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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Brother David Andrews, CSC, JD, Exec Dir, National Catholic Rural Life Conference, 4625 Beaver Avenue, Des Moines, IA 50310, 515-270-2634, ncrlc2@mchsi.com

Increasingly scholars are giving a new attention to food in a framework of human rights. Food is a necessity for life, not a luxury. The U.N. recognizes the right to food.

“The right to food is the right to have regular, permanent and free access, either directly or by means of financial purchases, to quantitatively and qualitatively adequate and sufficient food corresponding to the cultural traditions of the people to which the consumer belongs, and which ensures a physical and mental, individual and collective, fulfilling and dignified life free of fear.”¹

The right to food is not just a right to a particular good, like individual food products, it is a right to a good of order. In their articulation of "food sovereignty" La Via Campesina, the international peasant movement, states the following:

Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self reliant; to restrict the dumping of products in their markets, and; to provide local fisheries-based communities the priority in managing the use of and the rights to aquatic resources.²

This presentation will review the right to food: food security, food sovereignty, and governance. The presentation will place the right to food in a moral context which sees eating as a moral act, a fundamental human right. People have the right to dietary choices.

Learning Objectives: