United Nations System
Standing Committee on Nutrition

Working Group on Nutrition, Ethics and Human Rights

held during the SCN's 34th Session, 26 February to 1 March 2007, Rome.

Chair: Margret Vidar (FAO)
Co-Chairs: Flavio Valente (FIAN), Federica Donati (OHCHR), Marlis Lindecke (GTZ)
Rapporteur: Marc Cohen (IFPRI)

Links to the presentations and background material can be found at the bottom of the page.

Part I: Follow-up Actions Since 33rd Session of SCN

The 2006-07 work plan of the SCN Working Group on Nutrition Ethics and Human Rights (WGNEHR) centred on facilitating the mainstreaming of human rights approaches into the work of SCN. In furtherance of this aim, the WGNEHR arranged for joint presentations with other SCN Working Groups during the 34th session: in collaboration with the Working Group on Household Food Security, the WGNEHR organized presentations on the effects of avian influenza on the realization of the human right to adequate food (presented by Dr. Marlis Lindecke of GTZ) and on indigenous peoples and food diversity (presented by Professor Harriet Kuhnlein of McGill University); in collaboration with the Working Group on Nutrition of School-Aged Children, the WGNEHR organized a presentation on rights-based school feeding in Brazil (presented by Ms. Albaneide Peixinho of the Ministry of Education of Brazil).

The WGNEHR agreed at the 33rd Session to establish four task forces to further its objective of facilitating the interpretation and promotion of the Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security¹, a.k.a. the Right to Food Guidelines:

• The Task Force on Indigenous People and the Right to Adequate Food has focused its work on the human rights aspects of indigenous people’s food systems, and the policy implications, with particular attention to Right to Food Guidelines 8, 10, and 13.
• The Task Force on International Dimensions of the Right to Food (as discussed in particular in Guideline 19 and Part III of the Right to Food) organized a book project on that topic in 2006-07. The book, Global Obligations for the Right to Food, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield later in 2007. It argues that the global food system and human rights know no borders, so obligations on human rights do have a global dimension, which should form the basis of a global strategy to address hunger. States remain the primary duty-bearers with respect to human rights, but they have duties that are external as well as internal.
• The Task Force on the Human Rights Responsibilities of the Corporate Food Sector was established following the agreement at the 33rd Session on a Joint Statement by the WGNEHR and the Working Group on Nutrition Throughout the Life Cycle on the Human Right of Children and Adolescents to Adequate Food and to be Free from Obesity and Related Diseases: The Responsibilities of Food and Beverage Corporations and Related Media and Marketing Industries (attached). The Task Force focuses in particular on Guidelines 6 and 10, and Part III of the Right to Food Guidelines. The Task Force arranged for a presentation on issues associated with Marketing to Children during the 34th Session, made by Professor Philip James, President Elect, International Association for the Study of Obesity.
• The Task Force on Capacity Development for Human Rights in Nutrition was charged with building further on discussions in the WGNEHR in recent years about the urgent need for, and approaches to cross-disciplinary capacity-building in the interface between nutrition and human rights. The focus is on a limited number of interrelated and “doable” activities promoting strengthened human resources able to analyse, promote, and monitor food and nutrition as human rights (i) to call on all interested individuals and groups to take advantage of professional meetings (international, regional, and national) to help insert and diffuse information and ideas about nutrition and human rights into relevant technical disciplines, sectors, and programmes; (ii) to stimulate individuals and groups at relevant academic or other institutions to establish shorter or longer course modules in all regions; and (iii) to serve as a “hub” to enable the more system-wide channelling of information about initiatives in both these directions (from international organizations as well as public, academic, and NGO/CSO circles) for mutual inspiration and learning. The Task Force concentrates in particular on Guidelines 10, 11, 14, and 17, and Part III of the Right to Food Guidelines.

Part II

A. Continued Discussion of Plans to Fill Gaps in Knowledge and Practice

The Working Group discussed rights-based approaches to school feeding and nutrition programs at the 34th Session. Ellen Muehlhoff and Maarten Immink of FAO made a presentation on the Organization’s project on Enhancing the Effectiveness of School Feeding/Nutrition Programmes through Rights-based Approaches. The Brazilian government’s National School Feeding Program Coordinator, Albaneide Peixinho, gave a presentation on how human rights are integrated into the program.

The Working Group discussed its role in the SCN, particularly the question of whether it might serve as a catalyst and a vehicle for keeping track of, generating, transmitting, and diffusing ideas from SCN and its members, particularly in the areas of capacity building, technical cooperation, and advocacy.

To foster understanding of concrete implementation of a rights-based approach to nutrition, the Working Group hosted a presentation by the Minister of Health of Bolivia, Dr. Nila Heredia, on her country’s Desnutrición Cero program.

B. Summary Comments of the Working Group to the ECHUI Global Framework and Work Plan

The Working Group regrets that the ECHUI Global Framework fails to integrate a rights-based approach to ending childhood hunger and undernutition. Mere charity is not enough from a rights-based perspective. The ECHUI Global Framework should be anchored in a system of rights and corresponding obligations established by international law. This would help to promote sustainability, empowering people themselves – especially the more marginalised and vulnerable – and hold accountable those who have a duty to act.

As currently packaged, the ECHUI Global Framework:

• Fails to consider and incorporate human rights standards, including the rights of the child.
• Privileges top-down interventions, and fails to recognise the crucial role that the poor and vulnerable themselves should have in claiming their rights and determining their needs and requirements. Rather than viewed as passive beneficiaries, the poor and vulnerable should be empowered and fully integrated into policy formulation aimed at ending child hunger and undernutrition.
• Places strong emphasis on public-private partnerships while the protection and promotion of children’s freedom from hunger and right to adequate food remain the primary responsibility of states.
• Places much more emphasis on process-oriented outcomes – increased awareness, strengthened policies and programmes, increased capacity, and increased efficiency and accountability – than on the stated goal of ending childhood hunger and undernutrition, thereby confusing means and ends.
• Does not discuss how development policies and programs may themselves result in hunger and undernutrition, and therefore fails to address underlying and basic causes of problems and/or to discuss how to prevent this from occurring.
• Focuses on underweight, not stunting, thereby failing to address the important issue of the double burden of malnutrition, since children can be both stunted and overweight, manifesting multiple aspects of malnutrition.
• Does not focus on nutrition throughout the life cycle, placing little emphasis, for example, on maternal nutrition or intra-uterine growth retardation that in turn are major drivers of child undernutrition.

In view of the above, and because the SCN’s own Strategic Framework commits it to integrating human rights into its work, the Working Group does not endorse the ECHUI Global Framework as it stands and does not recommend that the SCN become the technical advisory secretariat of ECHUI until the Framework is revised. The Working Group stands willing to contribute to revisions to the Framework that would incorporate a rights-based and preventive approach, for presentation at the 35th Session of SCN.

C. Three Main Recommendations by the Working Group for SCN Action in the Coming Year

1. The Working Group recommends that the SCN support the Joint Statement made at its 33rd Session by the Working Groups on Nutrition, Ethics, and Human Rights and Nutrition Throughout the Life Cycle on the Human Right of Children and Adolescents to Adequate Food and to be Free from Obesity and Related Diseases: The Responsibilities of Food and Beverage Corporations and Related Media and Marketing Industries. As called for in the statement, the Working Group further recommends that the SCN then forward the statement to the U.N. Secretary General’s Special Representative on Business and Human Rights, Professor John G. Ruggie, and to the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food of the U.N. Human Rights Council, Professor Jean Ziegler, and encourage them to give in-depth consideration to the issues raised in their forthcoming reports.

2. The Working Group recommends that the SCN incorporate the principles of the above-referenced Joint Statement into the terms of reference of the proposed new SCN Working Group on Private Sector Engagement.

3. The Working Group recommends that the SCN’s 6th Report on the World Nutrition Situation should focus on measuring progressive realization of the right to adequate food. As proposed at the 33rd Session of SCN, the report would discuss the question of achieving the Millennium Goals (MDGs), but would emphasize efforts to do so through a rights-based approach, in light of the United Nations’ mandate to use such an approach in all of its work, and given the strong human rights emphasis in the Millennium Declaration, of which the MDGs are an integral part. It would seek to assess the processes of realizing the right to food as well as the outcomes.

Part III: 2007-08 Work Plan

The Working Group proposes the following leadership group to the SCN Chair:

Chair: Ms. Margret Vidar, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) (Margret.Vidar@fao.org)
Co-Chairs: Ms. Federica Donati, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) (fdonati@ohchr.org), Dr. Marlis Lindecke, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) (Marlis.Lindecke@gtz.de), and Dr. Flavio Valente (FIAN) (valente@fian.org)
Rapporteur: Dr. Marc Cohen (International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) (m.j.cohen@cgiar.org)

Statement by the Working Groups on
Nutrition throughout the Life Cycle
and
Nutrition, Ethics and Human Rights
of the United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition (SCN)

The human right of children and adolescents to adequate food and to be free from obesity and related diseases: the responsibilities of food and beverage corporations and related media and marketing industries

Adopted in Geneva, 15 March 2006 and Reiterated at the 34th Session of the SCN, Rome, 26 February to 1 March 2007

Child obesity has long been a problem in many high-income countries and is becoming a major health problem in many other countries throughout the world, including in developing countries, notably in Latin America and certain parts of South-East Asia and the Pacific. The causes are several and include inadequate breastfeeding, changing dietary consumption towards high energy, low nutrient-dense food items including fat-rich snacks and drinks containing high levels of sugar or salt. Lowered physical activity levels contribute to the picture and thus the causes are certainly multi-factorial. There are adverse health consequences for children, including the emergence of type 2 diabetes, but childhood and adolescent obesity also predisposes for long term health consequences in adulthood, increasing the risks for chronic diseases and reduced life expectancy.

There can be no doubt about the role played by the corporate sector and its active marketing of the kind of products that contribute to generating this change towards unhealthy consumption patterns affecting all age groups. Among these groups it is common knowledge that young mothers – often those pregnant for the first time and later their children – are particularly susceptible to marketing strategies that appeal to certain ’modern’ lifestyles and group identity. An important example of how such marketing should and can be regulated is the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes and subsequent World Health Assembly Resolutions, which have been successfully incorporated into national laws in dozens of countries since the Code was passed at the 1981 WHA.

The aggressive marketing practices of much of the corporate sector, particularly those aimed at programs for school children, as well as an increasingly narrowly controlled retail market chain, are working directly against young people’s right to adequate food³ for nutritional health and wellbeing. It is important that such corporate actors recognise their joint responsibility, together with governments and other non-state actors, for the realisation of the right to adequate food and the highest attainable health⁴ of all individuals and particularly of the young. Corporate practices should not contribute to establishing unhealthy food habits, thereby increasing the risk of developing disabling diseases and reduced quality of life.

A dialogue with the corporate food sector and related media and marketing industries should be initiated with a view to progressively shifting the demand away from, and eliminating the promotion of food and beverage products that contribute to diets that lead to childhood and adolescent ill-health and prospects for early death and/or disabling life years in adulthood, as recommended in the WHO/UNICEF Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding⁵ and the WHO Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health⁶. It is known that some corporations have already begun to alter their products to make them less harmful. This is welcome and must proceed systematically and on an accelerating scale. The current activities within the United Nations system, to encourage responsible corporate practices in regard to human rights, provide an important facilitating context.

Therefore, the Working Group on Nutrition, Ethics and Human Rights and the Working Group on Nutrition Throughout the Life Cycle of the United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition request:

1. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative on Business and Human Rights to give in-depth consideration to these issues in their forthcoming reports in order to increase the awareness of the problems faced.

2. The UN agencies concerned, in particular WHO, UNICEF and FAO to develop a code of conduct concerning marketing to children and adolescents.

3. Governments to urgently move towards appropriate regulation in this area.

¹ As adopted by the Council of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in November 2004, see http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/009/y9825e/y9825e00.htm
² The Task Force is discussing whether to expand its focus to the corporate sector as a whole, since a focus on food would not include agribusiness. Also, the Task Force is discussing whether to change its name to the “Task Force on Regulation of the Corporate (Food) Sector.”
³ The right to ’adequate’ food is the formulation used in the relevant provision under international human rights law, notably Article 11.1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966. The meaning of ’adequacy’ in regard to food has later been interpreted in General Comment No.12 on the right to food issued by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1999, see: http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/0/3d02758c707031d58025677f003b73b9?Opendocument and subsequently used in Voluntary Guidelines to support the progressive realization of the right to adequate food in the context of national food security adopted by the FAO Council in November 2004, see http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/009/y9825e/y9825e00.htm 
⁴ The right to ’the highest attainable health’ is the formulation used in Article 12 of the same Covenant and later interpreted in General Comment No. 14 on the right to health issued by the Committee on ESCR in 2000, see: http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(symbol)/E.C.12.2000.4.En?OpenDocument
⁵ World Health Organization, Geneva, 2003
⁶ World Health Organization, Geneva, 2004  

 34th Session, Rome, Presentations and Background Notes

• Guidelines for the 6th Report on the World Nutrition Situation
• Summary of SCN Interim Private Sector Engagement Policy
• Report from the Task Force on Human Rights Responsibilities of the corporate food sector
• Notes on the Human Rights Approach to Ending Child Hunger and Undernutrition
• Report from the Task Force on Indigenous Peoples and the Right to Food
• Enhancing the Effectiveness of School Feeding/Nutrition Programmes through Rights-based Approaches
• SCN/ WGNEHR as umbrella for joint actions on the right to food: how could it work in practice? Capacity building, technical cooperation, advocacy…
• Report from the Task Force on Capacity Development for Human Rights in Nutrition
• Report from the Task Force on International Dimensions (TFID)