03/10/2024 Session | Parliamentary Network for a Healthy Environment
The Parliamentary Assembly today urged 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.
Adopting unanimously a resolution based on the report prepared by Simon Moutquin (Belgium, SOC), the Assembly 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 Assembly 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 parliamentarians 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.
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In the framework of the debate, the PACE hosted the Nomad Kitchen, a workshop where smoothies were prepared and shared using surplus food collected locally. Built by the Young Ambassadors for Food Resilience of Seine-Saint-Denis (Paris), the Nomad it's a platform to raise awareness and foster dialogue on food resilience and food waste.
PACE members shared a convivial moment with the Young Ambassadors and discussed issues like food insecurity, sustainable food systems, and the role of youth in the ecological transition (see pictures below).
