Communities of color, including Indigenous Peoples, undocumented immigrants, and low-income populations, experience higher rates of hunger, food insecurity, and homelessness in the United States (U.S.). The food insecurity rate of people of color in every state is consistently at least two to six times that of whites. The U.S. has long failed to protect its people’s right to food in great part due to the legacy of racial discrimination and colonization that have given way to agricultural, food and nutrition, land, labor, housing, and urban planning policies that systemically deny food to communities of color. Black Americans make up 40% of the homeless population, while only 13% of the overall population. Moreover, intersecting discrimination based on race and gender exacerbates homelessness. Single women with children make up about 21% of the country’s homeless population, and about 50% include single Black mothers.
These violations have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis has brought to light the stark inequities that leave tens of millions in persistent hunger and poverty in the U.S. Millions of people lost their jobs during the pandemic, which was followed by an equally staggering rise in food insecurity. To make things worse, in 2020, the City of Miami passed an ordinance criminalizing food sharing, or the feeding of people experiencing homelessness in groups of twenty-five or more without a permit and at non-designated feeding locations (with only five inconvenient locations designated). By passing this ordinance, the City of Miami is “using hunger as a weapon against the poor.” COVID-19 has further exacerbated housing inequality with thousands of renters evicted from their homes each week. Racial disparities in household net worth and mortgage access place Black families at greater risk of housing instability and homelessness. While almost 75% of white families own their homes, less than half of Black families own their homes.
COVID-19 is pushing the emergency feeding system to its limits, exposing the true extent of the hunger problem in the U.S. at its roots. The U.S. emergency feeding system, a network of 60,000 frontline pantries, soup kitchens and food banks anchored in almost every community in the U.S., is critical at a time like this. That’s what it was designed for in the early 1970s – emergency relief. Community institutions are doing an essential and life-sustaining job of distributing food against all odds. However, the private charitable emergency feeding system in the U.S.—the largest and most sophisticated in the world—has historically never been able to meet the demand or make a real dent in the rate of food insecurity which has hovered between 11 - 12% over the past 30 years. It is simply not possible to ‘foodbank’ our way out of hunger. Even before the pandemic, 37 million Americans were struggling to get food on the table, while four out of five workers lived paycheck to paycheck. Hunger advocates generally focus on defending existing (and inadequate) government nutrition assistance while the average American citizen looks to the private charitable sector to meet the “emergency” needs of hungry families, rather than recognizing citizens, communities, and the natural resources we depend on as rights holders and governments as duty bearers.
The right to food is both a call to action and a global legal framework for coordinated reform in food and nutrition, agriculture, land, labor, housing, and urban planning policies. As the pandemic reshapes public life around the globe, it also offers an opportunity to organize and protect everyone’s basic human right to food in the U.S. On November 2, 2021, Maine became the first state in the U.S. to enshrine the human right to food in its state constitution. On December 9, 2021, a city resolution on the right to food was passed in the city of Morgantown, West Virginia, and a right to food constitutional amendment has been introduced and will be considered during the upcoming 2022 legislative session in West Virginia. Groups in Washington, Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, Hawaii, and other states are considering the proposal of similar right to food constitutional amendments. There is a nascent right to food movement in the U.S. that is expanding and embracing the shift from charity to rights. In parallel, a vibrant movement to recognize housing as a right, rather than a commodity in the U.S. has also started to take shape. President Biden’s platform endorses a right to housing, and there are movements to establish a right to housing at the state and local levels, including in California and Connecticut.
The need for deep reflection, innovative thinking, and joint strategizing with regards to hunger and food equity that put the needs and interests of communities of color at the center is urgent. This event, hosted by the University of Miami School of Law’s Human Rights Program and Clinic, in collaboration with the Human Rights Society, West Virginia University Center for Resilient Communities, and partners, will focus on human rights and racialized approaches to addressing hunger. It will reflect on ways to implement the CERD’s Concluding Observations to the U.S. and discuss the new and revitalized focus on government action as the primary duty-bearer of the right to food. The event will also examine lessons and opportunities for the practical implementation of this framework and dimensions critical for addressing hunger in communities of color. In particular, the panel will delve into the need to foreground the lived experiences and strategies of survival and resistance of communities of color around food insecurity, food system governance, access to land and natural resources, and the environment.
Additionally, the event will include an art exhibit focused on the human right to housing, kicking-off the Human Rights Program’s Art and Human Rights Initiative. The exhibit will use visuals to connect to community experiences and illustrate the seven dimensions of the right to housing in powerful and concrete ways in the U.S. context. These dimensions comprise legal security of tenure, availability of services, affordability, habitability, accessibility, location, and cultural adequacy.
The exhibit would form part of a continuing Art and Human Rights Initiative. This initiative seeks to raise the profile of social and economic rights in the U.S. and locally in Miami and provide a platform for creative thinking and the development of imaginative advocacy resources for realizing the rights to food, health, and housing in the U.S. It would further provide an opportunity to connect various strands of work on the rights to food, health, and housing at the University of Miami and locally with national and global advocacy.
