1st Edition

Gender, Nutrition, and the Human Right to Adequate Food Toward an Inclusive Framework

    514 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    514 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    1. The Evolving Nature of the Human Rights System and the Development of the Right to Adequate Food and Nutrition Concept  Anne C. Bellows, María Daniela Núñez Burbano de Lara and Roseane do Socorro Gonçalves Viana  2. Gender, Nutrition, and the Right to Adequate Food: Introducing Two Structural Disconnects and the Human Rights Processes Necessary to Address Them  Anne C. Bellows and María Daniela Núñez Burbano de Lara  3. Violence and Women’s Participation in the Right to Adequate Food and Nutrition  Anne C. Bellows and Anna Jenderedjian  4. Maternal, Infant, and Young Child Feeding: Intertwined Subjectivities and Corporate Accountability  Lida Lhotska, Veronika Scherbaum and Anne C. Bellows  5. Sustainable Food Systems, Gender, and Participation: Foregrounding Women in the Context of the Right to Adequate Food and Nutrition  Stefanie Lemke and Anne C. Bellows  6. Closing Protection Gaps Through a More Comprehensive Conceptual Framework for the Human Right to Adequate Food and Nutrition  Flavio L.S. Valente, Ana María Suárez Franco and R. Denisse Córdova Montes  Glossary of Abbreviations and Acronyms.  Chronological Glossary of Human Rights Instruments and Other International Frameworks and Documents Mentioned in This Volume.

    Biography

    Anne C. Bellows is professor and graduate program director of the Food Studies Program in the Department of Public Health, Food Studies and Nutrition at Syracuse University.

    Flavio L.S. Valente is the secretary general of FIAN International, based in Heidelberg.

    Stefanie Lemke joined the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University, UK in 2015. From 2013 to 2015, she was acting chair, Department of Gender and Nutrition, University of Hohenheim.

    María Daniela Núñez Burbano de Lara is a research associate at the Department of Gender and Nutrition at the University of Hohenheim.

    "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