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Large-scale farming facilitated by
corporate agriculture can produce
benefits such as job creation, infrastructure
development, technology
transfer, increased food security, better
balance of payments through exports,
and improved access to both international
and local markets. Yet some critics
have castigated foreign investment
in corporate farming as “land grabbing”
and argued that the potential
costs of internationalized agriculture
may include the loss of customary
landholdings and expulsion of local
inhabitants, unregulated environmental
damage and even threats to local
food security. The ongoing discussion
about the relative costs and benefits of
international corporate farming shows
the increased attention to economic
issues in the international debate over
the nature of human rights.
The United States has been outspoken
about the importance of fighting
hunger and has pledged to support a
policy of “global food security.” At the
G-8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, in 2009,
President Barack Obama committed
$3.5 billion to support women’s roles
“as critical drivers of agriculture-led
economic growth in developing countries.”
Women, he noted, constitute
the majority of smallholder farmers in
many developing countries yet often
lack access to capital. Two talented
Americans—Josette Sheeran (SAIS’s
2011 commencement speaker) and
previously Catherine Bertini (now on
the faculty at Syracuse University)—
have served as innovative executive
directors of the U.N. World Food
Programme. Under their leadership,
the WFP has acknowledged that famine
response in the developing world
should draw on local as well as international
sources of food so as not to
displace local farmers.
But the United States has also been
cautious in framing access to food as
a formal international “human right.”
This caution was reflected in the Carter
administration’s decision, in signing the
International Covenant on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights, to provide
that the rights in the covenant could
not be considered “self-executing” in
American law. Even the United Nations
58 SAISPHERE
treaty-monitoring Committee on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights, sitting
in Geneva, has recognized that the
limits of public financing and the key
role of the market mean that economic
and social rights can be measured only
against a standard of “progressive realization.”
Nonetheless, the committee
recently gained additional powers to
take individual complaints under an
optional protocol, which would allow
U.N. monitors to decide individual
cases of claimed economic rights in
countries that agree.
A Right to Adequate Food?
Within the international human rights
community, the right to be free from
starvation is taken to be the prerequisite
to the enjoyment of other human
rights. In General Comment No. 12,
the Geneva monitoring committee on
economic and social rights opined that
a “human right to adequate food is of
crucial importance for the enjoyment of
all rights.” Thus, the impact of international
economic policy on the supply of
food to affected communities is likely to
be seen in a broad framework.
Agriculture and land policy in Africa
may attract attention from one other
human rights body. Though there is no
express “right to food” in the African
Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights,
the African Commission on Human
and Peoples’ Rights has read a “right to