Right to Food
RFK Center 's Right to Food Laureate-to-Laureate Project focuses on the international community and corporate actors in the current global food crisis and preventing the realization of the right to food. The project focuses on Haiti and Brazil, addressing their unique food needs and using these countries as case studies to encourage the broader "freedom from hunger" movement to reorient itself to recognize food as a human right and to work within a rights-based framework to realize this right.
The right to adequate food has been established in international law under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, among others. Through affirming the right to food directly, the right to an adequate standard of living, the right to health and the right to life, these conventions provide for obligations of state parties to respect the right to adequate food. Despite this, over 1 billion people worldwide go hungry each day. The current food crisis threatens to put more people in jeopardy of hunger as food prices surge (an increase of 83% over the last three years according to World Bank estimate. In several countries, the inability to acquire basic food staples has led to protests over food prices. In light of this and the growing water crisis and concerns related to global climate change, the hunger and the right to food is likely to become one of the most pressing human rights concerns of our time.
RFK Center is working with two of its Laureates to assess the role the international community and corporate actors play in contributing to the crisis and advocating for changes that will lead to the realization of the right to food for all.
Submission to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food: Protecting the Right to Food: A Brief Analysis of the Impact of Agribusiness on Small Farmers in Brazil
Announcement: New Report on the Right to Food in Haiti
Laureates Involved
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