Jessica Fanzo Awarded $3.8 million Grant to Research Human Rights-based Approach to Food Systems

Jessica Fanzo, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food & Agricultural Policy and Ethics, has received a $3.8 million grant to apply a human rights-based approach to food systems. The grant is funded jointly by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and multidisciplinary project consortium's member organizations. The consortium includes The Johns Hopkins University, Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), and Rikolto.

 

Fanzo will utilize the grant to lead a multidisciplinary project titled "People-centered Food Systems: Fostering Human Rights-based Approaches, " which aims to characterize constraints globally and within countries for peasants and other rural dwellers to claim their rights to food security, adapt to and mitigate against climate change, and preserve the agrobiodiversity fundamental to their livelihoods.

 

"This grant is a meaningful opportunity to better integrate human rights into food systems through instruments like the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP)," Fanzo said. "The activities funded by this grant represent a major step forward in ensuring that access to sufficient and healthy food is a right, not a privilege."

 

Fanzo will collaborate with Swetha Manohar, Global Food Ethics and Policy Program Fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and faculty from Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics for the project, which seeks to use advocacy, build capacity, and develop accountability tools to better integrate human rights frameworks within food system policy and action. Initial project activities will take place in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Honduras, and Uganda with the goal of scaling up the approach to other countries in later phases to produce global guidance on this issue.