As World Food Day is celebrated, Mexico’s unfolding legislative process on the right to food deserves attention. The broad consensus around a holistic understanding of this right is a milestone in the country’s history. The narrow window of opportunity now open to turn this right into concrete change should not be missed.
The constitutional right to food
The right to food is recognised in Chapter I Human Rights and Guarantees, article 4 of the Mexican Constitution since 2011. This establishes that the state will guarantee access to nutritional, sufficient, and quality nourishment for all individuals.
Based on this premise, diverse social actors have urged the Mexican government to develop regulation that clearly defines the national strategy on the right to food, roles for institutions, and mechanisms for intersectoral collaboration and social participation in the operationalisation of this right. The call for regulatory clarity and guidance is founded on the constitutional principle of enforceability and the state’s obligation to have policy instruments in place to ensure constitutional rights are fulfilled and guaranteed.
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The draft General Law for Adequate and Sustainable Food
The last couple of years have finally seen progress to address this call. In 2021, Senator Ana Lilia Rivera, of the Morena Political Party, started an initiative to produce legislation on adequate and sustainable food. This not only seeks to guarantee the constitutional right to food, but it takes the understanding of this right several steps forward. It proposes a systemic view on the right to food that considers how this right pertains to the entire food system, from farm to fork. This will be achieved through mechanisms that encourage inter-ministerial collaborations and social participation, such as the Inter-Secretariat Board and the National Council on the Right to Food.
The General Law for Adequate and Sustainable Food highlights three important dimensions of the right to food:
- Legal dimension (national and international). In addition to addressing the constitutional principle of enforceability, this legal framework also aligns with international regulation that recommends the development of national level strategies to enable access to food for all people, as framed in article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the General Observation No.12 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
- Political dimension. The constitutional recognition of the right to food, back in 2011, was possible thanks to leftist social movements struggle that is currently recognised as the Mexico Chapter of the Parliamentary Front against Hunger. This Parliamentary Front is integrated by civil organisations, United Nations entities, academic bodies, and parliamentarians of the Mexican Congress (lower house) and Senate (upper house). It acts as an entity dedicated to guaranteeing the fundamental right to food at the legal level.
- Social justice. The law is driven by the goal of establishing a universal, fair, and equitable food system that eliminates social barriers to access to healthy and sustainable food. It recognises peasants as the agents of change and owners of seeds, cultivation practices, and recognizes the importance of ancient knowledge of indigenous and Afro-descendant cultures in Mexico, in line with food sovereignty ideas. The incorporation of food sovereignty into the Mexican legal framework is a breakthrough and will lead to challenges of the dominant corporate food regime. For example, in the case of maize, Mexico’s food staple, hybrid and genetically modified varieties that currently circulate widely under free trade agreements with the United States and Canada, may now come under scrutiny based on this right to food approach that is aligned with food sovereignty centered on peasants’ rights and indigenous knowledge.
The sovereignty-centred right to food framework is also impacting economic policy and free trade agreements. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement is the first US Free Trade Agreement with specific provisions on agricultural biotechnology, sanitary and phytosanitary measures. It indicates that the three countries do not require an authorisation for a product of agricultural biotechnology to be in the market, meaning that products with genetically modified organisms can be freely marketed. But, the Agreement allows for each country to establish, adopt, or modify its environmental laws and policies in order to ensure levels of domestic environmental protection.
The General Law for Adequate and Sustainable Food drives home the precautionary principle, recognising the richness of native seeds and biodiversity in Mexico and the state’s duty to protect its ancient heritage.
What are some of the immediate challenges?
While the proposed mechanisms for inter-ministerial collaboration and social participation are major steps forward to drive forward a comprehensive approach to the right to food, there are at least two challenges ahead that need consideration.
The first challenge relates to the truly short legislative window to get the law approved by the Congress and Senate. There are only three “legislative periods” left in the current administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as AMLO.
The first will be dominated by the 2024 budget approval. The second will focus on fulfilling the President’s commitments on legislative matters. The third will be characterised by changes in the configuration of congressional representatives due to the 2024 elections.
Given this tight framework, the approval of the law would ideally happen in the current legislative period, running until December 2023. This would ensure that the law is published in time to be implemented during the last year of AMLO’s administration. If this does not happen, the momentum for translating this law into concrete action may be lost.
The second challenge, which exists even if the law is immediately approved, is the competition for budgetary resources in the last year of AMLO’s administration. Four large infrastructure projects have already been indicated as the government’s priority for this coming year (these include the Dos Bocas Refinery, the Mayan Train, Tulum’s airport, and the Mexico-Toluca Interurban Train).
Amplifying the voices for the right to food
At the half-way point towards 2030, the 2023 Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) finds that at this critical juncture, incremental and fragmented change is insufficient to achieve the SDGs in the remaining seven years. The General Law for Adequate and Sustainable Food is a good illustration of the political commitment towards an integrated approach to policy, building synergies across interest groups and in alignment with international human rights frameworks.
But the key role played by social movements as organisers of a legitimate set of actions pushing for transformative chance in institutions and policies to fight hunger and secure the right to food cannot be overstated. For their commitment and perseverance, they deserve the spotlight in international debates on food rights, which should call upon Mexican legislators to get this progressive and important legislation approved at once and then rolled out with the appropriate level of budgetary support.
