The 50th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is being observed in 1998. With this precedent-setting document in mind and with the approach of a new millennium, the 1 5th annual World Food Day teleconference, Food for All: Right or Goal under- takes an examination of food security as a human right.

Could the right to food in time become an inalienable human right to be respected and fulfilled in all world societies practical problems and what is the status of hunger in the world?  What are the best strategies for a food rights campaign?

The right to food cannot be separated from a series of other rights that we often take for granted – work, personal security, health care, education, gender equality, welfare benefits in time of need, political participation and the rest.

Women's rights are particularly intertwined with food rights. Developing country women provide up to 80 percent of food consumed in their homes, yet they have little or no access to credit training and land ownership.  “Knowledge,” says the Food Agriculture Organization, “is a prerequisite of good nutrition.” Yet poor rural women are less educated than men. As a result, women and children represent a majority of the world's chronically hungry people.

A growing number of rights specialists believe that it is time to re-think the issues facing more than 800 milhon people around the world who go without enough food to maintain a minimum level of health, dignity and productivity. Today there is enough food in the world to feed everyone adequately. People are hungry in a world of plenty because they are poor and ignored. Apart from instances caused by sporadic civil and border wars, outright starvation has been largely replaced by insidious chronic undernourishment — a devastation less noticeable but no less tragic.

The right to food has been called the most endorsed and least implemented of all human rights.  The search for solutions to the hunger problem began in part from wartime aspirations. In 1941 President Roosevelt made his famous Four Freedoms address, calling for freedom from want and fear and freedom of speech and thought.  Delegates from 44 nations attended a 1943 conference on agriculture in the United States. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) formed just after the war ended, was aimed at ensuring “humanity's freedom from hunger.  In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted with great enthusiasm.

Problems became apparent when attempts were first made to implement the Declaration, which declared that “everyone has the right to a standard of living for the health and wellbeing of himself and his family, including food…” The 1948 Declaration did not have legal force in UN member countries. A process had to be started, therefore, to fashion binding covenants It was one thing for governments to endorse the non-binding, unpoliced standards of the Declaration, one observer noted, and quite another to contemplate specific legal obligations and machinery to enforce them.

To give the Universal Declaration legal and policing teeth, jurists spent years drafting two separate UN covenants which were offered UN member states for ratification. Human rights were broken into two parts.

• The International Covenant on Civil and Political rights, which covered such political and civil rights as participation in public affairs and elections; freedom of conscience and association.
• The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which covered such items as the right to have work, social security, proper standards of living and health and an education. ICESCR expressed the 'right of everyone to....adequate food," but it never received enough support to become widespread and effective.

Political rights were known as "first generation rights," and economic rights as "second generation rights," reflecting the prevailing opinion, the UN Department of Information noted, that "civil and political rights could be secured immediately, whereas adequate economic, social and cultural rights could be achieved only progressively, according to each state's available resources." As a sign of changing times, a 1993 World Conference on Human Rights was able to agree that all human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated.

Critics have long noted that it is easier for the world to gauge and governments to implement political and civil rights than economic and social rights. Governments can quickly cede political rights to citizens, for example, by holding a fair election, and outside observers can attend to pass judgment on the fairness of the election. But an economic right, such as providing suitable employment or decent housing for all, cannot be immediately accomplished, if ever in the near term. Making sure that everyone has food on their plate most often turns on the state of a nation's economy, it is argued, and should be considered an aspiration largely produced by sound management of the national economy.

A determined cadre of experts, however, contend that establishing rights is an evolutionary process and offer strategies for realizing the right to food. Such a right is seen as consonant with every faith, high human aspiration and constitution. The Cold War has ended; various human rights are being recognized, the information age allows people to monitor events around the globe and democratic governance is creating new possibilities for change.

Turning a desire to see the hungry fed into a reality, then, raises many practical and strategic questions:

• Is the task of rescuing today's 800 million from malnourishment feasible?
• Is humankind obliged to find a way to feed the hungry in its ranks?
• If so, is such an obligation collective or individual?
• How can food for the malnourished be established in law?
• How could the international community monitor food for all?
• Are food-surplus countries obliged to make food available to poor nations?
• Could citizens go to the courts to force the authorities to feed hungry people?
• How do you set obligatory levels of nourishment and police enforcement?

This year's World Food Day teleconference reviews the long fight for the universal right to food and examine the status of world hunger today, with a special eye to some of the ethical, legal, political dimensions of the problem. The issues are highly complex but one thing is clear — if food for all is achieved it will bring with it sweeping reforms in virtually all facets of human activity.