Food for Thought: Exploring the Right to Food in Theory and Practice

Cahill-Ripley, Amanda (2012) Food for Thought: Exploring the Right to Food in Theory and Practice. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 4 (1). pp. 147-154. ISSN 1757-9627

Abstract

The Fight for the Right to Food: Lessons Learned is written by the first United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and his team at the Research Unit on the Right to Food, which was founded in 2001 at the Graduate Institute of Development Studies in Geneva with the remit of providing research support to the Special Rapporteur in collaboration with staff at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The book documents the work undertaken by the first Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food during his eight-year mandate and combines legal, theoretical and conceptual ideas of the right to food with an operational understanding of the right in practice. Although there have been a number of notable texts published previously on the human right to food (see Kent, 2005; Eide and Kracht (eds), 2005), this book is important as it offers more than a discussion of the legal provisions for the right to food: the authors not only examine the right to food under human rights law, but explore the wider context in which the right to food operates. This includes an essential examination of the concept of food security and its relationship with the right to food as well as analysing the impact of international political and economic phenomena, such as globalization, international trade liberalization and armed conflict, on the realization of the right.