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UN report on covid's impact on food security and nutrition

Urgent global action is needed to tackle increasing threats to the right to food in the post pandemic food crisis. Communities have adapted in order to survive while governments around the world have yet to agree on a coherent international response. The UN special rapporteur on the right to food highlights the structural constraints to a effective response and how a just transition to agroecology is the right way forward.

FIAN International welcomes the launch of the UN Special Rapporteur's report and was happy to contribute to the participatory process which led to its completion. 

We particularly welcome the conclusions and recommendations on the urgency of starting a medium- and long-term global transformation of food systems and to establish an international debt relief mechanism which “should include formal debt write-downs and cancellation of debt stock owed to both sovereign and private creditors." As the report underlines debt relief should not be accompanied by structural and macroeconomic conditionalities that limit public spending or by other austerity measures.

FIAN also supports the call to extend pandemic-era policies that strengthen the realization of the right to food and convert them into permanent programmes, and that member states should develop action plans on the right to food based on the principles of solidarity, self-sufficiency and dignity.

The report also includes the following important recommendations:

Corporate Accountability: Negotiate, adopt and ratify a legally binding instrument on transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights.

Right to land: Protect and support land rights and enact genuine agrarian reform, as they are central issues to any discussion of climate change and food security. Also, protect land and environment defenders and eliminate acts of killing, criminalization, harassment and discrimination against them.

Trade: Terminate the WTO Agreement on Agriculture and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights as soon as possible, and in 2024, negotiate a set of trade principles based on the right to food.

Read the full report here: https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/a77177-right-food-and-covid-19-pandemic-interim-report-special