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It is a rare privilege indeed to be invited tointroduce this remarkable series of essays onfood justice in India. I am grateful to theInstitute of Development Studies and to OxfamIndia for this opportunity. The lessons thatemerge are important and timely for India andbeyond. This is a country with a GDP growthrate that has oscillated between 6 and 10 percent over the past ten years. It is also a countrywhich has significantly increased its productionof major cereals since the early 1960s, thanks totechnological advances that other regions noware seeking to replicate. Yet it is also a countrywith one of the highest rates of stunting in theworld – at 43 per cent, the clearest indication ofchronic undernutrition.

What went wrong? There is no simple answer.But some lessons may be drawn from the Indianexperience, and from other countries that arefacing a similar predicament.

A first lesson is that food security is not only aboutimproving agricultural production. It is also aboutwho benefits from the development paths that arechosen; it is about the bargaining position ofsmallholders, and about the spread between thefarmgate prices received by farmers and the retailprices paid by consumers; it is about the evolutionof the price of basic food commodities relative towages; and it is about rights. For the rural poor,who depend on producing food for theirlivelihoods, a rights-based approach means thatthey have access to grievance mechanisms whenthey do not benefit from the services or thesupport that they should in principle receive; thatthey should be protected from eviction from theirland; and that the food systems must be reshapedin order to accommodate the particular situationof the poorest and most marginal producers. Forthe poor in general, especially the net food buyers,it means that social protection programmes mustnot simply address basic needs: they must investpeople with rights they can claim.

By transforming a range of social programmes,eight in total, that governments are nowprohibited from reversing, the Supreme Court ofIndia established a link between theconstitutionally recognised right to life andspecific measures that were not initially seen asimplementing a constitutional mandate. In doingso it also significantly strengthened theeffectiveness of the programmes concerned.Indeed, social protection schemes that are humanrights-based are grounded in an adequate legaland institutional framework: they take the form oflegally binding and enforceable rights andobligations. This provides legal certainty andreduces the risk that political changes mayjeopardise existing social protection programmes.Grounding social protection schemes on humanrights also ensures transparency and access toinformation, both of which are essential toaccountability: in order for complaintsmechanisms to effectively address corruption,political clientelism, or discrimination, individualsneed to be able to recognise and understandeligibility criteria, the benefits to be received andthe remedies they can use.

Human rights-based social programmes presentother characteristics that the current debate onthe National Food Security Bill served, in part, tohighlight. They are schemes that fit intocomprehensive, cross-sectoral policies, that takeinto account the fact that poor nutritionaloutcomes are not just a matter of prices ofstaples or of calorie intake, but also of diversityin diets, of adequate health and of education insound nutritional practices. They are schemesthat respect the human rights principles ofequality and non-discrimination, including theadoption of special measures to protect the mostmarginalised and disadvantaged segments ofsociety as a matter of priority, while movingprogressively towards universal protection. Theyare schemes that are based on the active andmeaningful participation of the intended

Foreword

IDS Bulletin Volume 43 Number S1 July 2012 © 2012 The Author. IDS Bulletin © 2012 Institute of Development Studies

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Haddad et al. Standing on the Threshold: Food Justice in Indiaviii

beneficiaries, in the design, implementation andevaluation of the programmes concerned: thisimproves the quality of the programmes, itstrengthens their legitimacy, and it reduces therisk of under-inclusion.

A second lesson is that sometimes theprogrammes that work best are not those thatare imposed from the top down. The poor in factare very inventive. They often know, better thanany technocrat, what they need to overcome theobstacles they face. In India, women have formedself-help groups in which they join their effortsto address their problems collectively, train toachieve a sufficient degree of functional literacy,learn how to use new technologies, or set uprural distribution networks to facilitate access tomarkets for small food producers. These aresearchers, not planners. While India hasestablished some remarkable social programmes,that are envied and copied in many parts of thedeveloping world, it is important that we remainmodest, that we also provide avenues for thesegroups to share their experiences, identifyproblems they encounter, and co-design ways toovercome them. Empowerment also contributesto collective learning and to accelerating thecapacity of public and private organisations toimprove the kind of support they can provide.

A third lesson is that the fight againstdiscrimination and the focus on the mostvulnerable is vital in the realisation of the right tofood for all. Women, who provide 32 per cent ofthe workforce in the agricultural sector in India,still face widespread discrimination in access toresources and to services, limiting theiropportunities. Yet, by helping them, we helpeveryone: when women improve their access toincome and their bargaining position within thehousehold, this leads to immediate andsignificant improvements in nutritional outcomesfor the family, and in the children’s health andeducation. Scheduled tribes and Adavasis are alsounder particular threat. They are among themain victims of the increased pressure on naturalresources that results from competition for theuse of land and water between food production,the production of cash crops (including energycrops), large-scale development projects such asspecial economic zones and urbanisation. It istherefore particularly welcome that a number ofcontributions to this special issue of the IDSBulletin focus on these groups.

The right to food case filed over ten years agobefore the Supreme Court, and now the launch ofa national debate on the National Food SecurityBill, have created considerable expectations.These events, that have a worldwide resonancefar beyond India, have served as a rallying pointfor a dynamic and extraordinarily large foodjustice movement in the country. The failure toact is even less excusable now. Because of theurgency. Because our understanding of whatneeds to be done has significantly improved overthe past few years. And also because alliancesnow have become possible, to unite different foodmovements and different groups which weretraditionally seen as having divergent, or evenopposed interests. The urban poor were seen ashaving an interest in cheap food, at the expenseof the rural areas who were taxed and cheated tosatisfy the needs of cities: we have come to realisenow that both groups have the same interest inlocal food systems that can at the same timeincrease farmers’ incomes, and ensure theprovision of nutritious and adequate food ataffordable prices to the urban consumers. Theinterests of ‘the West’ were seen as opposed tothe interests of ‘the rest’, as high levels ofprotection and subsidies in rich countries weredenounced as obstacles to the growth ofagriculture in the global South. We understandnow that what matters is to allow each country oreach region to feed itself, without destroying theability of other countries or regions to do thesame by food dumping practices, and that smallfarmers from all regions have a common interestin being protected from competition by largeagrifood companies in their domestic markets.We thought the interest of plantation workerswas opposed to those of independent smallfarmers, because each of these groups depends ona different type of farming. We see now thatalliances between them are both possible anddesirable, based on their common interest inensuring an adequate regulation of largecommodity buyers and landowners, and in ataxation and subsidies system that obligesplantation owners to internalise the social andenvironmental costs of their ways of producingfood. We were in a situation in which the Statewas seen as a monolith, to which the ruralworkers were necessarily opposed. We now havemany examples of parliamentarians and localgovernments playing an important role inencouraging a shift towards another food system,and in holding the government to account.

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The earlier barriers are falling. New alliancesare forged – between the urban and the rural andwithin the rural world between farmworkers andindependent small food producers, betweenfarmers from the North and farmers from theSouth, and between actors in the food systemwho have been traditionally repressed andelements of the State who have often beenabsent from the formulation of policies. This

unique collection of essays, by the bestcommentators on the situation of food securityand the right to food in India, provides us withan indispensable tool to understand thechallenges that these movements now have aresponsibility to address.

Olivier De Schutter is the United Nations SpecialRapporteur on the right to food.