The transformative potential of the right to food 2014, para. 22
Paragraph- Paragraph text
- Though apparently unrelated to one another, these issues - industrial livestock production, liquid biofuels for transport, and waste - share certain common characteristics. As the Special Rapporteur has also highlighted with regard to the exploitation of fish stocks (A/67/268, paras. 21-23 and 29-32; A/HRC/19/59/Add.4 (Madagascar), paras. 38-43), they present the international community with specific challenges that result from globalized markets connecting populations with widely diverging purchasing powers, in the context of finite resources. The reason why large areas of farmland can be dedicated to producing feedstock to satisfy the overconsumption of meat in affluent societies, or to fuel their cars, is that consumers in rich countries can command the resources that will allow their lifestyles to continue unchallenged. Similarly, the huge amounts of retail and consumer waste in rich countries are correlated with the fact that, as incomes have grown, the proportion of the household budget spent on food has diminished. This highlights the limits of the argument that the expansion of trade in agricultural commodities leads to efficiency gains by encouraging a division of labour according to comparative advantage: in fact, the expansion of trade also has resulted in the luxury tastes of the richest parts of the world being allowed to compete against the satisfaction of the basic needs of the poor. Ultimately, this creates a highly worrying competition for the natural resources needed for food production, particularly land. While a purely Malthusian view of land as finite oversimplifies the issue of competition for scarce resources, as the productivity of land can be increased to a certain extent and as some land can still be brought into production, recent research has highlighted the considerable social and ecological costs of doing so. Once these trade-offs are taken into account, this research shows, there is significantly less cropland available for future expansion than has been traditionally assumed in most scenarios.
- Legal status
- Non-negotiated soft law
- Body
- Special Rapporteur on the right to food
- Document type
- Special Procedures' report
- Means of adoption
- N.A.
- Topic(s)
- Economic Rights
- Environment
- Food & Nutrition
- Governance & Rule of Law
- Person(s) affected
- All
- Year
- 2014
- Paragraph type
- Other
- Reference
- SR Food, Report to the HRC (2014), A/HRC/25/57, para. 22.
- Paragraph number
- 22
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