Heather Devine 

The greatest health risk in the world today is hunger.[1] One out of nine people in the world do not get enough to eat—meaning they do not get enough calories, nutrients, or both.[2] Hunger and malnutrition threaten global health at a greater rate than AIDs, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.[3]

Hunger is not restricted to developing nations. Fourteen percent of United States households are food insecure—they cannot consistently access enough food for their households.[4] Closer to home, 84,000 Vermonters, 25,000 of whom are children, are food insecure.[5] More than a third of Vermonters report they cannot afford to buy nutritious food, or they cannot buy enough food.[6]

The global hunger problem is not a problem of sufficiency. There is enough food to feed the world, both globally and domestically, but somehow that food does not get to all the people who need it.[7] The problem is food access.

Around the world, political leaders, scholars, and activists have started arguing that food access is a human right.[8] The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights declares that all people have the right “to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food,” and that the state has the duty to “respect, protect, and fulfill” that right.[9] More than one hundred nations now legally recognize a right to food.[10] The United States does not.[11]

This Note does not address whether the United States should embrace a right to food. This Note argues the right to food is a useful frame for understanding and addressing hunger within the United States, even though the United States does not recognize the right. Historically, the United States has treated hunger as a temporary caloric deficiency.[12] Food stamps and food pantries are reasonable solutions if hunger is a temporary caloric deficiency.[13] However, the right to food suggests that hunger and its causes are more complex—that hunger is not only a biological problem but a social problem.[14] Moreover, as a social problem, hunger exists within a legal architecture, and governments can change that architecture to mitigate hunger.[15]

This Note explores a small sample of laws affecting food access in Vermont as an exercise in illustrating how government can use the right to food framework to better address hunger. The Note describes the right to food in theory and practice, then uses the right to food framework to examine the current legal architecture of hunger in Vermont.

Questions and inquiries regarding this Note may be forwarded to the author at LawReview@vermontlaw.edu.

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[1] Hunger, World Food Programme, https://www.wfp.org/hunger (last visited Jan. 28, 2016).

[2] Id.

[3] Id.

[4] Alisha Coleman-Jensen et al., USDA, Household Food Security in the United States in 2014 1 (2015), http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/1896836/err194_summary.pdf.

[5] Vermont Hunger Facts, Hunger Free Vt., https://www.hungerfreevt.org/learn/what-is-the-issue (last visited Jan. 28, 2016) (noting this amounts to about 21% of Vermont’s children).

[6] Id.

[7] Hunger, supra note 1; see also Olivier de Schutter, The Right to Food: An Overview by Olivier de Schutter, YouTube (Oct. 22, 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GWDkenSJMc (explaining how world leaders recognized agricultural production would not solve the hunger problem).

[8] Lidija Knuth & Margret Vidar, Food and Agric. Org. of the U.N., Constitutional and Legal Protection of the Right to Food Around the World 32 (2011) (analyzing right to  food recognition in 106 countries around the world); Olivier de Schutter, Former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Inst. for Interdisciplinary Research in Legal Sci., Univ. of Louvain, Keynote Address at the Yale Food Systems Symposium: New Alliances that Shape a Movement: The Coming Food Revolution (Oct. 30, 2015); Michael J. McDermott, Constitutionalizing an Enforceable Right to Food: A New Tool for Combating Hunger, 35 B.C. Int’l & Comp. L. Rev. 543, 546 (2012); Marc J. Cohen & Mary Ashby Brown, Access to Justice and the Right to Adequate Food,  6 Sustainable Dev. L. & Pol’y 54 (2005); Flavio Luiz Schieck Valente, The Human Right to Food Movement in Brazil, in 2 Food and Human Rights in Development 182 (Wenche Barth Eide & Uwe Kracht, eds., 2007); see UVM Food Systems Summit: The Right to Food: Power, Policy, and Politics in the 21st Century, U. of Vt., http://www.uvm.edu/foodsystems/?Page=summit2015.html&SM=summitmenu.html (last visited Nov. 12, 2015), particularly the work of keynote speakers Raj Patel (http://rajpatel.org/) and Smita Narula (https://twitter.com/SmitaNarula).

[9] International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights art. 11, Dec. 16, 1966, 993 U.N.T.S. 3.

[10] Knuth, supra note 8.

[11] Ann M. Piccard, The United States’ Failure to Ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Must the Poor Be Always with Us?, 13 SCHOLAR 231, 232 (2010); see also Linda M. Keller, The American Rejection of American Rights as Human Rights & the Declaration of Independence: Does the Pursuit of Happiness Require Basic Economic Rights?, 19 N.Y.L. Sch. J. Hum. Rts. 557, 560-64 (2003) (discussing how the United States refuses to recognize economic, social, and cultural rights).

[12] See Joel Berg, Ctr. For Am. Progress, Doing What Works to End U.S. Hunger: Federal Food Programs Are Effective, But Can Work Even Better 6 (2010) (discussing how federal nutrition assistance programs have virtually eliminated starvation within the United States); Tatiana Andreyeva et al., Dietary Quality of Americans by Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Participation Status: A Systematic Review, 49 Am. J. Prev. Med. 594, 594 (2015) (“SNAP effectively alleviates food insecurity in terms of caloric, macronutrient, and micronutrient intake.”). See also telephone interview with Faye Conte, Advocacy & Education Director, Hunger Free Vermont (Nov. 25, 2015) (discussing how the federal government designed SNAP as temporary food assistance); interview with John Sayles, Chief Executive Officer, Vermont Foodbank, in Barre, Vt. (Oct. 23, 2015) (discussing the inadequacy of an emergency food system to meet consistent household food shortages); interview with Michelle Lapine McCabe, Director of Community Engagement & Food Access, The Council of Churches of Greater Bridgeport, Inc., in New Haven, Conn. (Oct. 31, 2015) (discussing how communities assume food pantries are temporary food sources).

[13] Telephone interview with Faye Conte, supra note 12; interview with John Sayles, supra note 12; interview with Michelle Lapine McCabe, supra note 12.

[14] See supra note 8, particularly Valente and the work of Smita Narula.

[15] See supra note 8.