Promising Steps Toward Recognition of Women’s Right to Food

Heidelberg, 8 March 2013 – In celebration of International Women’s Day, FIAN International applauds recent efforts to develop international frameworks in support of the right to adequate food for women.

Although the connection between gender justice and reduced world hunger is now widely accepted, currently there is a lack of adequate reference to women’s rights within key international human rights treaties.

To that end, different initiatives have been undertaken at the UN level with regard to mainstreaming gender within relevant international policy. Two initiatives have recently been undertaken by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to begin elaborating general recommendations on access to justice for women and on the rights of rural women.

CEDAW’s stated purpose is to provide appropriate and authoritative guidance to ensure that states respect, protect, and fulfill women’s human rights to access to justice, as well as access to control over, and use of land and other productive resources. 

This week, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, presented his report on Gender and the Right to Food to the UN Human Rights Council. “Sharing power with women is a shortcut to reducing hunger and malnutrition, and is the single most effective step to realizing the right to food,”  said  Mr.De Schutter.

In the report Mr. De Schutter recommends that states invest more money in liberating women from the care economy; that gender roles be redefined, as well as the need for that gender should be mainstreamed when developing policy.

“Promoting and protecting women´s human rights, especially against structural violence, is central to guarantee the realization of the right to adequate food for all, and it is therefore an integral part of FIAN´s mandate,” says Flavio Valente, Secretary General of FIAN International.

In 2013, FIAN International and the Department of Gender and Nutrition at the University of Hohenheim (UHOH) will publish a book titled: Gender, Nutrition and the Human Right to Adequate Food: Towards an Inclusive Framework[i] which aims to identify reasons why gender is not sufficiently addressed in the right to adequate food planning and advocacy and seeks to propose a more inclusive conceptual framework for the human right to adequate food. 

FIAN will continue to lobby for the adoption of a more inclusive conceptual framework for the right to adequate food that integrates gender, nutrition and food sovereignty at the international level, through its work with different actors including the United Nations bodies, civil society organizations and social movements.  

Further information:  

Below you will find a press release regarding International Women’s Day by FIAN Philippines, a statement by the Comunidad Regional Andes y Paraguay in which FIAN Ecuador is a participant (in Spanish), and related news stories about access to justice.

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[i] Anne C. Bellows, Flavio L.S. Valente, and Stefanie Lemke. (Eds.) Gender, Nutrition and the Human Right to Adequate Food: towards an inclusive framework. New York: Taylor & Francis/Routledge. (Expected date of publication: 2013). With contributions from the following lead authors: Roseane do Socorro Gonçalves Viana, M. Daniela Núñez B. de L., Lida Lhotska, Veronika Scherbaum, Anna Jenderedjian, Ana María Suárez-Franco, and R. Denisse Córdova Montes.