RAWALPINDI, Oct 29: The global food crisis has rendered nearly one billion people worldwide hungry, an independent UN expert said urging the issue to be viewed by governments through the lens of human rights.

Prices have dropped around the world, but “the crisis is still with us,” cautioned Olivier De Schutter, the special rapporteur on the right to food, noting that the number of hungry has grown significantly as a result. The “real problem of hunger” is not linked to inadequate food supplies, but rather that many people lack the purchasing power to buy available food, he pointed out.

In a report submitted to the Human Rights Council, he said the increase in prices of food commodities on international markets has had a severe negative impact on the right to food of the poorest households, who are net food buyers, with particularly damaging consequences in countries where there are either no social safety nets in place or the ones that exist are, too, weak to withstand the shock.

The increase will not benefit many small-holders, either as they face steep rises in costs or lack the infrastructure and support they need to increase food supply.

Mr Schutter highlighted the impact of the choices to be made on the right to food, placing them in the framework of states’ obligations domestically and internationally. He suggested that a human rights framework should be adopted in order both to identify the measures needed to respond to the new situation created by the surge in prices and to guide their implementation.

If a new global partnership for agriculture and food is to emerge from the current crisis, it is crucial to ensure that this partnership does not simply seek to boost supply by promoting technology-driven recipes, but also empowers those who are hungry and malnourished and whose livelihoods may be threatened precisely by this renewed interest in encouraging agricultural production.

He called upon the Human Rights Council to continue monitoring the initiatives adopted by governments, the private sector and international agencies, in reaction to the global food crisis, and contribute to the discussion of any future global partnership for agriculture and food, ensuring that it includes attention to its human rights dimensions and that it is based on an effective participation of rights-holders.

The council should encourage states to build national strategies for the realisation of the right to adequate food, which should include mapping of the food insecure, adoption of relevant legislation and policies with a right-to-food framework, establishment of mechanisms to ensure accountability so that rights-holders are able to claim their right to food.

The impact of the increase of food prices on international markets has been severe on net food buyers in countries in which the consumers are insufficiently insulated from such impacts.

Particularly, at risk are the landless labourers and the urban poor. But among the losers are also a large number of smallholders, themselves net food buyers, and who are unable to benefit from the increase in prices on the international markets.

As part of their national strategies, states should adopt a framework legislation ensuring that the right to food is justifiable before national courts or that other forms of redress are available, so that in situations such as the current one, when the prices of food undergo a sudden increase, the other branches of government will not be allowed to remain passive, and so that, in the adoption of measures aimed at realising the right to food, any discrimination in access to food or means for its procurement will be effectively prohibited.

There are approximately 500 million small-holder households, totalling 1.5 billion people, living on two hectares of land or less. Many are facing an unprecedented increase in the price of inputs, as a result of the increase of the price of oil and, for livestock farmers, of crops, at the very same moment that, as net food buyers, they are spending larger amounts of their budgets on food.