Roti before kapra and makan: Fighting for food as a basic right

“It is the need of the hour for human rights activists to raise a voice for the provision of food as a basic right in Pakistan,” speakers at a three-day training workshop for rights activists from all over the country said on Sunday. The workshop titled Human Rights Folk School Session held by the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), a Hong Kong based organisation, took place at the National Council of Churches at Mozang Chungi, Lahore.
The participants said that access to a balanced diet was the basic right of every citizen. The workshop focused on spreading awareness about food provision at the national level. Delivering a lecture on the Campaign on Right to Food, programmer officer Ju Jin said “It is the duty of the state, not only to ensure availability of the food, but also to guarantee access, adequacy and sustainability.” Jin said “In the past people used to ‘ask’ their governments for food. Now they demand it as a basic right. Which, it is.”
The speakers highlighted the fact that there was no law in Pakistan allowing citizens to claim their right to basic sustenance. Jin said that several diseases were becoming exceedingly common amid newborns and a major cause of deaths during delivery for most women was a poor diet. “In Pakistan, there is no proper mechanism to tackle this issue at the state level. It is the need of the hour to develop such infrastructure,” she said.
“People need food before anything else and the Pakistani people need to be made aware of who to demand this right from,” she said.
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan director IA Rehman said that the right to food needed to be made an ‘enforceable right’ in Pakistan. “People need to be able to claim this right through the court by filing writ petitions. Every person in Pakistan ought to be fed. We shouldn’t have starving people,” he said. “This issue needs to be recognised on an international forum,” he said.
Baseer Naweed, senior researcher for the Asian Legal Resource Centre, said that the state of human rights had rapidly deteriorated over the past decade. “All we see is lawlessness and a lot of it is because the people are desperate and poor. This country can afford to feed its people. It should take practical steps to do so,” he said.
Coordinators Munawar Ali Shahid and Bushra Khalid also spoke at the occasion and highlighted the issue of providing potable drinking water. “The people are compelled to drink polluted water which causes many diseases,” they said. IA Rehman also distributed certificates among the 25 participants, who had come from Khyber Pakhtunkhawa, Karachi, Multan, Faisalabad, Mianwali, Sargodha, Lahore and Okara.
Published in The Express Tribune