You can’t quibble with the scale and commitment of Oxfam’s GROW campaign on global hunger launched last week. But everything else about it strikes me as the outcome of too many people trying too hard.
I could list the symptoms but by far the most serious is the omission of the right to food as the vital political leverage on hunger. Throughout the GROW material the right to food is presumed rather than reiterated.
Surely its status in international law and in most national constitutions is the knife to twist in all those flaws in the global food system that Oxfam identifies.
The broad sweep of the campaign’s ambition badly needs a simple philosophy to glue it together for supporters and policy-makers alike. I can’t see any way through the world food crisis that doesn’t lean heavily on a rights-based approach.
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this post was first published by OneWorld UK