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4 - Human Rights, Climate Change, and the Right to Food

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2019

Anne Saab
Affiliation:
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva
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Summary

International human rights law and discourse have proliferated enormously in recent decades, resulting in the inclusion of human rights considerations in a wide array of fields, among them climate change and intellectual property. The inclusion of human rights law and discourse in discussions on climate change and intellectual property shapes narratives of hunger and debates about climate-ready seeds. Human rights law is most immediately associated with food sovereignty movements and frequently posited as a tool of resistance against neoliberalism that seeks to shift the focus away from economic, market considerations and towards human-centred local issues. However, as this chapter will show, the neoliberal narrative of hunger also draws, albeit often implicitly, on human rights, in general, and the right to food, in particular, to advance its story about how to feed the world in times of climate change. A serious criticism of international human rights law charges that it can easily be appropriated by the neoliberal agenda. It is hardly a novel observation that human rights language is appropriated by a whole range of actors for a variety of purposes, and that these differing uses of it frequently contradict each other. What is essential here, however, is to examine how both the neoliberal and the food sovereignty narratives of hunger invoke the right to food. This chapter shows that, because of the way it is framed, the right to food either promotes or fails to persuasively challenge the pyramid of assumptions that supports the neoliberal food regime.
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Chapter
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Narratives of Hunger in International Law
Feeding the World in Times of Climate Change
, pp. 111 - 135
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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