The right to food in the post-Cold War era

Abstract

This paper reviews how the end of the Cold War is affecting acceptance of key international conventions and the policy environment relevant to the realization of the right to food. It focuses on the International Bill of Human Rights and finds that ratification of international human rights conventions including those containing the right to food have accelerated from 1989 to 1994. The paper goes on to analyse the policy environment for the realization of the right to food in less developed countries in relation to worldwide sociopolitical processes of fragmentation and integration taking place in the post-Cold War era, specifically: civil conflict and cultural chaos, liberalizing national and international economics, the spread of democratic governance, growing use of politically conditioned aid and reallocation of foreign assistance resources. It documents and discusses each as an impediment or opportunity to the practical realization of the right to food through improved food and nutrition security. The concluding section argues that the prospects for direct implementation of rights to food as national food and development policy have become unfavourable because such policies have been economically unsustainable and because of the declining capacities of government institutions in general. At the same time the application of a normative human rights approach is found to be of critical importance for evaluation and promotion of food and nutrition security by the nation state and by transnational and subnational institutions that are growing more powerful in the post-Cold War era.