A/HRC/25/57 I. Introduction 1. Over the past six years, the Special Rapporteur on the right to food has conducted country visits in thirteen countries: Benin, Cameroon, Madagascar and Malawi, low-income countries; Brazil, China, Guatemala, Malaysia, Mexico, Nicaragua, South Africa and the Syrian Arab Republic, middle-income countries; and Canada, a high-income country. He also undertook missions to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in order to assess their contributions to the realization of the right to food. Following his initial report presenting his programme of work, he prepared 10 interim reports on a range of thematic issues, in addition to two special reports on the global food price crisis requested by the Human Rights Council in resolution S-7/1, at its special session on the global food crisis. He also prepared seven briefing notes, exploring areas that he could not address in sufficient detail in his official reports. In this final report, he presents his main conclusions. An overview of key recommendations made in his past thematic reports to the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly is appended as an annex. II. The diagnosis 2. The right to food is the right of every individual, alone or in community with others, to have physical and economic access at all times to sufficient, adequate and culturally acceptable food that is produced and consumed sustainably, preserving access to food for future generations.1 Individuals can secure access to food (a) by earning incomes from employment or self-employment; (b) through social transfers; or (c) by producing their own food, for those who have access to land and other productive resources. Through these channels, which often operate concurrently, each person should have access to a diet that “as a whole contains a mix of nutrients for physical and mental growth, development and maintenance, and physical activity that are in compliance with human physiological needs at all stages throughout the life cycle and according to gender and occupation”.2 Thus, the normative content of the right to food can be summarized by reference to the requirements of availability, accessibility, adequacy and sustainability, all of which must be built into legal entitlements and secured through accountability mechanisms. The Special Rapporteur’s country missions have been situated within this analytical framework. 3. Because of the various channels though which access to food can be achieved, the creation of decent jobs in the industry and services sectors plays an essential role in securing the right to food, as does the provision of social protection. The right to food overlaps in this regard with the right to work and the right to social security, guaranteed under articles 6 and 9 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. While addressing these issues in his thematic reports, the Special Rapporteur has focused most of his work on how food systems might be reformed to ensure a fuller realization of the right to adequate food. Indeed, the beginning of his mandate coincided with the global food price crisis of 2008, and the Special Rapporteur made it a priority to ensure that global and national efforts to address the crisis would be grounded in the right to food. While most of the initiatives that were adopted to strengthen the ability of countries to increase their own production and meet a greater share of their own food needs focused on supporting small-scale farmers, they did not include mechanisms for monitoring 1 Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, general comment No. 12 on the right to adequate food, paras. 6 and 7. 2 Ibid., para. 9. 3