PRESS BRIEFING BY SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON RIGHT TO FOOD

PRESS BRIEFING BY SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON RIGHT TO FOOD

In an era of both increased riches and increased misery, feeding the world’s people could not be left to market forces alone, according to Jean Ziegler, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

“There has to be a right to food and a national and international mechanism to make it realizable and justiciable,” he said.  Mr. Ziegler was at Headquarters to present the first report on behalf of such a right to the General Assembly.  In April 2000 in what he called an “epistemological eruption,” the United Nations Commission on Human Rights decided that the right should exist. 

Before that date, the market was supposed to take care of that fundamental need, he said, with aid organizations supplementing in the case of a market disruption, that is, a humanitarian catastrophe.  Countries he called the most progressive among the Group of 77 he mentioned Algeria, Cuba, and Venezuela -- took the lead in advocating for it at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. 

The task of the Special Rapporteur was to elaborate this new international norm along with the mechanisms –- necessary institutions and monitoring, for example –- which could lend reality to the right to food.  It was now time for him to explain to the Assembly how that mandate would be fulfilled.

The current situation, he said, was that the world was overflowing with riches and produced more than enough food to provide each person with the necessary average of 2,700 calories.  The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, in fact, estimated that enough food could be produced to feed 12 billion people.  Yet, every seven seconds a child below ten died of hunger, and right now, 850 million people were gravely undernourished to the extent that their brain functioning, growth, eyesight or other functions were permanently stunted.

Such misery and inequality, he said, helped produce breeding grounds for fanaticism and terrorism.  He was horrified by the atrocities of 11 September; however, the global coalition against terrorism needed to be complemented by a global coalition against hunger.

In that regard, he turned to what he found to be a tragic mistake in America’s operation in Afghanistan –- the simultaneous dropping of bombs and food aid.  “One bomb, one bread, one bomb, one bread,” he described it, with the food coloured the same yellow as the cluster bombs, in aerodynamic packages that descend like snow flakes over the landscape.

“This has to stop,” he said.  In an area where food was likely to land in minefields or be confiscated by those with the guns, humanitarian agencies only dropped food into controlled zones where a reception team then distributed it.  Otherwise, women and children could be horribly injured or the food would not get to those who needed it.

Even worse, the credibility of all future humanitarian aid, he said, was endangered by the airforce drops, which violated the three criteria for such aid.  That is, it must be neutral, impartial and inspired by humanitarian concerns.  Otherwise, humanitarian workers were falsely suspected of being associated with one of the parties in a conflict.  Already such suspicions had contributed to the deaths of agency workers in places such as Timor and Burundi.

To get food to the seven million people in Afghanistan who needed it, the air war should stop at the earliest possible moment, he said in reply to questions.  Winter would arrive in two weeks and distribution would be impossible in large areas of the country.  Even though the Taliban behaved scandalously, and a small percentage of the food packages might actually feed people, the damage done by the simultaneous food and bomb drops was too great for it to continue.

Asked whether there were people who had actually been injured gathering the food packages, he said there were some cases, not thousands, but he did not have the specifics on hand.  In addition, whether the criteria for humanitarian aid he described could be deemed international law depended on which legal reference work was consulted and whether or not General Assembly resolutions were considered legal documents.  The problem was not a matter of simply military planes being used for humanitarian aid, which was accepted.  It was that parties to ongoing combat were delivering such aid, in a partisan manner, along with ordinance.

On Afghanistan, the views he expressed were his own, Mr. Ziegler said in response to other queries.  It was important that the Special Rapporteur retain his independence.  Otherwise, he was useless.  However, he did not work alone.  He had extensive communications with Non-Governmental-Organizations, and worked with a team, in conjunction with the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and within the spirit of remarks made by the Secretary-General.

Finally, a correspondent asked about the goal to halve hunger in the world by the year 2015, set by the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome.  He replied that that goal was totally unrealistic if current practices continued.  In fact, even a Rome Plus Five Summit, which was supposed to take place this week, had been postponed. 

There was some local progress, he said, where innovative methods of distribution and compensation were being tried, in Venezuela, Niger and South Africa, for example.  But if corruption, wars, stock market speculation, and monopolistic practices continued, among other obstacles, “there would be no victory against the plague of hunger.”

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