23 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

Jessica Lawrence

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Introduction

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is a United Nations (UN) specialized agency established for the purposes of eliminating hunger, improving nutrition, and increasing living standards. As stated in the FAO Constitution’s preamble, the Organization aims at:

Raising levels of nutrition and standards of living…

Securing improvements in the efficiency of the production and distribution of all food and agricultural products;

Bettering the condition of rural populations;

Thus contributing towards an expanding world economy and ensuring humanity’s freedom from hunger

In keeping with this mandate, the FAO has developed five ‘strategic objectives’ that guide its institutional activities for the current period:

Help eliminate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition;

Make agriculture, forestry and fisheries more productive and

sustainable; Reduce rural poverty;

Enable inclusive and efficient agricultural and food

systems; Increase the resilience of livelihoods to threats

and crises.

The FAO acts as a coordinator and forum where states and technical agencies can come together to share their policy expertise and develop initiatives designed to accomplish these goals. It employs experts (including agronomists, fisheries and livestock specialists, nutritionists, foresters, social scientists, economists, and statisticians) to produce and disseminate information regarding standards, best practices, sustainable farming, and scientific techniques on food and nutritional issues. It works with NGOs and food industry partners on initiatives to improve rural access to food and food markets. It works with the World Food Programme (WFP) and other humanitarian agencies to provide support in times of crisis. And it provides monitoring and risk-assessment services to alert countries to potential problems regarding agriculture and nutrition.

Learning Outcomes:

  • On completing this module, the reader is expected to understand:
  • The aims and objectives of the FAO.
  • The various humanitarian programmes it undertakes. Its role as a forum for human rights.

History

Food and nutrition have long been concerns of the international community, and agriculture was one of the themes taken up by the international organizations of the pre-World War Two era. In the late 1800s, US agriculturalist David Lubin was an early advocate of an ‘international agricultural congress’ that would connect farmers across the globe and distribute information regarding production, costs, and disease. Partially in response to his efforts, the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA) was created in 1905, with a mandate to assist farmers in sharing their expertise, establishing credit systems, marketing, and other issues. During World War Two, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was charged with providing countries in Europe and Asia with food and other relief goods. The IIA effectively closed its doors in 1945 (though it was not officially disbanded until 1948), when it was replaced by the FAO. UNRRA, similarly, was terminated following the war, and FAO took up its role in assisting countries in crisis by mobilizing world food resources.

The idea for the FAO was born at the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture convened by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in May-June 1943. The conference built on the idea of ‘freedom from want’ articulated in Roosevelt’s famous 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech. After the 44 nations attending the Conference agreed to establish the organization, an Interim Commission on Food and Agriculture worked for the next two years to draw up a Constitution.

The FAO (whose library is named in honor of David Lubin) was founded on 16 October 1945, with the conclusion of the FAO Constitution at a conference in Quebec City, Canada. Its headquarters was initially established in Washington, DC, but was shortly relocated to Rome, Italy. 16 October continues to be celebrated every year as World Food Day.

In its early days, FAO did not have a ‘rights’ orientation, but rather focused primarily on improving the distribution of international food surpluses and on increasing agricultural production in order to ensure that all people had access to a basic minimum amount of food. The first decades of the FAO’s work exhibited a faith in the power of statistical analysis and scientific agriculture as key to ending hunger. The collection and publication of data, and the implementation of technical assistance programs were key to this vision.

The 1960s and 1970s saw some conflict on the issue of the right to food, as developed countries continued to see the issue in terms of increased production and aid, while the developing world fought for structural reforms under the banner of the New International Economic Order. The FAO was, in many senses, caught up in this ideological dispute, and thought it pushed for an increased focus on hunger (for example with the 1960 Freedom from Hunger Campaign), it was largely unsuccessful in moving policy away from control of national food surpluses and deficits.

It was not until after the cold war in the 1990s that a fundamental shift began to occur. Though Asbjørn Eide and others were already publishing on the right to food in the 1980s, it was not until the FAO-sponsored 1996 World Food Summit that the right fully came into its own. In the aftermath of this international conference, the FAO came to adopt a human rights based approach to food security—an approach that has been clarified, strengthened, and expanded to the present day.

The Institution

The FAO is headquartered in Rome, Italy. It also maintains regional and sub-regional offices throughout the world, and has representation in more than 120 countries. The FAO is relatively decentralized (particularly since a major restructuring that took place in 1994), with much of its personnel working in these field offices.

The FAO is governed by the Conference of Member Nations, which is made up of all 194 member states, the European Union (a ‘member organization’) and associate members the Faroe Islands and Tokelau. The Conference meets every two years to review the organization’s work, determine policy goals, and approve the FAO budget. It is assisted by Committee on World Food Security, which works to coordinate and development food security policies.

The Conference elects a group of 49 member countries to what is known as the Council. These members serve three-year rotating terms, and act in the Council as the FAO’s executive organ.

The Conference also appoints the FAO’s Director-General for a (once renewable) four-year term. The current Director-General is José Graziano da Silva, a long-time advocate on issues of food security, rural development and agriculture, who has held that position since 2012.

The Organization is divided into seven departments: Administration and Finance, Agriculture and Consumer Protection, Economic and Social Development, Fisheries and Aquaculture, Forestry, Natural Resource Management and Environment, and Technical Cooperation.

The FAO’s budget is funded by regular contributions from the member states, as well as additional voluntary contributions from member states and other partners.

Role as a Forum for Human Rights

The “right to adequate food and freedom from hunger” is one of the most basic human rights, and is contained in a number of international and regional human rights treaties. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states in Article 25 that:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), more expansively, attests that:

The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions. The States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right, recognizing to this effect the essential importance of international co-operation based on free consent.

The States Parties to the present Covenant, recognizing the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programmes, which are needed:

(a) To improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition and by developing or reforming agrarian systems in such a way as to achieve the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources;

(b) Taking into account the problems of both food-importing and food-exporting countries, to ensure an equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need.

Additional protections are included in many international and regional instruments, including, for example, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC),  the Additional Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights in the Area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Protocol of San Salvador),  the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, and the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa,  to name a few.

Approaching food security through the lens of the right to food is important, because it frames the need for accessible, available and adequate food as a legal entitlement, rather than as aid or charity. It emphasizes the obligation of states, rather than the good will of countries or private donors, to ensure that individuals and communities can either produce or access on the market sufficient food of sufficient quality to meet their needs. Furthermore, the ‘right to food’ approach envisions food security as inseparable from other human rights principles, such as non-discrimination, equality, and accountability, and is thus a more holistic way of viewing priorities and programs. As Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier De Schutter explains:

The right to adequate food is not a slogan. It imposes obligations on states and non-state actors alike which are grounded in international law. Putting it at the center of our response to the global food crisis… leads us to fundamentally rethink the nature of the challenge we are facing, and what it requires to make progress towards addressing it.

Because of its status as a UN specialized agency and its focus on eliminating hunger, improving nutrition, and reducing poverty, the FAO is a natural forum for human rights work with respect to the right to food. All UN entities must abide by the UN Charter, which establishes human rights as a major institutional goal:

We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small…

In this context, the FAO’s work as a ‘knowledge base’ for food and agriculture, its crisis and emergency support efforts, its work to combat malnutrition, its programs promoting food security and safety, and other activities contribute directly to the fulfillment of every person’s right to adequate food.

The FAO has committed to framing its work via a human rights-based approach, with a particular focus on equity. It has worked to mainstream human rights into its policy documents and programs. It has made significant efforts to focus on the rural poor. And it has identified ‘gender’ and ‘governance’ as two ‘cross-cutting themes’ that are to be integrated into all areas of its work. This human rights framework has allowed the FAO to develop a sophisticated approach to food and agricultural security that goes beyond simply assessing the quantity of food produced, asking in addition who produces it, how it is produced, and what nutritional quality it holds.

The FAO has also contributed to the development of the right to food as an international legal and political concept more generally. In 1996, the FAO sponsored the World Food Summit, an international convention on food and agriculture. The World Food Summit Plan of Action, which issued from that conference, established as its Objective 7.4:

To clarify the content of the right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, as stated in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and other relevant international and regional instruments, and to give particular attention to implementation and full and progressive realization of this right as a means of achieving food security for all.

The Plan of Action further invited the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and other human rights institutions to “better define the rights related to food in Article 11 of the [ICESCR] and to propose ways to implement and realize these rights.” It was as a result of this invitation that the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adopted General Comment 12 in 1999, elaborating its authoritative views on the progressive realization of the right.

Following up on the World Food Summit and General Comment 12, in 2004 the FAO Member States adopted the landmark Voluntary Guidelines to Support Progressive Realization of the Right to Food in the Context of National Food Security. These Voluntary Guidelines provide guidance and practical information regarding the implementation of the right to food in the context of national food security. The Voluntary Guidelines are, moreover, the first document on how to operationalize an economic, social and cultural right that has been adopted by Member States outside the human rights system. The Voluntary Guidelines take a human-rights based approach, focusing inter alia on democracy and the rule of law, strengthening national human rights systems, education, nutrition, food aid, social safety nets, and international assistance. Though they are voluntary and thus do not have binding weight as international law, they are helpful as an articulation of concrete steps that countries can take to implement the right to food.

In 2006, the FAO created a Right to Food Unit to support members in implementing the Right to Food Guidelines. The Right to Food Unit provides information, develops toolkits and best practices guidelines, assists in mainstreaming the right to food in the FAO’s work, provides technical expertise and policy advice, and assists with capacity development. Through this and other mechanisms, the FAO continues to provide extensive support to national governments seeking to implement the guidelines, as well as undertaking specific right to food projects at the country level.

Current right to food projects at the FAO include:

The “Coherent Food Security Responses: Incorporating Right to Food into Global and Regional Food Security Initiatives” project, which aims improve global governance as well as regional food security governance;

The development of a “Hunger-Free Initiative for West Africa,” in association with ECOWAS;

The “Improved Global Governance for Hunger” program, which seeks to improve the way that the international community responds to hunger by, for example, mainstreaming the right to food approach in social protection programs;

The “Integrating the Right to Adequate Food and Good Governance in National Policies, Legislation and Institutions” project, which works with government and non-government stakeholders in Mozambique, Bolivia, Nepal and El Salvador to strengthen institutions and promote good governance;

The “Mainstreaming the Right to Food and Nutrition into the Smallholder Commercialization” program, which supports the government of Sierra Leone in adding a nutrition and right to food component in its Smallholder Commercialization Program and district development plans;

The “Mainstreaming the Right to Food into Sub-national Plans and Strategies” program, which supports governments and civil society in Uganda, Sierra Leone and Tanzania in their efforts to promote good governance at the local level;

The “Support to Country-Level Learning from Actions for Food Security in Southern Africa” project, which focuses on learning from experience to increase the effectiveness of food security programs.

Summary

Despite its generally strong record on human rights issues, some questions and criticism of the FAO’s approach remain. UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier de Schutter, for example, has pointed out that the FAO has not done enough to mainstream the right to food across all sectors of the organization’s activities. As part of a review of the FAO’s human rights policies conducted in 2013, de Schutter argued that despite its good work thus far, the FAO continued to face challenges in overcoming “the ‘silo effect’ whereby the right to food is primarily promoted through discrete projects carried out by only one part of the organization.” To this end, the Special Rapporteur recommended:

Focusing on high-impact activities in support of the right to food;

Mainstreaming the right to food by making it the operative criteria in project clearance and monitoring processes;

Systematically integrating right to food procedural requirements into FAO regional and country activities;

Ensuring the alignment of FAO norms and standards with the right to food;

Expanding right to food support to national and regional governments;

Ensuring that country guidance is compatible with the right to food framework;

Providing practical guidance on the right to food in partnership with civil society; and Recognizing NGOs and other civil society organizations as partners.

Other commentators have also expressed a desire for more and firmer action on the right to food. John Teton, director of the International Food Security Treaty Campaign, has argued that FAO’s approach in insufficiently steeped in ‘hard law’, and that the organization should support a treaty-based regime that would impose firm legal obligations on states to alleviate hunger.

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Reference

  • Constitution of the Food and Agriculture Organization,
  • For more on the history of the FAO, see D. John Shaw, World Food Security: A History Since 1945 (2007).
  • For more on the FAO’s first few decades, and its largely failed attempts to implement international price controls and other reforms, see Amy L.S. Staples, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945-1965 82-104 (2006).
  • See Su-ming Khoo, “The Right to Food: Legal, Political and Human Implications for a Food Security Constitution of the Food and Agriculture Organization (1945), arts. III-V. Constitution of the Food and Agriculture Organization (1945), art. VII.
  • Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), art. 25.
  • “General Comment 12: The Right to Adequate Food (art. 11),” UN Doc. E/C.12/1999/5, 12 May 1999. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979), arts. 12 (right to “adequate nutrition during pregnancy and lactation”); art. 14 (right to “access to agricultural credit and loans, marketing facilities, appropriate technology and equal treatment in land and agrarian reform as well as in land resettlement schemes”).
  • Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), arts. 24 (right to the “highest attainable standard of health” including through combatting malnutrition via the “provision of adequate nutritious foods and clean drinking-water” as well as “basic knowledge of child health and nutrition”), 27 (right of every child to “a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development” including through the provision of “material assistance and support programmes, particularly with regard to nutrition”).
  • Additional Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights in the Area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Protocol of San Salvador) (1988), arts. 12, 17 (in the context of the elderly).
  • African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990), art. 14 (right to health and health services, including nutrition).
  • Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, arts. 14 (right to food), 15 (right of pregnant and breastfeeding women to nutrition).
  • Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), arts. 25 (right to health, including prevention of the “discriminatory denial of … food and fluids on the basis of disability”), 28 (right to “an adequate standard of living … including adequate food”); Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition (1974) GA Res. 3348 (XXIX).
  • Olivier De Schutter, “The Right to Food: Fighting for Adequate Food in a Global Crisis,” Harvard International Review 38 (2009), at 42.
  • World Food Summit Rome Declaration and Plan of Action (1996)
  • World Food Summit Rome Declaration and Plan of Action (1996)
  • Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, General Comment 12, UN Doc. E/C.12/1999/5.
  • FAO, Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security (2005), available at http://www.fao.org/3/a-y7937e.pdf.
  • Olivier de Schutter, “The FAO Must Do More to Promote Food as a Basic Human Right,” The Guardian, 4 March 2013; Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, “Mission to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” UN Doc. A/HRC/22/50/Add.3, 14 January 2013.
  • Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, “Mission to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” UN Doc. A/HRC/22/50/Add.3, 14 January 2013
  • Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, “Mission to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” UN Doc. A/HRC/22/50/Add.3, 14 January 2013 Su-ming Khoo, “The Right to Food: Legal, Political and Human Implications for a Food Security Agenda,” Trócaire Development Review 33 (2010).