ABSTRACT
In 1984 the editors of one of the earliest books on the human right to adequate food said:
At the conclusion of the World Food Conference held in Rome 1974 the governments of the world proclaimed “that within a decade no child will go to bed hungry, that no family will fear for its next day’s bread, and that no human being’s future and capacities will be stunted by malnutrition.”
As that decade comes to a close the tragic reality is that little, if any, progress has been made toward meeting those goals. During the target year of 1984, as during every other year since the Conference, literally millions of children have starved to death, tens of millions have gone to bed hungry, and malnutrition continues to afflict hundreds of millions of people in all parts of the world. These statistics make hunger by far the most flagrant and widespread of all human rights abuses. (Alston and Tomaševski 1984, 7)
