Final UN Report On Right To Food Calls For Redesign Of World Food System

In a final report before the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) today, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food called for a redesigned world food system to ensure the human right to adequate food and freedom from hunger. This includes some changes to the way intellectual property rights apply to food and agriculture.

Olivier de Schutter on 10 March presented his final report before the HRC after a six-year mandate. He outlined the need to shift from a profit-oriented vision of agriculture toward “alternative, democratically-mandated visions.”

In the report, he considered that patents on plants should not be allowed and called international organisations to help developing countries to build “a sui generis regime for the protection of intellectual property rights which suits their development needs and is based on human rights.”

Several measures that states should implement in order to ensure that IP rights on plant varieties are compatible with the right to food are developed in the report. Among them, the right to local exchanges of seeds such as seeds banks and ensure that seeds’ regulations do not exclude farmer’s varieties.

Cities should take over the issue of food security, and bottom-up strategies should be developed, taking into account small-scale farmers’ needs, de Schutter said. Agroecological and poverty-reducing forms of agriculture should be priority investments. But these local initiatives have to be supported at the national level, with a real democratic decision-making process and an independent monitoring system of these policies, he added.

A favourable international environment is also a key issue, de Schutter stated. He emphasised the importance of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) work, and asked all international organisations to align with CFS’s strategy.

Reforms of export-driven policies, reducing the demand of agriculture for animal feed and agrofuels, and decreasing volumes of food waste are specific recommendations addressed to developed countries.

The full report is available here.