17/09/2024 Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development | Parliamentary Network for a Healthy Environment
A PACE committee is urging steps to ensure accessible, sustainable and adequate food for all – including enshrining a “right to food” in national constitutions and giving priority to a coherent legal framework to make food distribution, processing and marketing systems fairer and more stable.
Approving a report by Simon Moutquin (Belgium, SOC), the Assembly’s Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development pointed out the “extremely paradoxical phenomenon” that hunger and malnutrition are present despite ample supplies of foodstuffs.
Unbalanced distribution, processing and marketing of food “gives priority to commercial and agricultural interests, which are often in tension with the imperative of the right to food,” the committee pointed out.
These inequalities were likely to be further aggravated by climate change, which exacerbates extreme weather events, agricultural crises and disruptions to supply chains, it added.
The committee called for an explicit “right to food” in national constitutions, including the right of access to drinking water, which would “oblige all branches of government to place people’s rights at the heart of food policies”.
It also urged laws to make food distribution, processing and marketing fairer and more stable by “reducing economic imbalances between public and private players, aligning agricultural issues with the objectives of ecological transition and supporting farmers in this transition in an inclusive way, while ensuring fair remuneration and greater protection of their rights”.
National and local food strategies should be developed in line with UN standards, and there should be a move from “a charitable approach to food aid and food provision for the more vulnerable members of society towards a rights-based approach”, so that emergency food aid was no longer the primary response.
The report is due to be debated by the plenary Assembly in Strasbourg on Thursday 3 October.