In March 2016, the UN Human Rights Council was in session in Geneva. It was International Women’s Day, and Anne C. Bellows took advantage of the occasion to co-host a side event focused on both issues, human rights and women. The parallel event—“No Right to Food without Women’s Rights: Women Exposing Violations from around the Globe”—was designed to shed light on structural barriers that women find in their everyday lives.
“Despite calls for the inclusion of women and a gender perspective in food and nutrition security, the status of hunger and malnutrition of women and girls is still not improving,” says Bellows, professor of food studies in Falk College. “These groups are particularly susceptible to a dominant economic and development model that exploits people and natural resources.”
The event brought together women’s rights activists from around the world to present an understanding of the right to adequate food and nutrition that does not limit them to their traditional role in families but empowers them as women’s and human rights agents for change. The women made presentations on the situation of women’s rights to food and nutrition in their respective countries and constituencies and how they are advocating for this human right. They spoke on behalf of tea plantation workers in India, peasants in Spain, women affected by mining and displacement in Togo, and women’s analysis of, and recommendations to, address malnutrition in Guatemala.
Bellows, in her presentation, “Structural Disconnects that Frustrate Women’s Rights to Food and Nutrition,” discussed issues that frustrate women’s right to adequate food and nutrition. She touched on the lack of attention to women’s and girls’ specific needs and rights to food in the umbrella International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and subsequent General Comments; and the omission of women’s and girls’ right to adequate food and nutrition in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
Bellows was there in her capacity as a board member of FIANInternational, which orchestrated the event; the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food also participated. Founded in 1986, FIANInternational (formerly the FoodFirst Information and Action Network) was the first international human rights organization to advocate for the realization of the right to adequate food and nutrition.
“True social and food justice comes from self-determination, not chronic charity,” Bellows says. “Local and national food systems require sustainable and productive food economies responsive to human rights principles. Public policy, including food governance, must reflect broad public welfare through decision-making bodies that answer to the people, not corporate shareholders.”
Bellows recently co-authored the book Gender, Nutrition, and the Human Right to Adequate Food: Toward an Inclusive Framework, a collaboration between university-based researchers and two international nongovernmental organizations. “All of the authors are focused on aspects of under-recognized food and nutritional justice within the framework of the human right to adequate food and nutrition,” Bellows notes.
She adds that Falk College is the perfect setting for her scholarship, teaching, and advocacy. “The Falk College dean, Diane Murphy, has had the insight of pulling together a Food Studies program at a moment when the new disciplinary field is exploding,” she says. “We in the department are focused on the social, political, and economic conditions of food systems.”
It’s a mutual admiration society. “This event was a wonderful acknowledgement of Professor Bellows’ work, which is recognized around the globe,” Murphy says. “We at Falk College are so proud of her scholarship. The caliber of her work brings great focus to the work in our Food Studies program.”