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Nutrition and Human Rights
The system of international human rights principles, agreements, and institutions offers a new opportunity for promoting development goals and policies with lasting effects for the individual human being. Many members of the international nutrition community now also see international human rights provisions and institutions as a potent new context in which to formulate and implement nutrition policies and programs. They have begun to assert the obligation of states to promote the human rights to adequate food, health, and care for the vulnerable—those areas that the nutrition community has established as primary to ensuring nutritional well-being. They also recognize that a range of other human rights—civil, political, economic, social and cultural—must be implemented to allow rights to food, health, and care to be realized on a sustainable basis.
To date, nutrition advocates interested in exploring human rights have focused on how they can use human rights law and institutions more systematically to underpin efforts aimed at bettering human nutrition, as a moral imperative and as a precondition for sustainable social, economic and human development. This goal is in line with the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and subsequent conventions on human rights derived from these. It constitutes the major message of recent literature on the right to adequate food in particular.
This brief considers the other side of the coin: how can the insights and tools of the socially oriented nutrition community help identify how human rights principles can guide development, enhancing sustainable positive effects for the human being and for society? By operationalizing and testing a human rights approach to food and nutrition in development, nutrition-relevant scholarship and practice has considerable potential to put content behind rhetoric regarding human rights, particularly economic, social and cultural rights.