Aravind Ganesh

The Right to Food and Buyer Power

Modern global food supply chains are characterized by extremely high levels of concentration in the middle of those chains. This paper argues that such concentration leads to excessive buyer power, which harms the consumers and food producers at the ends of the supply chains. It also argues that the harms suffered by farmers are serious enough to constitute violations of the international human right to food, as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and more specifically, in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. World competition law regimes cannot ignore these human rights imperatives. To a certain extent, these imperatives can be accommodated under existing consumerist competition law theories by the interpretive mechanism of conform‐interpretation. However, when one comprehends the truly global scale of modern food supply chains, it becomes obvious that conform‐interpretation alone will not suffice. Instead, the protection of a minimum level of producer welfare congruent to those producers’ rights to a minimum adequate level of food must find a place among the aims of any credible theory of competition law. Moreover, the same globalized nature of these food supply chains means that current doctrines of extraterritorial jurisdiction of competition control have also to be revised.

Contempt and execution in vindicating the right to education

In other jurisdictions, the judge almost seems to have magic powers - a solemn utterance, a bang of the gavel - and her orders solidify into reality. In South Africa, however, one is disabused of this illusion rather quickly and nowhere so swiftly as in the Eastern Cape, where the courts have on numerous occasions lamented their vanishing influence on public officials. Vindicating the constitutional right to an education requires going beyond the mere establishment of a violation of section 29 of the Constitution. The post provisioning litigation carried out by the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) in the Eastern Cape in 2013 demonstrated that the next and crucial step is to devise ways to ensure government compliance with the court orders that follow. In such cases, the choices facing litigants and counsel ultimately boil down to sending recalcitrant officials to prison or executing on government property, access to which is governed by the law of contempt of court and the State Liability Act 20 of 1957 respectively. It is hoped that the insights gained from the experience of the LRC case will prove useful to lawyers and litigants seeking effective and meaningful enforcement of court orders concerning the right to education. From the broader point of view, the episode throws into relief both the potential and the limits of what the judiciary can do to render socio-economic justice, bring about transformative change, and uphold the rule of law.