The Campaign for a Right to Food Act and the Indivisibility of Human Rights
The UK is one of the richest countries in the world and yet food insecurity blights the lives of millions of its residents. In this context, under the banner of the 'Right to Food Campaign', community organisations, unions, and NGOs are turning to a new tool – the human right to food – in an effort to force the government to act.
Sarah Bailey makes a strong case the right to food should not be separated from the broader issue of universal human rights.
Although the government has ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which establishes the right to food, this cannot currently be enforced by the UK courts. However, a domestic right to food act, which is a key demand of the Right to Food Campaign, would be enforceable domestically. The difficulty is that legislating for a right to food in the absence of other socio-economic rights may not achieve the desired result: the interconnected nature of human rights means that efforts to secure one right will be difficult, and in some cases impossible, without reference to other rights.
Interconnections
Most obvious, perhaps, are the interconnections between the right to food and the rights to work and social security. In a market economy, access to nutritious food is linked, first and foremost, to affordability – with affordability, in turn, linked to secure well-paid employment and social security benefits that are set at an adequate level.
The Right to Food Campaign has acknowledged these interconnections; for instance, it is calling on the government to ‘reveal how much money is factored in for food when setting minimum/living wages and benefits.’ However, a ‘standalone’ right to food act will be unable to capture the complexity and richness of the content of the rights to work and social security as they have developed over decades.
Realising the right to work, for example, requires the ability to ‘freely choose and accept work’ and to bargain collectively, both of which have been under threat in recent years. It also requires states to open the labour market to everyone under its jurisdiction, which would do much to alleviate food insecurity among asylum-seekers and other UK residents with an insecure migration status. Equally, the right to social security requires that benefits be set at an adequate level, establishes a retirement age that factors in the nature of workers’ occupations – thereby protecting those in, for example, manual jobs, which cannot easily be undertaken by individuals in their mid to late sixties – and guards against ‘retrogressive measures’ such as benefit cuts.
Other socio-economic rights matter
The relevance of other socio-economic rights to the realisation of the right to food may be less immediately apparent but they are no less important. For example, the government’s duty to ensure that households have sustainable and affordable access to energy for cooking and storing food – which is certainly not the case in today’s Britain – is provided for by the right to adequate housing.
The right to education also comes into play as educational status appears to have a positive influence on a healthy diet. The realisation of the right to food also necessitates the realisation of the right to health as certain health conditions can lead to malnutrition even when individuals can afford to purchase nutritious food.
From a campaigning perspective, the focus on the right to food makes strategic sense. There are no human needs more basic than access to nutritious food and as such, the call for a right to food act may resonate widely. In the long term, however, a ‘standalone’ right to food act may struggle to achieve its objectives, and may also undermine or exhaust support for broader efforts to enshrine all socio-economic rights in domestic law, a goal which if realised, has the potential to transform lives in the UK for generations to come.
