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Häberli, Christian --- "Do WTO Rules Improve or Impair the Right to Food?" [2012] ELECD 115; in McMahon, A. Joseph; Desta, Geboye Melaku (eds), "Research Handbook on the WTO Agriculture Agreement" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Research Handbook on the WTO Agriculture Agreement

Editor(s): McMahon, A. Joseph; Desta, Geboye Melaku

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848441163

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: Do WTO Rules Improve or Impair the Right to Food?

Author(s): Häberli, Christian

Number of pages: 34

Extract:

3 Do WTO rules improve or impair the right
to food?
Christian Ha¨berli


I. INTRODUCTION
The global food crisis of 2007­08 seems to have been forgotten. Media
attention at the time focused on food riots in Haiti and Mozambique,
while world leaders and more than a dozen international organizations
gathered for several food summits, calling for immediate relief measures.
All in all, however, the governmental and inter-governmental response
was sadly limited to a few high-profile conferences and action plans with
no follow-up at the regulatory and institutional level. The attention of
the mighty and wealthy focused on the subsequent financial and
economic crises. What is really alarming, however, is that apparently no
lessons were learned when for the first time in history the number of
hungry people exceeded 1 billion (FAO Press Release, 2009a).
Interestingly this ominous record was reached in mid-2009 ­ at a time
when food prices had already dropped by 40 per cent. By 2010 `only' 925
million people were still undernourished ­ yet this number was still
higher than before the food crisis (FAO, 2010). In November 2010 the
World Food Programme (WFP) warned that prices could rise again in
2011 (WFP, 2010). And so they did.1 Moreover, the IMF expected this
rise to continue with non-oil commodity prices expected to increase by
11 per cent in 2011 (IMF, 2011: 6). Again, this seemed to matter only
where the angry poor rioted in the Middle East and elsewhere.
But not ...