A/HRC/25/57
post-2015 development agenda”, and it mandated its Bureau to ensure this key objective
would be reflected in this agenda.49
49.
Indeed, it is now time to move from generous intentions to action. The eradication of
hunger and extreme poverty is now placed at the top of the political agenda, and through
the new sustainable development goals, monitoring will be strengthened at a global level.
Grounding these efforts explicitly in the right to food will encourage all the actors involved
in the implementation of these goals to acknowledge their duties towards those who are
marginalized economically and politically disempowered, and to address the political
economy of food systems – in other terms, the question of who decides, on the basis of
what information, and under which accountability mechanisms.
VI. Conclusion
50.
The eradication of hunger and malnutrition is an achievable goal. Reaching it
requires, however, that we move away from business as usual and improve
coordination across sectors, across time and across levels of governance. Empowering
communities at the local level, in order for them to identify the obstacles that they face
and the solutions that suit them best, is a first step. This must be complemented by
supportive policies at the national level that ensure the right sequencing between the
various policy reforms that are needed, across all relevant sectors, including
agriculture, rural development, health, education and social protection. In turn,
local-level and national-level policies should benefit from an enabling international
environment, in which policies that affect the ability of countries to guarantee the
right to food – in the areas of trade, food aid, foreign debt alleviation and development
cooperation – are realigned with the imperative of achieving food security and
ensuring adequate nutrition. Understood as a requirement for democracy in the food
systems, which would imply the possibility for communities to choose which food
systems to depend on and how to reshape those systems, food sovereignty is a
condition for the full realization of the right to food. But it is the paradox of an
increasingly interdependent world that this requires deepening the cooperation
between States.
49
20
Committee on World Food Security, report on the fortieth session, Rome, 7–11 October 2013
(CFS 2013/40 REPORT), para. 81.
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