The Right to Food, Violence, and Food Systems – Eighth Annual T.M.C. Asser Lecture
Series: Annual T.M.C. Asser Lecture Series

About the 8^th Annual T.M.C. Asser Lecture, Michael Fakhri writes: 

‘Drawing on my work as Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and my upcoming report to the Human Rights Council, I will outline a way out. I will explain how systems not only produce food but also amplify and produce forms of violence that make people more poor, vulnerable, and marginalised. I also describe how food systems rely on a global economy of dependency and extractivism. 

In sum, food systems are part of a cycle between structural inequality and systemic violence causing wide-spread human rights violations. I will address the war in Ukraine to highlight how international markets amplify rather than abate violence, creating global shocks from a regional war.’ 

About Michael Fakhri

Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food since 2020, is a professor at the University of Oregon School of Law where he teaches courses on human rights, food law, development, and commercial law. He is also the director of the Food Resiliency Project (University of Oregon School of Law). He investigates key environmental and policy issues relating to all stages of the food system, including production, transportation, packaging and consumption.

Mr Fakhri has taught courses on the right to food at Harvard Law School, European University Institute, and the University of Arizona Indigenous Governance Program. He has lectured on international human rights and development topics at universities around the globe. Mr. Fakhri has further led public dialogues on human rights and development with peasant organisations, labour unions, and human rights activists in the Arab region and North America, and at international organisations such as the WTO. During his practice as a lawyer, Mr. Fakhri fought for the rights of people who were indigent and incarcerated in a psychiatric institution. He is the author of the book Sugar and the Making of International Trade Law. 

The lecture held by Michael Fakhri has been published as a book in the Annual T.M.C. Asser Lecture Series
Download the full text of the Eighth Annual T.M.C. Asser Lecture below or order the printed version via press@asser.nl at EUR 10.00 excl. p&p.