Protecting the Right to Food in the Era of Covid-19 and Beyond

• Publication year: 2021
• Citation: Vol. 49 No. 1

Protecting the Right to Food in the Era of COVID-19 and Beyond

Ying Chen^*

Table of Contents

I. Introduction...............................................................3

II. The Right to Food in International Law and the Three Key Elements.................................................................. 5

III. The Short-Term Impact of covid-19 on the Right to Food. 7

A. The Impact on Food Availability...........................................8
B. The Impact on Food Accessibility.........................................9

1. Economic Access.............................................................9
2. Physical Access.............................................................12

C. The Impact on Food Adequacy............................................13
D. Summary..............................................................................15

IV. The Long-Term Impact of Covid-19 on the Right to Food: Availability Problems at the Global Level.................. 15

A. The First Aspect of Availability: The Threat of a Looming Global Food Shortage.........................................................15

1. COVID-19 and Agricultural Production......................16

[Page 2]

2. Natural Disasters and Climate Change........................19

B. The Second Aspect of Availability: Trade Restrictions on Agricultural Commodities...................................................21
C. Summary..............................................................................24

V. Proposals................................................................ 25

A. At the National Level...........................................................25

1. Governments' Priorities in Protecting Domestic Food Security..........................................................................25
2. Strengthening Resilience for Food Security and Nutrition: Domestic Agricultural Production...............28
3. Emergency Food Reserve (EFR)...................................31

B. At the International Level....................................................35

1. Under International Law: The Development of the Right to Food in Emergencies................................................35
2. In Practice: Emergency Food Aid................................38

VI. Conclusion.............................................................. 42

[Page 3]

The right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman, and child, alone or in community with others, have physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement.¹

— The United Nations (UN) Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights General Comment No. 12

I. Introduction

On the sixteenth of March, 2020, I headed to Woolworths² for my weekly grocery shopping. Unlike any other time I had experienced, what awaited me was not a store full of fresh and tasty food products. Instead, it was a horrific scene one often sees in apocalypse movies: hundreds of anxious shoppers were racing through the grocery aisles, loading all the food items they could find on the shelves into their shopping carts. As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was quickly spreading throughout Australia, it was expected that panic buying would eventually come to Armidale, a college town in rural New South Wales, Australia, where I live and work. It was apparent that this day had come earlier than expected. Over the following two weeks, the situation did not improve; grocery stores across Australia still struggled to keep up with the dramatically increased consumer demand. Meat, particularly ground beef, sold out immediately. Dry foods, such as rice and pasta, disappeared within minutes. Many shoppers had to visit several stores on a hunt for some of the most basic food items necessary to prepare a single meal.

The rest of the world was not immune to panic buying. COVID-19 triggered people's survival instinct on a much broader scale than any time period since World War II.³ Shoppers throughout the world rushed to grocery stores to stock up on food, hoping that several weeks' supply might spare them from what was to come. For example, in mid-March, British shoppers cleaned out shelves as

[Page 4]

COVID-19 anxiety rose.⁴ In late March, American shoppers found empty shelves had hit their stores as well.⁵ Although authorities insisted that there was no real food shortage and the issue involved only temporary supply-chain bottlenecks,⁶ the public chose to ignore official advice and continued stockpiling food.⁷

Two concerns arise pertaining to COVID-19's food security impact. In the short term, panic buying across the world has largely restricted vulnerable peoples' access to adequate food and nutrition, particularly those who do not have the financial or physical means—let alone the space—to stockpile food. In the long term, there is also an emerging concern that COVID-19 may provoke absolute food shortages around the world, leading to a devastating food crisis.⁸

[Page 5]

This paper addresses these two concerns from a human rights perspective. Section II examines the right to food in international law as well as the three key elements that are essential to the full realization of this human right. Section III investigates the short-term impact of COVID-19, revealing that the outbreak of this virus has already undermined the right to food in the areas of food availability, accessibility, and adequacy. Section IV subsequently explores the long-term impact of COVID-19, predicting that a global food crisis is imminent if the world does not take action immediately. To ensure the full realization of the right to food in the era of COVID-19 and beyond, Section V further provides a number of proposals to be carried out at both the national and international levels. Section VI concludes the paper by re-emphasizing the importance of protecting the right to food in a pandemic, and it calls for the world to work collaboratively to prevent the total collapse of the global food system.

II. The Right to Food in International Law and the Three Key Elements

All human beings have a fundamental right to food, and this right is "indispensable for the fulfilment of [all] other human rights enshrined in the International Bill of Human Rights."⁹ Since the 1960s, many international human rights treaties have explicitly acknowledged the importance of the right to food. For example, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1967) (ICESCR) defines the right to food as "the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger,"¹⁰ and imposes a binding obligation on States to take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right.¹¹ Similarly, the Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Food, Hunger, and Malnutrition (1974) affirms that every individual has "the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition in order to develop fully and maintain their physical and mental faculties."¹² Moreover, the United Nations' Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights General Comment No. 12 (1999) also recognizes that the right to food "is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, have physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or

[Page 6]

means for its procurement."¹³ As evident from the above, the world has declared its commitment to the promotion and protection of the right to food.¹⁴

In 2010, two United Nations (UN) agencies, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), jointly published OHCHR Fact Sheet No. 34 (Fact Sheet No. 34).¹⁵ Built upon the international human rights treaties discussed above, Fact Sheet No. 34 identifies the key elements of the right to food, explains the implications of this right for specific groups, elaborates on States' obligations with respect to this right, and "provides an overview of national, regional and international accountability and monitoring mechanisms."¹⁶ Fact Sheet No. 34 has made significant contributions to the advancement of the right to food, both in theory and in practice. Among these contributions, the identification of the key elements of the right to food is particularly important. Three key aspects of the right identified in Fact Sheet No. 34 are availability, accessibility, and adequacy.¹⁷ Although sustainability has yet to be officially recognized by the international community as a key element of the right to food, Fact Sheet No. 34 encourages States to "make efforts to enable a sustainable production of food to ensure the availability of food for future generations."¹⁸

The interpretation of "availability" is twofold. First, "food should be available from natural resources either through the production of food, by cultivating land or animal husbandry, or through other ways of obtaining food, such as fishing, hunting, or gathering."¹⁹ Second, food should be made "available for sale in markets and shops."²⁰

Food "accessibility" rests on two pillars: economic access and physical access. Economic access guarantees food affordability to all individuals. Fact Sheet No. 34 suggests everyone "should be able to afford food for an adequate diet without compromising on any other basic needs, such as school fees, medicines or rent."²¹Physical access means that food should be physically accessible to all individuals, particularly to vulnerable groups, such as children, the sick, persons with disabilities, and the elderly because it may be difficult for them to physically

[Page 7]

go out for food.²² Further, close attention should also be paid to people who live in remote areas, to victims of armed conflicts or natural disasters, and to prisoners because the limitation of movement may restrict their physical access to food.²³

Fact Sheet No. 34 addresses three aspects of the "adequacy" of food:²⁴ the importance of food safety, the protection of individuals' dietary requirements for food, and the...