United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

We have had the chance to meet or exchange emails, directly or via my team, since I was appointed by the Human Rights Council of the United Nations as Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

I am delighted to announce the launch of a new website which will keep you informed about the activities linked to the mandate. It will help you to keep track of developments in the large number of areas which have an impact on the enjoyment of the right to food: international trade and the role of agribusiness; food aid and development cooperation; the rights of land users and access to land; access to inputs for agriculture and intellectual property rights; legislative frameworks implementing the right to food; or the impact of climate change on the right to food.

Almost one billion people are hungry in the world today. Increased volatility of prices on international markets, climate change and desertification, and increased competition between feed, food and fuel, threaten to make this situation even worse in the future. At the same time, there is a shared understanding among all those who care about this situation that a return to business as usual is not a solution. We have a unique opportunity to change the existing state of things, if we take seriously the many signs, including the recent global food crisis, which demonstrate that the current food system has failed. This system must be fundamentally rethought: it has led to one billion hungry people and to similar rates of obesity; it is neither socially nor environmentally sustainable; it must be changed.

It is important to recognise that policies should be put in place in order to ensure food security for all. It is even better to insist that each individual has a right to adequate food, grounded in international law, and that States have corresponding obligations. Most actors now accept that we need to rebuild the system by taking the realization of the right to food as a departure point: indeed, in the speech he delivered at the Madrid High-Level Meeting on Food Security for All, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon suggested that, in developing actions to react to the global food crisis, we needed to rely on the right to food ‘as a basis for analysis, action and accountability’.

I am equally convinced that the right to food framework can constitute a useful tool as to how States and international organizations can best confront the impacts of the global food crisis.

I would also like to seize this opportunity to announce the creation of an Advisory Board to the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur, including Smita Narula, Raj Patel, Sanjay Reddy, Jo Swinnen and Judi Wangalwa Wakhungu. I am most grateful to these individuals, highly recognized experts in their fields, for having agreed to share their time and expertise in order to support the mandate. Needless to say, the members of this advisory board are not bound by the positions I take; and the views I adopt as Special Rapporteur are developed independently from the input they provide.

It is my hope that the new website which is being launched shall contribute to the efforts of the defenders of the right to food throughout the world, and shall strengthen their link to the mandate. The website shall be updated on a daily basis.

The website shall provide easy access to all information related to the mandate, including:
- official reports, such as the report on my mission to the World Trade Organization which was presented at the March session of the Human Rights Council
- documents issued on special occasions, such as the conclusions I draw from the Madrid High-Level Meeting on Food Security for All
- the calendar of my past and future activities.

I welcome your comments, and look forward for a fruitful collaboration in the upcoming months.

Sincerely,

Olivier De Schutter
UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food