“The human right to food: if it’s not safe, it’s not food.”

Access to food in sufficient and adequate quantity and quality is a human right. Already the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights formally enshrined its existence. And yet it is still one of the most difficult human rights to realize, and the goal of zero hunger remains among the priorities of the Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The recent pandemic crisis has, indeed, exacerbated the problem of access to food for millions of individuals: according to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, in 2020 alone the number of people without access to adequate food grew from 320 million to 2.4 billion, affecting one-third of the world’s population.

The concept of the human right to food immediately refers us to the idea of having a fair amount of food; in short, the right to be free from all forms of undernourishment and malnutrition. We are used to thinking of the right to food as the realization of so-called food security. But the right to food is also the right to food quality: it can only be said to be fully realized if there is access to food that is safe from the point of view of health effects. Thus, it is clear that from a human rights perspective, the security of having food is not sufficient in itself; when it comes to human rights, food safety and food security are two inseparable aspects of a single fundamental right.

And yet, even today global food systems as we know them have been unable to cope with the need to ensure food in adequate quantity and quality for all. Food, seen as a commodity, inextricably links food production to hyper-productivity from a consumerist perspective. It is now clear that increasing agrifood productivity is not the key to guaranteeing the right to food for as many people as possible. At the root of hunger and malnutrition is in fact not a shortage of food, but a problem of access to food, mainly due to poverty and rampant inequality, which the industrial system of food production only perpetuates by itself being the cause of food insecurity for millions of people.

Food security is not only the necessary condition but also the ultimate goal of sustainable food systems, which are understood to be food systems that ensure food security for all while at the same time not compromising the economic, social and environmental foundations necessary to generate food security for future generations and not interfering with the enjoyment of other human rights.

Meeting the growing demand for food from an increasingly large world population, while ensuring that it is sufficient in quantity and quality, therefore requires a rethinking of global food systems in terms of sustainability.

Instead, food production to date is still devoted to maximizing productivity and efficiency at the lowest possible cost, largely based on industrial and intensive agriculture, which in turn consists mainly of monocultures, intensive livestock farming, industrial food processing and mass distribution.

Such a pattern generates distortions that are reflected in global food security. The agribusiness sector employs 70 percent of the world’s child labor, fostering poverty and inequality. Widely used monocultures depend on the use of fertilizers and pesticides, which impact farmers and rural communities. The same monocultures that, in the short run, guarantee faster production, create unsustainable ecological disasters in the long run. Intensive livestock farms have increased the risk of pandemics and fostered the flourishing of unacceptable working conditions and environmental abuses. Agricultural workers themselves are among the most vulnerable to food insecurity, precisely because of widespread poverty due to precarious working conditions. Intensive agriculture is also a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation.

Therefore, when we talk about safe food it is always necessary to ask: safe for whom? The way we produce and consume food reflects a partial and Eurocentric view of the global food systems, in which food safety, understood as both adequate food and food that is not harmful to the health, of those who produce it as well as those who consume it, is guaranteed for only a portion of the world’s population.

The path to achieving true food security for all is still long and treacherous. It will not be possible unless we radically rethink the global food production system from an environmental and social sustainability perspective that aims to remove the deep roots of the inequalities that today are the main obstacle to the full realization of the right to food for all.