This book introduces the human right to adequate food and nutrition as evolving concept and identifies two structural "disconnects" fueling food insecurity for a billion people, and disproportionally affecting women, children, and rural food producers: the separation of women's rights from their right to adequate food and nutrition, and the fragmented attention to food as commodity and the medicalization of nutritional health. Three conditions arising from these disconnects are discussed: structural violence and discrimination frustrating the realization of women's human rights, as well as their private and public contributions to food and nutrition security for all; many women's experience of their and their children's simultaneously independent and intertwined subjectivities during pregnancy and breastfeeding being poorly understood in human rights law and abused by poorly-regulated food and nutrition industry marketing practices; and the neoliberal economic system's interference both with the autonomy and self-determination of women and their communities and with the strengthening of sustainable diets based on democratically governed local food systems. The book calls for a social movement-led reconceptualization of the right to adequate food toward incorporating gender, women's rights, and nutrition, based on the food sovereignty framework.
"This multi-authored volume, the product of a continuing seminar by the editors and additional authors, exhaustively spans and connects the latest legal, political, economic and sociocultural thinking connecting gender, nutrition and human rights?As in usual in writings building legal background and arguments, there are many redundancies as the authors trace the institutional and documentary background to each topic. This is an advantage, in that individual chapters contain fully developed backgrounds, and individual chapters refer to the others."
Ellen Messer, Cambridge University Press
"The volume of essays introduces several critical feminist perspectives to the debates around food and nutrition security, employing a lens of social justice, and a feminist critique of the structural causes of global food insecurity, which is often treated as a technical problem"
Emily Hillenbrand, Senior Technical Advisor for Gender and Livelihoods, CARE USA Food Nutrition Security Unit, Atlanta, USA
"This book addresses important issues for attaining human wellbeing worldwide. It presents a thorough review of literature and of international declarations related to food and nutrition. Each chapter presses for change in inter-national frameworks, instruments and policies related to human rights."Ann Waters-Bayer,Royal Tropical Institute, Agriculture and Human Values Journal of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society
