The 2011 edition of the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch identifies accountability as the most immediate challenge to the fight against hunger. Human rights and state obligations go hand in hand – rights can only be realized when they are effectively enforced. This is sadly not the situation in many countries, as the case studies in this edition of the Watch illustrate.
Violations mentioned in the publication include the forced eviction of communities from their lands, the pollution of water supplies and food export dumping. Carried out with impunity by the senior executives of transnational corporations in distant wealthy countries, these acts go unpunished while the victims are left without recourse.
Self-regulatory monitoring measures are clearly not an effective brake on corporate greed. The existence of frameworks of international human rights law and declarations, including the Millennium Development Goals, are useless without effective accountability mechanisms. Accountability mechanisms include constitutional and legislative reviews, assessments of global nutrition strategies, measures to prevent gender discrimination, environmental impact assessments, laws against land-grabbing, evaluations of welfare systems and precise descriptions regarding extraterritorial state obligations and other obligations related to corporations.
People must have the capacity and tools to hold state actors accountable, however, the international community must also bear some responsibility.
In too many cases corporations in the Global North are not sufficiently regulated by states, and their impunity leads to a repetition of the same abusive behavior.
The Right to Food and Nutrition Watch contains two sections:
1. The first section addresses how the right to food can be claimed. It includes detailed case studies of vulnerable groups, such as women, suggests indicators for risk monitoring and presents recommendations on how chains of accountability might be established between citizens, governments and donor agencies. This section also reviews progress towards the justiciability of economic, social, and cultural rights. It looks at strategies for addressing barriers to accountability, including effective interventions by peasant movements such as La Via Campesina’s adoption of the Declaration of Rights of Peasants – Women and Men.
2. The second section contains country and regional level case studies that focus on right to food and nutrition accountability. These 15 cases in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia provide valuable insight through the circumstances and experiences of communities. In many instances, the Watch brings to light ill-conceived development policies and exploitative practices such as landgrabbing, cash-cropping and financial speculation on agricultural products.
Five key conclusions emerge from this issue of the Watch:
• The existence of a genuine world-wide right to food movement;
• The importance of access to justice for those struggling for their right to food and nutrition;
• An urgent need for increased right to food accountability on the part of state and non-state actors;
• Recognition of the link between chronic hunger and the impunity of right to food violations;
• The identification of steps to strengthen accountability, namely the leading role of rights-holders, the development of frameworks and the formulation of a global civil society agenda to address these issues.
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