PHM-Exch> The New Right to Food and Nutrition WATCH 2009

[Claudio Schuftan]

*The New Right to Food and Nutrition WATCH 2009
Who controls the governance of the World Food System*

*FIAN *is pleased to announce the release of the new issue of the* Right to
Food and Nutrition WATCH*. This year’s edition focuses on the question of
“Who controls the governance of the world food system?” – a burning issue in
light of the current World Food Crisis.

The WATCH, available in three languages, is a common endeavor of a
Consortium of human rights organizations, social movements and development
agencies. The Consortium for the WATCH 2009 is composed by Brot für die
Welt, the Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation (ICCO) and
FIAN International as publishers, and World Alliance for Breastfeeding
Action (WABA), People’s Health Movement (PHM), Habitat International
Coalition (HIC), World Organisation against Torture (OMCT), DanChurchAid,
Rights and Democracy, Plataforma Interamericana de Derechos Humanos
Democracia y Desarrollo (PIDHDD), and African Right to Food Network as
partners.

For the first time in history, the number of undernourished people in the
world has surpassed the tragic figure of 1 billion. The gap between promises
and reality is increasing as the international community and national
governments are painfully far from realising the World Food Summit targets
to halve the proportion of chronically hungry people in the world by the
year 2015. It is clear that the global governance of the World Food System
needs to be remodelled in order to effectively overcome hunger and its
causes.

As an evidence-providing monitoring tool, the WATCH pursues two aims: to put
public pressure on policy makers at the national and international level to
take the human right to food serious, and to provide a systematic
compilation of best practices for the realisation of the right to food,
while documenting where violations take place.

In the thematic part of the WATCH, individual contributors such as UN
Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, focus on
Governing World Food Security and necessary changes to related international
bodies, as well as on other burning right-to-food issues of the present. The
national and regional part of the WATCH highlights how the right to food and
nutrition are connected to agro-fuel production, poverty or the right to
land in countries such as Brazil, India or Kenya. From Benin to Zambia, the
WATCH presents reports on the state of the implementation of the right to
food and nutrition as well as initiatives such as the Zero Hunger Program in
Nicaragua.

As an annual publication, the WATCH seeks to provide a platform for human
rights experts, civil society activists, social movements, media and
scholars to exchange experiences, to learn from each other how best to carry
out right-to-food work in different settings, and to  advocate and lobby for
this right.

 *Published by Brot für die Welt, ICCO, FIAN International. Available in
English, Spanish and French, 72 pages, CD enclosed, available from FIAN at <
fian at fian.org>.*

If you want to link to the electronic version of the Right to Food and
Nutrition Watch on the FIAN website, you can do so:
The direct link is
http://www.fian.org/resources/documents/rtfn-watch/right-to-food-and-nutrition-watch-2009.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://phm.phmovement.org/pipermail/phm-exchange-phmovement.org/attachments/20091013/ceed492e/attachment-0001.html>