A blog from writer, philosopher and Food Ethics Council member Dr Julian Baggini
The right to food has become a key focus of organisations and individuals committed to ending hunger and poor diets as part of a shift to a more sustainable food system. In the UK, the Right To Food UK Commission, based in Parliament, is currently investigating the scale and scope of food poverty and hunger in the nation. But what exactly is the right to food? Does it mean we should all be provided with food to eat, and if so, what kind and by whom? And if it doesn’t mean anyone is obliged to provide food, what does it mean?
The Food Ethics Council previously hosted a webinar to bring some clarity to these issues, with expert panellists Morven McEachern (Professor of Sustainability and Marketing Ethics at Chester Business School) and Tomaso Ferrando (Associate Professor at the University of Antwerp). What follows are my personal reflections on what we learned from the webinar. (I take no credit for the insights gleaned but shoulder full responsibility for any distortions of them.)
Start with what it means to have a right of any kind. There is an idea that rights are somehow natural: we are born with them purely in virtue of being human. However, this view of rights is philosophically controversial. Jeremy Bentham famously called talk of natural rights as “nonsense on stilts”.
Fortunately, we do not need rights to be natural in order for them to be powerful. The alternative view is that rights are granted by humans, to humans and also to animals and the natural world. As Ferrando put it, “when we talk about a right, we’re talking about a legal entitlement.” Rights only exist because they are enshrined in laws.
The fact that rights are based in law rather than nature does not make them weaker. Indeed, it could make them stronger. A natural right that is not recognised by law is impotent. Rights are only as strong as the laws that uphold them.
Many fundamental rights are given the strongest legal protection of all, enshrined in constitutions and international law that then define and shape national legislations. Less important rights, such as certain consumer rights, are guaranteed by specific laws.
So when people call for the right to food to be upheld, what they are usually demanding is that the right is given full legal recognition in national legal frameworks. I say “full” because quite clearly the right is already recognised by international law. Article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food…” It’s also in the 1966 UN International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, article 11 of which says “The States Parties to the present Covenant recognise the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing…” General Comment number 12 on the right to adequate food, issued by the UN’s Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Committee, also defines and specifies the nature of the obligations. So as McEachern says, we already have rights to an adequate supply of food. The problem is that it’s not enforceable.
Enshrining the right to food in national law brings government accountability one step closer, but it is no guarantee that it will be enforced. McEachern pointed out that countries such as India, South Africa and Brazil already have the right to food in national law, yet hunger and malnutrition remain problems in all three. Still, recognising the right at least gives citizens something tangible to appeal to. Ferrando calls it a “lighthouse”, signalling that the right is there and matters.
So how could we make that right enforceable? It seems to me that it is genuinely more difficult to uphold the right to food than it is many other rights. Most legal rights are either entitlements to services or protections. For example, the rights to life and privacy place obligations of non-interference on others that are reasonably clear to identify. The main way in which these rights are upheld is that the threat of prosecution provides an incentive to respect them. Rights to education, health care, housing and water are upheld by the state directly or indirectly providing these services.
The right to food doesn’t neatly fit either category. It is not merely a right to non-interference, upheld as long as people don’t actively deprive others of food. But nor do we expect the state to literally feed us.
This raises difficulties, because as Ferrando pointed out, where there are rights, there are obligations on certain public/state parties to make sure that they are upheld. As Ferrando said, this duty-bearer component is essential.
What, then, are the duties of governments and public bodies with regard to the right to food, if it is not to provide it? In broad terms, as McEachern argued, it is to ensure that everyone has access to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food. Both McEachern and Ferrando reinforced the message of the then UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, that dignity is part of this right. As Ferrando said, “my dignity is breached the moment that I receive food as a donation that has been chosen by someone else, and the only option that I have is to take it or leave it”. It is also an affront to dignity to argue, as the Italian state tried unsuccessfully to do, that serving pork to Muslim detainees in detention centres was acceptable because it was nutritious.
But how should governments uphold this right? When public bodies are actual providers, such as in schools, hospitals and prisons, it’s easy enough to see what the obligations are. Outside of these contexts, there are two main ways in which the state could and should protect the right.
The first relates to the basic ability of citizens to feed themselves by either having the financial capacity or the means to produce their own food. As McEachern said, food poverty is really about poverty, full stop. She pointed out that since 2010, demand for food banks has risen inexorably, with one exception. During the COVID pandemic, there was a dip in demand. The reason for this is simple: during the pandemic there was an uplift in benefit payments. People who previously couldn’t afford food suddenly could.
This is a powerful point. It might seem that making the government responsible for providing us with food is a call for some kind of Soviet-era central state planning. In reality, all it requires is that no one is left without the material means to shop for themselves.
The second key opportunity to enforce the right comes through governments’ responsibility is for the food system as a whole. Even if we eradicated poverty, it would still be difficult for many to feed themselves adequately because in too many parts of the country, the only easily available food is not nutritious. The perverse incentives in food and farming make it cheaper to buy ultra-processed foods than to buy or cook healthier ones.
As Ferrando argued, “there is a lot of state presence behind an individual’s capacity to buy food that is invisible, making healthy food more or less available and accessible. A lot of policies and regulations, in terms of incentives, trade, investments, and labour, define people’s capacity to access or not access food. Around a third of the annual budget of the European Union goes into subsidies to agriculture, defining the food system from production all the way to consumption. So implementing the right to food means making sure that whenever the state intervenes in the food system, it does so in a way that aligns with the social and environmental priorities.”
What exactly governments should do to fix these failings in our food system is a whole other debate, on which there are many different views. The key point, however, is simply to acknowledge that if people are unable to exercise their right to food because of the structure of the food system, then governments have a duty to change it.
Because many of the obstacles to people exercising their right to food are systemic, for the right to be made a reality, all stakeholders in the food system need to be part of the solution. This is not just an issue for food insecurity campaigners, the food industry or government. “Ultimately, we need everyone around the table before we can actually go about addressing the right to food,” says McEachern. Civil society needs to rally around the principle.
Ferrando believes that when the state does fall short of meeting its obligations with regard to the right of food, we have some hope that citizens can hold them to account. Courts around the world have already recognised the right to food. For example, students at the legal clinic at the University of Antwerp have identified at least thirty judicial decisions at regional and national levels that have interpreted and operationalised the right.
Will pressure in the UK for the right to food to be respected rise enough to make a difference? Awareness is certainly increasing. We can hope that we will reach a tipping point, when it is widely recognised that the denial of the right to food is a national disgrace. As one webinar attendee put it, many other social and economic rights and their respective responsibilities are recognised, such as local authorities’ obligation to prevent homelessness and provide of education, and the state’s duty to provide healthcare free at the point of use. We need to get to the point when people realise it is unacceptable that the right to food matters less than these existing entitlements.
Photo by Tom Grünbauer on Unsplash.