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Climate Change and the Right to Food

Climate change and the policies instituted to combat it are affecting the realization of the right to food in myriad, often unnoticed ways. This study highlights how the climate change regime and the human rights regime addressing the right to food have failed to coordinate their agendas and to collaborate to each other’s mutual benefit.

The current climate change regime fails to accurately address the human harms resulting from climate change itself, and is not operating with the necessary safeguards and preventive measures to ensure that mitigation and adaptation measures are fully complementary to the right to food obligations of states and non-state actors.

The study proposes concrete methods by which institutions can address climate change problems and realize the right to food symbiotically, in compliance with the principles of systemic integration under international law.

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Publication series on ecology, Volume 8:
Climate Change and the Right to Food
A comprehensive study by the Human Rights Institute
of Columbia Law School and Olivier De Schutter
Edited by the Heinrich Böll Foundation
Berlin, Nov. 2009, 160 pages, boxes and charts
ISBN 978-3-86928-018-9

Table of Contents

Preface 9
Foreword 11
Executive Summary 14
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Climate Change Impacts on Food Security 26
1.2 The Evolving Consensus 35
1.3 The Added Value of a Human Rights Perspective 41
1.4 Bridging the Gap between the Climate Change Regime and the Human Rights Framework 47
2.0 Is the International Climate Change Framework Well-equipped to Take into Account Human Rights?
2.1 Introduction 49
2.2 The Climate Change Regime 51
2.3 Objectives and Principles of the Climate Change Framework 56
2.4 Climate Change Research and Information 65
2.5 Combating Climate Change through Mitigation Measures 71
2.6 Coping with Climate Change Harm through Adaptation Measures 78
2.7 Enforcing the Climate Change Regime 88
2.8 Conclusion 94
3.0 Is the Current Right to Food Framework Well-equipped to Deal with Climate Change?
3.1 Overview of Relevant Institutions 97
3.2 Raising Awareness about Climate Change as a Human Rights Issue 98
3.3 Monitoring Right to Food Policies in the Context of Climate Change 101
3.4 Accountability for Violations: Litigation 109
3.5 Case Study on the Powers and Influence of Non-State Actors: the World Bank Group and Other International Financial Institutions 119
3.6 Conclusion 121
4.0 Moving Forward – Recommendations
4.1 From Fragmentation to Systemic Integration of Human Rights and Climate Change Law 124
4.2 Recommendations for the Climate Change Regime 130
4.3 Recommendations for International Human Rights Bodies 138
4.4 Recommendations for the Food and Agriculture Organization 147
4.5 Domestic Integration 148
Acronyms 152
Authors

Preface
More than a billion people are suffering from severe hunger worldwide, threequarters 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.

The Heinrich Böll Foundation would like to offer profound thanks to Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute and the UN Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier de Schutter for their outstanding work.

Barbara Unmüßig, President Heinrich Böll
Christine Chemnitz & Ute Straub, International Agricultural Trade Foundation Department

Study Climate Change and the Right to Food

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