Preface of the Study "Climate Change and the Right to Food"
More than a billion people are suffering from severe hunger worldwide, three quarters of them live in rural areas and depend directly on agriculture for their food. Political mismanagement and political failures have contributed to this tragic situation. The current hunger crisis is aggravated further by climate change and the economic crisis. Both hit the poorest of the poor the hardest.
Climate change is predicted to affect agricultural production and food security in developing countries by far the most. Small farmers, rural workers, and other people who are already vulnerable and experiencing food insecurity are likely to be the first and worst affected. They are confronted with the immediate risk of increased crop failure, a lack of appropriate seeds and planting materials, and loss of livestock. It is clear that the current system of agricultural production is not able to feed the world of tomorrow.
Without comprehensive and far-reaching adaptation strategies, climate change will severely endanger the human right to food in developing countries. It is not only shrinking productive farmlands, decreasing soil fertility, less water availability, and increasingly precarious and extreme climatic conditions that pose new threats to world food security. Adaptation and mitigation strategies of industrialized countries that do not put the needs of vulnerable people first also
greatly affect food security in developing countries. Biofuel production intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as export-related food production will compete with food production at the local and domestic market levels.
International measures to combat climate change should avoid negatively affecting those who are already vulnerable. An international climate change regime has to put the particular needs of the poor first. The human rights approach provides a comprehensive set of instruments and criteria. This is why the Heinrich Böll Stiftung tries its best to bring together the human rights and climate change agenda.
Negotiating a climate regime without respecting questions of equality and justice – and, thus, the particular needs of developing countries – will lead the world community to make the same serious mistakes that have been made in international trade negotiations thusfar. If the rich countries continue to ignore the needs of the poor, it is likely that the climate negotiations will lead to the same dead-end as with the trade negotiations. However, in negotiating a climate regime, there is no time for several rounds of trial and error negotiations, as has been the case with the WTO since the start of the Doha Round – we need a climate deal now to keep the 2°C objective.
This study tries to bridge the climate change regime with the human rights regime by: (1) analyzing how climate change and relevant mitigation and adaptation plans may interfere with the realization of the right to food; (2) giving recommendations on how the climate change regime can do more to adequately address the human rights harms resulting from climate change itself and how the tools that exist within the human rights regime could be improved to deal with the negative impacts of climate change on the right to food. By publishing this report, the Heinrich Böll Foundation would like to initiate a debate among policymakers, practitioners, and scientists on the complex relationship between climate change and the right to food. The intention is to reach as broad an audience as possible. Some might be very well-versed in either climate change issues or in the promotion of human rights, whereas some may be experts in neither.
Teaserimage: Dried out lake. Photo: Stefan Kühn. Original: WikimediaCommons. License: CC BY-SA 3.0
