The human right to food: ‘Voluntary guidelines’ negotiations

This chapter examines the limits and possibilities of the human right to food as a source of resistance against neoliberal globalization. Enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the human right to food reflected the promise of the post-Second World War project of international development to secure basic human necessities and welfare on a global scale. Its contemporary significance derives from the failure and abandonment of this project in favour of a more disciplinary form of capitalist development that subjects the provisioning of basic necessities to market principles (Gill and Bakker 2003). The idea of food as a human right reveals a fundamental contradiction of neoliberal socioeconomic arrangements: the widespread persistence of hunger alongside unprecedented material abundance and productive capacities.