A/HRC/16/49 II. Diagnosis: three objectives of food systems 5. Ensuring the right to food requires the possibility either to feed oneself directly from productive land or other natural resources, or to purchase food. This implies ensuring that food is available, accessible and adequate. Availability relates to there being sufficient food on the market to meet the needs. Accessibility requires both physical and economic access: physical accessibility means that food should be accessible to all people, including the physically vulnerable such as children, older persons or persons with disabilities; economic accessibility means that food must be affordable without compromising other basic needs such as education fees, medical care or housing. Adequacy requires that food satisfy dietary needs (factoring a person’s age, living conditions, health, occupation, sex, etc), be safe for human consumption, free of adverse substances and culturally acceptable. Participation of food-insecure groups in the design and implementation of the policies that most affect them is also a key dimension of the right to food. 6. Consistent with obligations assumed by States under international human rights treaties to take effective measures towards the realization of the right to food, food systems should be developed in order to meet the following three objectives. 7. First, food systems must ensure the availability of food for everyone, that is, supply must match world needs. The most widely cited estimates state that an overall increase in agricultural production should reach 70 per cent by 2050,4 taking into account demographic growth, as well as changes in the composition of diets and consumption levels associated with increased urbanization and higher household incomes. This estimate, however, needs to be put in an appropriate perspective, since it takes the current demand curves as a given. At present, nearly half of the world’s cereal production is used to produce animal feed, and meat consumption is predicted to increase from 37.4 kg/person/year in 2000 to over 52 kg/person/year by 2050, so that by mid-century, 50 per cent of total cereal production may go to increasing meat production.5 Therefore, reallocating cereals used in animal feed to human consumption, a highly desirable option in developed countries where the excess animal protein consumption is a source of public health problems, combined with the development of alternative feeds based on new technology, waste and discards, could go a long way towards meeting the increased needs. The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) estimates that, even accounting for the energy value of the meat produced, the loss of calories that result from feeding cereals to animals instead of using cereals directly as human food represents the annual calorie need for more than 3.5 billion people.6 In addition, food losses in the field (between planting and harvesting) may be as high as 20 to 40 per cent of the potential harvest in developing countries, due to pests and pathogens, and the average post-harvest losses, resulting from poor storage and conservation, amount at least to 12 per cent, and up to 50 per cent for fruits and vegetables.7 Finally, as a result of policies to promote the production and use of agrofuels, the diversion of crops from meeting food needs to meeting energy needs contributes to tightening the pressure on agricultural supplies. Although these are all domains in which measures could be adopted, the need to meet the supply-side challenge remains. 4 5 6 7 4 J.A. Burney, et al., “Greenhouse gas mitigation by agricultural intensification,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107:26, 2010, pp. 12052-12057. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Agriculture: towards 2030/2050, Interim Report, Rome, 2006. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), The environmental food crisis – The environment’s role in averting future food crises, 2009, p. 27. Ibid., pp. 30-31.