Annual Meeting of the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition

In July 2015, Habitat International Coalition took part in the annual meeting of the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition (GNRtFN), held over three days in Kathmandu, Nepal, hosted byFIAN International and FIAN Nepal. The meeting was convened to bring together the partners of the Global Network for discussions, and strategizing future priorities and areas of work.

As with other networks and groups with which HIC affiliates, the GNRtFN seeks to converge struggles and movements on key issues, and promote people’s alternatives. These relationships and spaces of convergence are critical spaces for further our work across issues and sectors, and promoting the full realization of economic, social and cultural rights. For any information about how to be involved with this work with HIC, please contact hlrn@hlrn.org.

At the July 2015 meeting, the participants expressed this common vision in a joint statement that culminated their deliberations and embodies a coherent vision of needed policy alternatives, beginning from the standpoint of the human right to food and nutrition. The full statement is reproduced below:

Statement of the members and friends of the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition

We, the members and friends of the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition (GNRtFN) from social movements and civil society organizations (CSOs), met in Kathmandu for the third global meeting of the network.

Even as we discuss ways to achieve the full realization of the human right to adequate food and nutrition, the threats to food sovereignty and people’s control over resources increase with each passing day.

We are meeting at a moment when the struggle against the corporate capture of the food system, where global trade agreements undermine the rights of people and the capacities of governments to respect, protect and fulfill the human right to adequate food and nutrition, has intensified.

It is a period in which traditional and local indigenous knowledge, practices and foods are replaced by low-quality, ultra-processed food that perpetuate hunger and malnutrition in all of its forms.

The land, water, forests, other natural resources, livelihoods, identity and physical existence of many communities and indigenous peoples are threatened. In many cases, people have paid with their lives in their struggle to secure the right to adequate food and nutrition.

A period in which women continue to have to fight patriarchy in every sphere of their life resulting in the disproportionate load of unpaid care responsibilities at home and affecting their access to education, health care, fair wages, natural resources, and even control over their own bodies and lives.

A period when conflicts, instability, land, ocean, fisheries, rangelands, forests and other resource grabbing, climate change, injustices and economic uncertainties have resulted in unprecedented numbers of people  being displaced and migrating to seek livelihoods and security.

But there is hope, as Nepal, which is recovering from a devastating earthquake, had the first public consultation on 20 July 2015 in hundreds of locations across the country, to debate and deliberate the draft Constitution, which enshrines food sovereignty.

We, the participants of the meeting, reaffirm our commitment to:

1. Support and protect human rights defenders against repression, violence and criminalization to which they are often subjected to;

2. Mobilize network members and friends to strengthen human rights accountability and the application of the human rights based frameworks from the local to the global level;

3. End the impunity of abusers and violators of the human right to adequate food and nutrition and related rights;

4. Proactively promote full and meaningful participation of most affected communities in decision making processes at all levels, from local to global;

5. Promote the inter-dependence and indivisibility of all human rights;

6. Call for an end to all forms of discrimination and violence against women and recognize the critical role that women play in food systems;

7. Develop analyses and advocacy instruments to publicize the network’s concerns and specific struggles against human rights violations;

8. Enact a binding international human rights instrument for the regulation of transnational corporations (TNCs).

9. Promote and protect the human right to adequate food and nutrition in the context of the indivisibility of the human rights of all human beings in particular marginalized populations and groups including, peasants, fisherfolk, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, agriculture and plantation workers, migrants and migrant workers, internally displaced people, refugees and asylum-seekers, Persons with Disabilities (PWDs), people living with HIV/AIDS, Dalits, urban poor, people affected by disasters (both natural and man-made), people living under occupation, religious and ethnic minorities, LGBTQI, and other discriminated communities, and in particular women, elderly, young people and children in these communities;

10. Fight for the full realization of all rights of all women including the right to education, to health, to land, to livelihood and equal pay, to all sexual and reproductive rights, to maternity protection and the right to breastfeed;

11. Promote the full realization of all rights of children in particular in the first 1,000 days of life, within a life cycle approach, by directly tackling the root causes of violations, including by protecting, promoting and supporting optimal breastfeeding and local and culturally adequate complementary feeding;

12. Fight corporate capture in all its forms and across sectors, be it of resources, institutions, policy spaces or structures of governance;

13. Resist and reverse dangers posed to food sovereignty and nutrition by commercialization of malnutrition through Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and multi-stakeholder initiatives;

14. Hold States accountable for their extraterritorial obligations (ETOs) to regulate corporations and financial institutions;

15. Call on academics, researchers and research institutions to generate independent evidence, including and building on people’s traditional knowledge systems;

16. Strive to push governments for policy coherence with the promotion and protection of the human right to adequate food and nutrition;

17. Defend the primacy of human rights over the current global model of development, trade, investment and taxation;

18. Call on all governments to sign and ratify all relevant International Human Rights instruments, including the Optional Protocol of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

We, the friends and members of the GNRtFN, resolve to move towards greater convergence of all the struggles of different movements of communities around the world to fight collectively the continuing assaults on people’s sovereignty.