This book documents and analyzes the experiences of the UN's first Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. It highlights the conceptual advances in the legal understanding of the right to food in international human rights law, as well as analyzes key practical challenges through experiences in 11 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

While the right to adequate food is often discussed in the context of developing countries, especially in situations where access to adequate food is a problem on a larger scale, this book focusses on the right to food in two Western countries in which theoretically the circumstances allow this right to be enjoyed by each individual. Through a legal comparative study, the enforceability of the right to food is compared between the Netherlands and Belgium in light of the current UN Human Rights system. There seems to be a difference between what the countries do, what they say they do, and what they should do on the matter. As it appears, the coincidental constitutional circumstances mainly determine the enforceability of the right to food, rather than the content of the human right in itself. This book includes a thorough analysis of suitable comparative legal methodology and the embedment of the right to food in the UN human right system. Furthermore, for both countries, an in-depth analysis of the case law on the right to food (mostly concerning the status of foreigners), the constitutional context in which the Judiciary operates, and the relevant UN reports and subsequent procedures are outlined. Finally, recommendations are made to both countries and the relevant UN Committees.

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In the world’s most affluent and food secure societies, why is it now publicly acceptable to feed donated surplus food, dependent on corporate food waste, to millions of hungry people? While recognizing the moral imperative to feed hungry people, this book challenges the effectiveness, sustainability and moral legitimacy of globally entrenched corporate food banking as the primary response to rich world food poverty. It investigates the prevalence and causes of domestic hunger and food waste in OECD member states, the origins and thirty-year rise of US style charitable food banking, and its institutionalization and corporatization. It unmasks the hidden functions of transnational corporate food banking which construct domestic hunger as a matter for charity thereby allowing indifferent and austerity-minded governments to ignore increasing poverty and food insecurity and their moral, legal and political obligations, under international law, to realize the right to food. The book’s unifying theme is understanding the food bank nation as a powerful metaphor for the deep hole at the centre of neoliberalism, illustrating: the de-politicization of hunger; the abandonment of social rights; the stigma of begging and loss of human dignity; broken social safety nets; the dysfunctional food system; the shift from income security to charitable food relief; and public policy neglect. It exposes the hazards of corporate food philanthropy and the moral vacuum within negligent governments and their lack of public accountability. The advocacy of civil society with a right to food bite is urgently needed to gather political will and advance ‘joined-up’ policies and courses of action to ensure food security for all.

In The Right to Food and the World Trade Organization’s Rules on Agriculture, Rhonda Ferguson explores the relationship between the right to food and agricultural trade. The analysis is situated within the context of debates surrounding the fragmentation of international law.

This book introduces the human right to adequate food and nutrition as evolving concept and identifies two structural "disconnects" fueling food insecurity for a billion people, and disproportionally affecting women, children, and rural food producers: the separation of women’s rights from their right to adequate food and nutrition, and the fragmented attention to food as commodity and the medicalization of nutritional health. Three conditions arising from these disconnects are discussed: structural violence and discrimination frustrating the realization of women’s human rights, as well as their private and public contributions to food and nutrition security for all; many women’s experience of their and their children’s simultaneously independent and intertwined subjectivities during pregnancy and breastfeeding being poorly understood in human rights law and abused by poorly-regulated food and nutrition industry marketing practices; and the neoliberal economic system’s interference both with the autonomy and self-determination of women and their communities and with the strengthening of sustainable diets based on democratically governed local food systems. The book calls for a social movement-led reconceptualization of the right to adequate food toward incorporating gender, women’s rights, and nutrition, based on the food sovereignty framework.