ABSTRACT
In a 2012 interim report, Olivier De Schutter – then Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food – drew a link between fisheries governance and advancing food security so as to reduce hunger. The Voluntary Guidelines on small-scale fisheries combine such tentative forms of interaction into a merry amalgamation of concepts and perspectives. Using the notion of food sovereignty as a foil, we argue that both the law of the sea nor the human right to food tackles the root causes of hunger and poverty, and hence that they might be better understood as functionally in parallel than functionally distinct. In contrast to discussions of explicit norm conflict and hierarchy, we have presented the relationship between the law of the sea and the human right to food as one of informal regime interaction.
