Re-thinking farming

The root cause of hunger and malnutrition for millions of people worldwide is not in natural disasters or food shortages, according to the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch 2012. The report describes people who continue to suffer hunger despite their efforts to farm and cultivate their own food, as “victims of selfish interests”.

The RTFMN Watch outlined seven case studies of individual countries, one from each continent, in which the right to food and nutrition are violated due to ineffective legal structures. It also made the direct connection between these violations and the states’ unethical seizures of natural resources and land grabbing, as seen in the case studies of Mexico and the Arab Spring.

According to the Watch, there is a direct correlation between power and food, in that those with power never hunger, and those without any voice in decision-making have lost individual sovereignty over their own nutrition. The report defines food sovereignty as “the right of Peoples to define their own policies and strategies for the sustainable production, distribution, and consumption of food, with respect for their own cultures and their own systems of managing natural resources and rural areas, and is considered to be a precondition for Food Security.”