supplements and food fortification (support for the distribution systems of iodine, iron, vitamin A and zinc), and school feeding programs.
These measures should be embedded in a human rights framework. For example:
· School feeding programs should rely more on locally produced foods, building on the strengths of local farmers;
· Fortified products should be produced and distributed locally, contributing to local economic development;
· Day care centers should be set up to address the specific needs of women and should be properly monitored;
· Women should be able to enjoy the right to breastfeed their babies at the work place.
The question is, which of these strategies are politically feasible in each country? There is no quick fix to these problems, but it is no longer tolerable, and it is even criminal, to simply carry on in the same old way, tackling only the immediate crises, when in fact, these feed on chronic, well known situations of macro and micro nutrition deficiency.
Therefore, to safeguard the principle of concomitantly acting on food, health and care, and to reestablish the rights of family members, which have now been further violated by the crisis, governments should urgently implement the following – keeping in mind that each country’s situation is unique:
-Subsidize public health care to help alleviate the impact of the crisis on mothers, children and minorities;
-Restore commensurate family income flows – especially the income of female household members, which is more directly linked to better nutrition;
-Ensure that private investments neither displace communities from their land nor degrade natural resources, but instead promote small-scale farmers, sustainable and agro-ecological production systems and develop effective accountability systems at national and international level in order to curtail the growing corporate control over the food system;
-Develop food markets in a way that rewards sustainable practices by applying special safeguard measures to protect consumers from price volatility, as well as in ways that favor the adoption of healthy dietary patterns instead of falling into monotonous and fast food diets of high energy and low nutrient density;
-Revise local and national policies to protect customary land tenure, women’s access to land, communal use of land and peasant-based production;
-Focus investments on food, health and care interventions following local priorities identified through participatory and transparent processes; the communities themselves are best able to identify the most vulnerable and the best able help to address their needs;
-Continued monitoring and analysis of the evolving global food security and local nutrition situation;
-Seek partnerships with local and foreign actors as well as NGOs in the implementation and monitoring of food, health and care programs;
-Provide information and adequate institutional mechanisms to strengthen the ability of civil society organizations to effectively participate in nutrition related policy decision making and to challenge decisions that threaten their rights;
-Implement recourse mechanisms to which people can resort in cases where their right to nutrition is not being guaranteed;
-Set up needed support mechanisms for children without family support (orphanages, safe houses for refugees), and other general social supports (e.g., for domestic violence mitigation) and supports for overall child protection 6 (e.g., programs against child exploitation);
-Implement the key recommendations made in the World Health Organization (WHO) report on the social 7 determinants of health.
Conclusions
All levels of government have legally binding obligations to fulfill the right to nutrition of their citizens and to implement policies that respond to needs while, at the same time, protecting the environment. It is also the duty of the rights holders (citizens) to demand accountability and enforcement of their right to nutrition. This is the only way we can ensure that governments live up to their responsibilities. Only strong popular pressure will enable the changes needed to eradicate hunger, malnutrition and poverty. Growing mobilization efforts and strong pressure
from civil society, including labor unions, farmer and fisherfolk organizations, indigenous people, and women, as well as other broad-based social movements, are indispensable for changing the prevailing power structures and 8 policies that dominate today’s decision making.
As readers of this article, we are counting on you to become involved proactively in advocacy by demanding that the measures discussed here be implemented. You are best able to judge what your governments and national civil society organizations are doing or not doing, and you must act.