The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Advancing the right to Food to promote Public Health

The core objective of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) since its founding in 1945 has been to eradicate hunger. International policy debates and the work of the Organization focused until the 1980s on increasing agricultural production; however, a shift has occurred in recent years in the understanding of FAO’s mandate. The modest but growing reference to the right to food is an essential part of this new thinking, which crystallized at the 1996 World Food Summit and in the adoption of the 2004 Right to Food Guidelines. Although the visibility of the right to food has gradually increased in the Organization’s work, this chapter—while assessing the past and current state of mainstreaming the right to food within FAO—argues that right to food mainstreaming within FAO is far from unidirectional and has more recently seen a period of retrenchment