Rights Not Charity: A Human Rights Perspective on Corporate-backed Charitable Food Aid
A new publication is launched by FIAN International, the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition, and the Global Solidarity Alliance for Food, Health, and Social Justice
The brief "Rights Not Charity: A Human Rights Perspective on Corporate-backed Charitable Food Aid" outlines the global trend of increased corporate backed food charity, and how the growing demand for humanitarian responses to food insecurity is being addressed through the food banking economy. Thus, state policies and institutions are systematically neglecting their obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the human right to adequate food.
Amid increasing poverty, hunger, and inequalities globally, corporations are increasingly claiming to have the solution- taking up policy space and supplanting government roles. Amongst this trend, corporate-backed food charity through redirection of food waste, product donations and financial support, food banking and other food access organizations have become a significant cog in the industrial food system.
Corporations and governments are promoting and codifying a false link between food waste and food security. Ignoring and exacerbating deeper structural problems associated with overproduction and food waste, they have created new financial incentives to uphold dysfunctional industrial models of food production, and captured charity as another vehicle to consolidate corporate control of the food system. This is a failed response to ensure food security for all, with its entrenchment undermining the state’s obligations to fulfil the human right to adequate food - and it must be challenged.
Solutions consistent with human rights require public policies that address and overcome structural food access barriers that people face. Food and nutrition policies should be designed to overcome the need for emergency food, by ensuring that food is consistently adequate, available, accessible and sustainable. If surplus food redistribution infrastructures are required to meet this goal, these should be destigmatized, universally accessible, connected to regional food provisioning systems and governed by local community development interests and goals, not those of distant corporate actors.
Download report here
For more information contact Amanda G. Cordova: cordova-gonzales@fian.org
