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It seems like yesterday that the then-Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, raged against the latest increase of the world’s people who go hungry jumping to 820 million. With the crisis deepening daily, the FAO’s announcement of one billion people in the world going hungry is sidelined as a statistical fact in an environment that fails to acknowledge the hardest hit on its door step: compare Barbara Ehrenreich’s coverage of those “too poor to make the news.”

“The fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger,” Article 11 of the Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights has been endorsed by no less than 160 countries world wide.

Nicholas Kristof makes a strong case for the outdated nature of an administrative branch devoted to agriculture as opposed to food.

Having to pull myself out of the numbness that sometimes surrounds me in highlighting the effects of poverty on people in poor countries, it is always particularly disturbing to witness the effects of poverty in those parts of the world where one would assume there is plenty for all: the Guardian reports on poverty as the primary cause for child mortality in the United Kingdom. 

In addition to the growing gap between rich and poor the report of British network End Child Poverty points out that poor families are at a factor 10 more likely to loose their child due to suddent infant death than better-off families. It also highlights a fact usually a standard in reports from developing countries: the underweight of children born into poor families.

Recently, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva agreed on a special session to discuss the food crisis. Olivier De Schutter, the newly appointed Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, called the crisis “a human rights emergency”, which affects at least 100 million people, whose right to adequate food is being violated. 

Here is the resolution on the negative impact of the worsening of the world food crisis on the realization of the right to adequate food for all. 

As the Daily Mail reports, the world’s leaders had to “swallow” an 18 course-meal to discuss the current food crisis only days after the adoption of said resolution: