The Right to Food

A/RES/60/165View PDF

Who adopted this document and its mandates?

A Resolution of the General Assembly, under agenda item 71b Human rights questions, including alternative approaches for improving the effective enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms, published in 2006.

What else is in this group?

42 documents · 2002–2026

Newer documents in this group exist (latest: 2026).

Year	Symbol	Title	Word length	Text similarity
2026	A/HRC/RES/61/13	The right to food	3,279	–
2025	A/RES/80/210	The right to food	6,246	–
2024	A/RES/79/171	The right to food	6,140	–
2024	A/HRC/RES/55/4	The right to food	2,906	–
2023	A/RES/78/198	The right to food	6,097	–

This group bundles related documents that are not individually ordered.

What’s in this document?

27 operative paragraphs

Reaffirms that hunger constitutes an outrage and a violation of human dignity and therefore requires the adoption of urgent measures at the national, regional and international levels for its elimination;

Also reaffirms the right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food, consistent with the right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, so as to be able to fully develop and maintain their physical and mental capacities;

Considers it intolerable that there are about 852 million undernourished people in the world, that every five seconds a child under the age of 5 dies from hunger or hunger-related diseases somewhere in the world, when, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the planet could produce enough food to provide 2,100 kilocalories per person per day to 12 billion people, twice the world’s present population;

Expresses its concern that women are disproportionately affected by hunger, food insecurity and poverty, in part as a result of gender inequality and discrimination, that in many countries, girls are twice as likely as boys to die from malnutrition and preventable childhood diseases, and that it is estimated that almost twice as many women as men suffer from malnutrition;

Encourages all States to take action to address gender inequality and discrimination against women, in particular where it contributes to the malnutrition of women and girls, including measures to ensure the full and equal realization of the right to food and ensuring that women have equal access to resources, including income, land and water, to enable them to feed themselves and their families;

Encourages the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the right to food to continue mainstreaming a gender perspective in the fulfilment of his mandate, and encourages the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and all other United Nations bodies and mechanisms addressing the right to food and food insecurity to integrate a gender perspective into their relevant policies, programmes and activities;

Encourages all States to take steps with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the right to food, including steps to promote the conditions for everyone to be free from hunger and, as soon as possible, to enjoy fully the right to food, and to create and adopt national plans to combat hunger;

Acknowledges that many indigenous organizations and representatives of indigenous communities have expressed in different forums their deep concerns over the obstacles and challenges for their full enjoyment of the right to food, and calls upon States to take special actions to combat the root causes of the disproportionately high level of hunger and malnutrition among indigenous peoples and the continuous discrimination against them;

Requests all States and private actors, as well as international organizations within their respective mandates, to take fully into account the need to promote the effective realization of the right to food for all, including in the ongoing negotiations in different fields;

Stresses the need to make efforts to mobilize and optimize the allocation and utilization of technical and financial resources from all sources, including external debt relief for developing countries, and to reinforce national actions to implement sustainable food security policies;

Recalls the importance of the New York Declaration on Action against Hunger and Poverty, which has been supported by more than one hundred countries to date, and recommends the continuation of efforts aimed at identifying additional sources of financing for the fight against hunger and poverty;

Recognizes that the promises made at the World Food Summit in 1996 to halve the number of persons who are undernourished are not being fulfilled, and invites once again all international financial and development institutions, as well as the relevant United Nations agencies and funds, to give priority to and provide the necessary funding to realize the aim of halving by 2015 the proportion of people who suffer from hunger, as well as the right to food as set out in the Rome Declaration on World Food Security6 and the United Nations Millennium Declaration;4

Urges States to give adequate priority in their development strategies and expenditures to the realization of the right to food;

Stresses the importance of international development cooperation and assistance, in particular in emergency situations such as natural and man-made disasters, diseases and pests, for the realization of the right to food and the achievement of sustainable food security, while recognizing that each country has the primary responsibility for ensuring the implementation of national programmes and strategies in this regard;

Calls upon Member States, the United Nations system and other relevant stakeholders to support national efforts aimed at responding rapidly to the food crises currently occurring across Africa;

Invites all relevant international organizations, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to promote policies and projects that have a positive impact on the right to food, to ensure that partners respect the right to food in the implementation of common projects, to support strategies of Member States aimed at the fulfilment of the right to food and to avoid any actions that could have a negative impact on the realization of the right to food;

Takes note of the interim report of the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the right to food,¹⁰ and also takes note of his valuable work in the promotion of the right to food;

¹⁰See A/60/350.

Supports the realization of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur as extended by the Commission on Human Rights in its resolution 2003/25 of 22 April 2003;¹¹

¹¹See Official Records of the Economic and Social Council, 2003, Supplement No. 3 (E/2003/23), chap. II, sect. A.

Requests the Secretary-General and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to provide all the necessary human and financial resources for the effective fulfilment of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur;

Welcomes the work already done by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in promoting the right to adequate food, in particular its General Comment No. 12 (1999) on the right to adequate food (article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights),¹² in which the Committee affirmed, inter alia, that the right to adequate food is indivisibly linked to the inherent dignity of the human person and is indispensable for the fulfilment of other human rights enshrined in the International Bill of Human Rights, and is also inseparable from social justice, requiring the adoption of appropriate economic, environmental and social policies, at both the national and the international levels, oriented to the eradication of poverty and the fulfilment of all human rights for all;

¹²Ibid., 2000, Supplement No. 2 and corrigendum (E/2000/22 and Corr.1), annex V.

Recalls General Comment No. 15 (2002) of the Committee on the right to water (articles 11 and 12 of the Covenant),¹³ in which the Committee noted, inter alia, the importance of ensuring sustainable water resources for human consumption and agriculture in realization of the right to adequate food;

¹³Ibid., 2003, Supplement No. 2 (E/2003/22), annex IV.

Welcomes the adoption by the Council of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations of the Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security,8 which represent a practical tool to promote the realization of the right to food for all, contribute to the achievement of food security and thus provide an additional instrument in the attainment of internationally agreed development goals, including those contained in the Millennium Declaration;

Also welcomes the continued cooperation of the High Commissioner, the Committee and the Special Rapporteur, and encourages them to continue their cooperation in this regard;

Calls upon all Governments to cooperate with and assist the Special Rapporteur in his task, to supply all necessary information requested by him and to give serious consideration to responding favourably to the requests of the Special Rapporteur to visit their countries to enable him to fulfil his mandate more effectively;

Requests the Special Rapporteur to submit a comprehensive report to the Commission on Human Rights at its sixty-second session and an interim report to the General Assembly at its sixty-first session on the implementation of the present resolution;

Invites Governments, relevant United Nations agencies, funds and programmes, treaty bodies and civil society actors, including non-governmental organizations, as well as the private sector, to cooperate fully with the Special Rapporteur in the fulfilment of his mandate, inter alia, through the submission of comments and suggestions on ways and means of realizing the right to food;

Decides to continue the consideration of the question at its sixty-first session under the item entitled “Human rights questions”.

The Right to Food

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