March 7, 2017 - The peoples of the world, in particular in the global south, have been facing increasing levels of violence in different forms, which directly or indirectly have an important bearing on the realization of their human right to adequate food and nutrition (RTFN – Global Network for the Right to Food & Nutrition), and related rights.

The vast majority of violations of the RTFN are associated with acts of commission and omission of State authorities and with abuses and crimes carried out by transnational corporations (TNCs) and other business enterprises. These acts of violence take a variety of different forms: land grabbing, forced evictions, child marriage and gender-based violence, bonded labor, abusive utilization of agrochemicals by agribusiness with detrimental consequences to health and the environment, criminalization of social movement leaders and human rights defenders, ocean and fisheries grabbing, abusive marketing of junk food, and the promotion of climate change.

These violations lead to hunger, malnutrition, loss of livelihoods and reduction in the quality of life, and reflect the lack of peoples’ sovereignty over their own lives and bodies, and states that are indifferent to peoples´ needs and priorities and in consequence do not comply with their human rights obligations internationally assumed.

In the face of these challenges, peoples, communities and grassroots groups have organized in different ways to resist this increasing level of violence perpetrated by powerful actors at global, national and local levels.  Efforts have more recently intensified to build a convergence of struggles for land, water, seeds, food sovereignty, health, and dignified labor conditions that departs from local, national and regional processes as, for example, in West Africa and Latin America.

The Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition (GNRTFN), launched in 2013, plays a supportive role in many of these processes. It sees the human rights framework as having a fundamental role in further guiding and facilitating the unification of popular struggles, in strengthening the capacity of people to hold governments accountable and in promoting policy coherence. Such coherent policies should serve to the progressive realization of the human right to adequate food and nutrition, and related rights, and for increased food sovereignty for people, communities and countries.

Background: Why an Alternative Monitoring Tool?

Since 2000, and the development of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), monitoring and data generation have become an increasingly important tool for underpinning policy measures and interventions- but it is always important to question data- where it comes from, what is measures and who it benefits. The problem with monitoring hunger is that, as a concept, it is something that can be defined and measured in different ways. The measurement often serves specific policy purposes, which in effect deeply influences the methods (i) and the results. Different bodies from the World Bank, the International Food Policy and Research Institute (the Global Hunger Index), UNICEF and WHO, and of course the FAO (State of Food Insecurity) issued different measurements and methods for calculating the number of world’s hungry and malnourished people. All of these methods, while generating interesting information, fail to paint a full picture of how we measure hunger, neglecting issues of distribution, not being sensitive to short terms shocks, and failing to capture the multiple dimensions, root causes and consequences of hunger.(ii)

Existing monitoring systems of food insecurity are largely based on quantitative measuring of calories intake, income or food related expenditures, agricultural production, inter alia, focusing on outcomes at the individual and household level. These monitoring systems rarely address issues of discrimination linked to socio-economic status, gender and race/ethnicity, disenfranchisement, patterns of ownership and access to land, labor and capital and more qualitative assessments of wellbeing and human capabilities. On the other hand those affected by food insecurity and malnutrition tend to be mere objects to be monitored instead of subjects who should have a say in defining what should be monitored and how, or the policy interventions designed with this data.

Human rights instruments (iii) are increasingly being utilized by social movements not only to defend their members from major abuses and human rights violations, but also to develop public policies and laws, which allow the structural conditions to exercise social human rights. The human right to food framework has been incorporated at national level as well as at regional and international level. This advance and possible impact on the quality of life of people are not captured by the existing monitoring reports on food and nutrition, security  for instance the SOFI. In fact, they do not include indicators that monitor popular participation, governance, accountability and policy coherence with human rights, nor do they correlate the other factors that affect the realization of the right to food and nutrition.

Monitoring in the Wake of the SDGs

The formal adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development(iv)  marks the beginning of a new phase of monitoring development - with all countries now working to translate the SDGs into their respective national contexts through the development of a national action plan. The implementation of the SDGs will be monitored through a set of some 233 global indicators (v) adopted by the UN General Assembly in the first half of 2016. The monitoring process will be done at national, regional and global levels, as well as around thematic reviews.

As the indicators to measure the progress of the SDGs moved forward, it became increasingly clear that they will fail to meet the needs and demands of civil society. The indicators neglect to integrate the human rights approach, downplays the legal obligations of human rights standards, promotes a dangerous shift towards “multistakeholderism” over rights-holders, and further releases the state as a duty bearer in upholding human rights obligations. The implementation of the SDGs risks to promote corporate led “development” schemes and a focus on data-based indicators that do not include those most affected by hunger and malnutrition in assessing progress or the root causes of hunger and malnutrition. The endless focus on hard data collection skews the reality on the ground rather than assessing the structural causes of food and nutrition insecurity such as inequality, poverty and malnutrition, and fails to capture the priority issues of those most affected and subject to human rights violations.(vi)

Despite these challenges, the SDGs will dominate the global discourse and development agenda for the next 15 years, the monitoring around the SDGs should not reduce the actions and priorities of civil society organizations and grassroots movements to hard data sets and clear indicators of international progress. Rather, the grassroots priorities should be brought into the interpretation of the SDGs, reflected in the data that will be collected, and be streamlined in policy decisions.

Challenges for Civil Society

It is important that civil society efforts also fill the gaps left by the SDGs, or the inevitable human rights-based monitoring gaps left by states. It is important for civil society to ask how the operationalization of human rights can guide the implementation of the SDGs, and inversely how the SDGs can be used as a tool towards the operationalization and realization of human rights obligations. There is an impending need for civil society and social movements to monitor these goals- and create methods that support broader based monitoring and advocacy across international mechanisms, regional and local platforms, and provide analysis on the structural causes of human rights violations. This peoples’ monitoring initiative seeks to understand how to promote accountability for human rights within relevant processes- linking up those international bodies and civil society efforts in Rome, Geneva and New York, as well as regional bodies in Africa and the Americas, and ensuring coherence.

From a holistic human rights approach, all goals within the SDGs are important- however our own monitoring effort will directly engage with Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture, but cannot be separated from progress within the others, as the right to food and nutrition cannot be realized in a vacuum. 

The CFS is currently discussing its relationship with the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda- and specifically Goal 2. Promoting the implementation of CFS policies can be understood as the major contribution in advancing the new Sustainable Development Agenda. Furthermore, the CFS innovative monitoring mechanism could be seen as complementary to the SDG monitoring system (heavily based on data and indicators). This complementary function would be fulfilled given its strong focus on direct participation of the primary contributor to food security and the most affected by food insecurity and malnutrition (small scale food producers, workers, and groups most vulnerable to food and nutrition insecurity groups), and due to its qualitative nature. In fact, the CFS monitoring process can complement the quantitative progress tracking with a qualitative assessment of the efficacy of policy instruments aimed at advancing the agenda of food security and nutrition and removing structural obstacles that could hinder the implementation of the new agenda.

The People’s Monitoring Project

In 2004, FAO members states adopted the Voluntary Guidelines to support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security (vii), which should serve to guide states in creating policies that operationalize the right to food, and suggest that States establish mechanisms to monitor the implementation of the guidelines (Guideline 17). In order to produce human rights based monitoring,(viii) the indicators for this alternative monitoring processes were guided and influenced by the Right to Food Guidelines, as well as other human rights-based instruments promoted by civil society within the CFS. Within these, we can mention the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (Tenure Guidelines), the Global Strategic Framework (GSF), and the Framework for Action for Food Insecurity in Protracted Crises; and reflecting the links to the Sustainable Development Goals. This monitoring process seeks to go beyond data collection and the activity of States, and analyze whether or not the state is fulfilling its human rights obligations and the structural issues that violate these rights.

In failing to utilize human rights based indicators, mainstream monitoring also lacks indicators and information that reflect the priorities of grassroots movements. Data is often misleading: how data is collected, how data is presented, and who is behind the collection is not always understood, but what is clear is that peoples’ priorities and needs are not reflected, nor is the situation on the ground.

Mainstream monitoring towards food security and nutrition fails to address the critical question around the social control of the food system, and in particular natural resources (as opposed to nature as a resource or service), and creates inferences and proposes solutions based on the current industrial model of production that feeds a global, and inherently unequal economy. Protecting the human right to food and nutrition, also means supporting small-scale food producers in realizing their livelihoods and accessing natural resources, supporting women’s rights, and creating the conditions in which communities and groups most impacted by food insecurity are at the center of decision making.

Footnotes:

• (i)Edoardo Masset, “A Review of Hunger Indices and Methods to Monitor Country Commitment to Fighting Hunger,“ Food Policy,  vol. 36, no. 1, January 2011.
• (ii) Masset, ibid.
• (iii)Specifically the review processes under the UN Human Rights Council, including the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), the Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and the Universal Periodic Review (UPR).
• (iv)Official information available at: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld
• (v) These indicators are being developed by the Inter Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators for final agreement by the UN Statistical Commission by March 2016 and thereafter adoption by the UNGA.
• (vi) See statement of the Civil Society Mechanism for the Committee on World Food Security, 42nd Session, October 2015: http://www.csm4cfs.org/news/?id=236
• (vii) Voluntary Guidelines to Support to Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security”, adopted by the 127th Session of the FAO Council , November 2004  http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/y7937e/y7937e00.htm
• (viii) For more information on the FIAN approach to rights based monitoring within the bodies of the Human Rights council, please see: Screen State Action against Hunger! How to use the voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food to monitor public policies?, 2007, FIAN International, http://www.fian.org/en/news/article/screen_state_action_against_hunger/  

Global Network for the Right to Food & Nutrition (RTFN)

http://www.righttofoodandnutrition.org/peoples-monitoring-right-food-and-nutrition

Извор: WUNRN – 10.07.2017