Chapter of the book “New Challenges to the Right to Food”, edited by Miguel Angel Martin and Jose Luis Vivero (2011).CEHAP, Cordoba and Huygens Editorial, Barcelona
In that sense, a campaign53 has to be designed to rally people across the world around this goal and engage them in processes that will lead to its achievement. The campaign would raise public awareness and understanding of the hunger problem and of solutions, engage policy-makers and bring an increasingly large number of institutions into the consensus. It would appeal to peoples’ sense of justice in order to mobilize widespread popular support for hunger eradication and thereby induce higher levels of government commitment.
There continue to be a lot of misconceptions and myths about hunger and malnutrition, and the lack of public awareness is a major cause for government inaction. The idea that it is entirely possible to end hunger in the world, and that this will bring huge benefits for mankind, is still off the radar screen. This can only be addressed through a massive, world-wide education-based campaign, orchestrated by the full range of concerned civil society organizations, working together. The campaign will build support for strong national and global action towards its goals through: Raising public awareness in order to sensitise and engage people from all walks of life, foster leadership at all levels and turn individuals and groups into agents of change; Building the campaign on existing movements/campaigns, networks and initiatives, fostering partnerships, based on a common commitment to eradication, while respecting their autonomy and special interests; Developing country-specific campaigns and national advocacy plans that feed and underpin all global campaigning efforts. The campaign will be implemented by a broad group of CSOs and NGOs, with support from media and other stakeholders such as parliamentarians and schools, working together towards a shared goal. In each country, a programme involving 3 overlapping phases of action will set in motion the emergence of a well-informed informal social movement: Phase 1. Raising awareness to generate understanding, engagement, leadership and action The aim will be to enable large numbers of people, in both developed and developing countries, to become “hunger eradication advocates”. The first phase will focus on civil society actors and other groups involved in social issues – especially women’s groups, youth groups, scout and guide groups, sporting clubs, trade unions, farmers’ groups, religious groups etc, as well as schools. The approach will be to build advocacy capacity on the issues, to distribute simple informational materials and to facilitate learning through discussions and local visits. The focus will be on looking at the extent to which there is hunger and malnutrition within their communities and country, what is being done about it, what more needs to be done and what they themselves can do. In this way members of the groups will be able to arrive at their own decisions on what they can do individually and collectively to eradicate hunger in their community, country and across the world. Phase 2. Spreading the word, deepening commitment, building solidarity Facilitators will encourage networking/exchanges between groups, especially in the same geographical areas, to build a consensus on what has to be done and to feed ideas into a national campaign headquarters; build up local media coverage of small-scale events, and start to engage local leaders. The result would be the emergence of an informal social movement to end hunger. Phase 3. Campaigning National and international campaign headquarters will orchestrate popular mobilisation around local and national events, and selected global occasions, with an immediate focus on getting countries to 53
We use the term “campaign” to mean a sustained, time-framed and coordinated effort by a group of stakeholders to raise public awareness of specific goals and to make a change happen.
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