More than 800 million people are still haunted by hunger and the human right to food security must be upheld, Prof Hilal Elver, the UN Special Rapporteur on Right to Food, is urging.
Prof Elver was commenting this week in a lecture titled ''A rights-based approach to food security: An urgent challenge'', at the University of Otago.
About 40 people attended the talk, which was hosted by the university's National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies.
There was strong resistance by global market forces to a rights-based approach to food security because it supposedly interfered with free market principles, she said.
And although the right to food was embedded in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, it was ''not taken nearly as seriously'' by many developed countries as was the companion treaty, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, she said.
''Human rights are not all that well received by some countries.''
A few countries, such as North Korea, deliberately cut food supplies to part of their population as a form of weapon.
She noted the UN was evaluating the outcome of the millennium development goals before enacting subsequent sustainable development goals, that would take effect next year.
In developing new goals, the right to food security should be emphasised, and part of her UN role was to work with ''civil society'' to raise awareness of such issues.
The quest for food security also involved other rights.
A high proportion of small farmers in developing countries were women, who faced an ''incredible social problem'', given that they owned little property and had limited access to finance.
Prof Elver is a research professor at the University of California, in the United States.
