Human Rights, Law, and Political Economy

The final chapter of the book explores the potential of international human rights law as a means of addressing the persistence of world hunger. The chapter begins by relating the institutional development of the human right to adequate food. The analysis highlights some of the main advances that have been made in protecting the right, and it considers the emegence of two particular approaches taken to realizing socio-economic rights on the domestic level. The chapter then considers some of the limitations of human rights law as a tool to remedy complex socio-economic problems. The challenges of financialization and world hunger serve as referents for this analysis. Next, the author discusses the rise of the ‘food sovereignty’ movement and considers whether this approach overcomes some of the limitations of rights-based solutions to hunger. The chapter concludes with a two-fold argument concerning the limitations of existing international responses to hunger, which is that they simultaneously underweight the embeddedness of regulatory law in political economy, and, relatedly, that they pay insufficient attention to the operations of constitutive legal regimes that function to obstruct efforts to realize a right to adequate food.