ABSTRACT
The right to food, however, is an accepted principle in international law, legally binding for the 162 states that have ratified the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the subject of various more recent specifications of states’ obligations (although obviously not ‘a guarantee’, as Trauger observes). Several governments have incorporated it into law as well, some at the level of national constitutions (Golay 2011; Ziegler et al. 2011). While food sovereignty has also become a constitutional norm in various countries, as several contributions in this collection discuss (e.g. Giunta, McKay et al.), the concept is far from enjoying the legitimacy among international and national policy-makers that is the case with the right to food. Moreover, even when food sovereignty has achieved constitutional or other legal recognition, it has often been in combination with the right to food. Advocates of the latter approach have generally neglected to consider access to productive resources – and distributional questions more broadly – as part of the right to food. Food sovereignty supporters, in contrast, have given these elements a central place in their analyses. Nonetheless, the vastly greater international legitimacy of the right to food, as opposed to food sovereignty, suggests that it may be a more effective advocacy tool for building consensus and for beginning to resolve urgent crises related to food and agriculture – at least until food sovereignty makes further gains (see, for example, the analysis of the engagement of the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, in Burnett and Murphy’s discussion). As McMichael indicates, in his contribution to this collection, even the FAO’s Committee on World Food Security, which opened to significant civil society participation in 2009 as a result of pressure from the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, lacks explicit references to food sovereignty in its program and mandate. This observation echoes Beuchelt and Virchow (2012, 262-3), who point out that
The International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Bank have not worked further with the concept of food sovereignty. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) also has no official definition, but the concept of food sovereignty is at least mentioned in some documents. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) appears to deal more frequently with the concept of food sovereignty but no official FAO document contains the concept either… . The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) seems the only UN body which intensively discussed within its documents and meetings the concept of food sovereignty.
