Priscilla Claeys

The Creation of New Rights by the Food Sovereignty Movement: The Challenge of Institutionalizing Subversion

This article analyses the creation of new human rights by a contemporary transnational agrarian movement, Vía Campesina. It makes the case that the movement’s assertion of new rights contributes to shaping a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and anti-hegemonic conception of human rights. It discusses the advantages and constraints of the human rights framework and analyses the creation of new rights by the movement as a way to overcome the limitations of the ‘rights master frame’. It concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges involved in the institutionalization of new rights.

Food Sovereignty and the Recognition of New Rights for Peasants at the UN: A Critical Overview of La Via Campesina's Rights Claims over the Last 20 Years

Abstract This article explores how human rights framing by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) has evolved over the last 20 years. It discusses how the movement has worked towards institutionalizing new categories of rights, such as the ‘right to food sovereignty’ and the ‘rights of peasants’, thereby contributing to the creation of new human rights standards at the United Nations (UN). It also critically addresses some of the challenges the movement has been confronted with when framing its demands in terms of rights. Its overall argument is that LVC has managed to tap the potential of the rhetoric of rights to find common ground, thanks to its innovative use of non-codified rights. This has enabled activists to ‘localize’ human rights and make them meaningful to their various contexts. However, it contends that further advancing the movements goals will require serious consideration of some of the key limits of the human rights framework.

Rethinking Food Systems. Structural Challenges, New Strategies, and the Law

Taking as a starting point that hunger results from social exclusion and distributional inequities and that lasting, sustainable and just solutions are to be found in changing the structures that underlie our food systems, this book examines how law shapes global food systems and their ongoing transformations. Using detailed case studies, historical mapping and legal analysis, the contributors show how various actors (farmers, civil society groups, government officials, international bodies) use or could use different legal tools (legislative, jurisprudential, norm-setting) on various scales (local, national, regional, global) to achieve structural changes in food systems. Section 1, Institutionalizing New Approaches, explores the possibility of institutionalizing social change through two alternative visions for change – the right to food and food sovereignty. Individual chapters discuss Via Campesina’s struggle to implement food sovereignty principles into international trade law, and present case studies on adopting food sovereignty legislation in Nicaragua and right to food legislation in Uganda. The chapters in Section 2, Regulating for Change, explore the extent to which the regulation of actors can or cannot change incentives and produce transformative results in food systems. They look at the role of the state in regulating its own actions as well as the actions of third parties and analyze various means of regulating land grabs. The final section, Governing for Better Food Systems, discusses the fragmentation of international law and the impacts of this fragmentation on the realization of human rights. These chapters trace the underpinnings of the current global food system, explore the challenges of competing regimes of intellectual property, farmers rights and human rights, and suggest new modes of governance for global and local food systems. The stakes for building better food systems are high. Our current path leaves many behind, destroying the environment and entrenching inequality and systemic poverty. While it is commonly understood that legal structures are at the heart of food systems, the legal academy has yet to make a significant contribution to recent discussions on improving food systems - this book aims to fill that gap.

Peasant and indigenous transnational social movements engaging with climate justice

ABSTRACT This article offers a comparative account of the engagement of two key transnational social movements, the agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) and the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC), in global climate discussions, particularly the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Since 2007 these movements have each developed their own framing of climate justice and sought political and legal opportunities to advocate rights-based policies. LVC has advanced a development paradigm grounded in food sovereignty and agroecology, and IIPFCC has sought to increase indigenous participation in United Nations climate schemes and regain control over ancestral territory.

Vía Campesina’s Struggle for the Right to Food Sovereignty: From Above or from Below?

The transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina has successfully mobilized a human rights discourse in its struggle against capitalism and neoliberalism. As La Via Campesina celebrates its 20th anniversary, this chapter proposes a critical overview of the right of peoples to food sovereignty. Looking at food sovereignty both as La Via Campesina’s most prominent collective action frame and as a new collective human right, this chapter explores some of the challenges social movements are confronted with when using human rights. It discusses efforts by La Via Campesina to achieve the international recognition of food sovereignty as a new human right and explores past and current challenges involved in the institutionalization of food sovereignty.

Introduction: In Search of Better Options: Food Sovereignty, the Right to Food and Legal Tools for Transforming Food Systems

The stakes for building better food systems are high. Our current path is leaving many behind, destroying the environment and entrenching inequality and systemic poverty. This introduction sets the scene to Rethinking Food Systems and provides an account of the legal and rights-based approaches taken throughout the book. It also begins a discussion on the benefits and limitations to using the law to address hunger and malnutrition. Further, by examining the arguments of the contributing authors and the crosscutting themes in their chapters, this introduction begins to explore the following questions: What are just, sustainable, and equitable food systems? What are the values on which they are built? What tools are available to push for change? What are the advantages and disadvantages of rights-based approaches? Should actors focus on the sub-national, national, regional or global level in their advocacy efforts? And should these actors push for new laws, focus instead on policies and programmes, or put efforts into developing alternative practices? How should they approach the challenge of large-scale land acquisitions in the Global South, intellectual property regimes imposed from above or the growing fragmentation in the international management of food systems? What is and what should be the role of the state in addressing issues of hunger and food insecurity and what role do and should international institutions, consumers and producers play?

Gender, Nutrition and the Human Right to Adequate Food: Toward an Inclusive Framework ed. by Anne C. Bellows, Flavio L.S. Valente, Stefanie Lemke, and María Daniela Núñez Burbano de Lara (review)

Why are women and girls overrepresented among victims of violations of the right to food and nutrition? And why have decades of gender mainstreaming efforts not succeeded in addressing this injustice? The answer, the authors argue, is to be found in our collective failure to tackle gender-based violence, and to promote and protect women’s right to feed themselves and others through locally defined and self-determined strategies and food systems. In Gender, Nutrition and the Human Right to Adequate Food. Toward an Inclusive Framework, a small group of leading academics—from Syracuse University, the University of Hohenheim, and Coventry University—and human rights practitioners—from the non-governmental organizations FIAN International and the Geneva Infant Feeding Association (GIFA)—reflect on how the human right to adequate food and nutrition (RTFN) has developed over the last decades, and how power relations have influenced its conceptual developments. They denounce and critically analyze a number of structural disconnects, and identify ways to overcome them. Together, they advocate for an inclusive framework grounding the RTFN in a holistic understanding of human rights. The starting point for the book is that the human rights approach is not immune to social and political pressures. The ways in which human rights have been defined and applied by various sectors have resulted in failures in protection that are particularly serious in the field of food, nutrition, and women’s rights. The authors of the book, however, are convinced that human rights remain the best and most potent tool for helping diagnose problems and overcome the root causes of inequities. Their objective, therefore, is to apply a human rights lens to gender, food, and nutrition, while pushing the boundaries of the RTFN framework itself, to make it a more powerful tool for social mobilizations and for holding states accountable for human rights violations. The book is more than an edited volume, gathering chapters that vaguely connect with each other. It is the outcome of a collaborative writing project and sustained dialogue between the working group of editors and chapter co-authors, to the extent that the book reads almost like a monograph. The book contains six very dense and detailed chapters. Chapter 1 provides a historical overview of how food, nutrition, and discrimination and violence against women are addressed in the UN human rights framework. It offers background information on the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and discusses recent developments in human rights based approaches to food and nutrition, following the global