The US must acknowledge the right to food in order to transform its broken food system in the post-pandemic era and make it more resilient in the face of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss, according to a United Nations hunger expert.
“Whether we’re talking about right to food, food justice or food sovereignty, there has been growing momentum over the last 10 years to understand that food is not just something we just leave to be determined by what is available or by corporations or the status quo,” said Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food.
Last month, Fakhri presented a report on the right to food – which would entail that adequate food be available and accessible to all people – as a means of food system recovery and transformation to the UN general assembly.
“People are really mobilizing around food to say food is political, cultural and social, and we should be able to decide for ourselves what counts as good food,” he said.
The right to food, which can also be characterized as a right to culturally appropriate nutrition that a person needs to live a healthy and active life, is recognized in the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is enshrined in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. However, it has not historically been a mainstream concept in the US.
In 2021, the US and Israel were the only countries to vote against a United Nations committee’s draft that asserted food as a human right. The draft also expressed alarm that the number of people lacking access to adequate food rose by 320 million to 2.4 billion in 2020 – nearly one-third of the world’s population. The US said the resolution contained “many unbalanced, inaccurate, and unwise provisions the United States cannot support”.
“I wonder if [the right to food] doesn’t have an older tradition in the US because of the way US culture understands rights and the way the constitution plays a particular role,” said Fakhri, who is also a University of Oregon law professor. “Unfortunately, in the US, there’s this reluctance to engage with the sort of basic necessities of everyday life as the starting point.”
Yet the movement has gained popularity in the US and abroad in recent years. In 2021, Maine voters approved a constitutional amendment that guarantees a “natural, inherent and unalienable right” to food. That same year, Liverpool became the first “right to food city” in the United Kingdom. In June, Geneva became the first Swiss canton to solidify the right to food in its constitution after a popular vote.
In 2022, 44.2 million people in the US lived in food-insecure households and 49 million people turned to food assistance for extra help.
When the pandemic triggered a global food crisis that affected rich and poor countries alike, people turned to farmers’ markets, smaller businesses and social enterprises to express their right to food, according to Fakhri. After witnessing how corporate-dominated supply chains fell apart, people took care of each other and some even began growing their own food.
In his report, Fakhri details how the formal end of the pandemic has made the food crisis that started in 2020 worse in part because governments ended Covid-era policies that ensured people had access to food amid the rise of global inflation, food prices and conflict.
To recover from the current food crisis and prepare for the future, Fakhri has outlined a three-part interconnected strategy that includes responding to the situation with a national plan, developing an international coordinated response to the food crisis, and transforming food systems to make them more resilient to climate change and prevent biodiversity loss.
He sees universal school meals as one way to transform the US system since the efficacy of the no-questions-asked policy is already proved. During the pandemic, free school meals reduced hunger and destigmatized the act of receiving them. (Republicans blocked another extension of the program last summer.)
Free school meals can also support local food systems and offer stability in precarious times. “Schools are places for learning, but they’re institutions of care,” he said. “It’s where we send our kids to be taken care of, and it’s where we take care of each other’s kids.”
Experts say schools with free meals have fewer disciplinary problems and tend to have higher test scores. California and eight others states including Maine, New Mexico, Colorado and Massachusetts have implemented free school meals, and advocates continue to push for a federal policy.
Fakhri’s report details other pandemic-era measures, such as direct cash transfers, support for Indigenous people and small-scale food producers, and enhanced worker protections that he says should become permanent programs.
He also calls for food systems to move away from industrial agriculture toward sustainable agriculture and food systems, supporting local markets and depending less on corporations as ways to reconfigure food systems to support the right to food.
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Fakhri said the US has plenty of flaws in its food system, starting with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). “The USDA has a long history of racism, whether it’s using the Homestead Act to displace Indigenous people or the continued racism against Black farmers,” Fakhri said.
“The USDA subsidizes things that one could call ‘edible products’, but it’s not good food,” he said. “They don’t significantly subsidize fruits and vegetables even though we know that’s the best thing we could be eating more of.”
Fakhri also said that the government agency spends much of its money subsidizing corporations, which he sees as dominating food governance rather than being governed.
Corporations began dominating the food and agriculture sector in developed nations in the 1960s, and the consolidation of corporate power during the last several decades changed all aspects of the US food system. Today, a handful of corporations control our food, which damages rural communities, local economies, the environment and public health, according to Farm Aid.
“[Corporations] are profit-generating schemes, and the USDA is subsidizing in a way to prioritize certain commodity crops that is not necessarily making people in the US healthier and not creating a good relationship between us and the land and water,” Fakhri said. “Because corporations continue to gain power and it’s so hard to hold them accountable, we have a food system that’s making us more sick every day.”
He cites the example of genetically modified organisms, which supporters say allows farmers to have predictable crops. Fakhri said they create homogeneity, creating field after field of the same type of plants, which makes them more vulnerable to pests and factors exacerbated by the climate crisis.
“To have this degree of homogeneity is really quite dangerous,” Fakhri said. “It’s bad for the environment and bad for the future of resilient plants.” In addition to damaging the environment, corporations have been falsely attributing price increases to various crises to hide their profiteering, according to the report.
Fakhri believes the next couple of years will be an important period for people and governments to take up the right to food.
“People are watching Maine to see what’s going to happen,” said Fakhri, who expects to see the right to food become policy in other cities, states and countries. “The right to food is the right to celebrate life with people we care about. It’s the right to express our love for each other and our relationship to the land.”