Outrage: Right To Farm Stripped, Right To Food Violated

Adding insult to injury, land owners in one of the most socio-economically depressed cities in the nation are now told they cannot grow their own food, according to a new state ruling that violates the human right to adequate food. The new ruling has backyard farmers upset and is opposed by environmental groups. Opposition by human rights groups might benefit Michiganders.

The state’s Sierra Club says the changes will effectively remove all protections for those raising animals on urban lots or on small acreages, according to Cliff Weathers of AlterNet. 

Detroit, Michigan’s largest city and driving force behind an urban-farming boom in the state due to the will of the people to survive and help each other. The city has suffered from blight and decay for many years, has seen over a third of its residential homes abandoned, burned down, or gutted by scavengers and thousands of men, women and children are hungry. 

Among Detroit’s ruins are approximately 30,000 acres of rich soil, fed by water and roadway infrastructures robust for proper irrigation and food distribution.

Within the city’s limits, modest bungalows with attached hen houses, fields owned by anti-hunger charities, and educational and community farms have thrived and helped feed millions of meals to people hungry in metro Detroit.

Much of the city’s people helping themselves and each other is coming to an end, in direct violation of a basic human right to food.

The state has an ”obligation to refrain from any discrimination in access to food as well as to means and entitlements for its procurement, on the grounds of race, colour, sex, language, age, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. States are further prohibited to take retrogressive measures, i.e. deliberate measures that result in the deterioration of current level of fulfillment of the right to food,” according to the United Nations.

The right to food is the right to have regular, permanent and unrestricted access, either directly or by means of financial purchases, to quantitatively and qualitatively adequate and sufficient food corresponding to cultural traditions of the people to which the consumer belongs, and that ensure a physical and mental, individual and collective, fulfilling and dignified life free of fear, according to Mr. Olivier De Schutter, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

The Special Rapporteur implements the right to food mandate through different means and activities.

A 300-acre woodlands is being planted on Detroit’s East Side. The city has opted to prevent families from small time farming on their properties and instead, give corporations a boost. It will host large commercial farming enterprises jumping on the organic, regional and other niche food bandwagons – while prohibiting people from surviving by growing their own produce and raising chickens, honey bees and goats.

Michiganders raising chickens, goats and ​honey ​bees on their residential property have had their right to keep livestock stripped by the state’s Agriculture and Rural Development Commission. The state agency claims the small mom and pop farmers are not protected by the same laws as commercial farms.

Urban parts of Michigan, particularly Detroit, have been enjoying a renaissance of small-scale farming in recent years, much in the form of community farms, residents providing food for themselves, and small entrepreneurs who sell fresh eggs, dairy, honey, and produce to their neighbors, sometimes off the books.

Now, local authorities might require landowners on properties not zoned for agricultural use with 13 or more residences within an eighth of a mile or another residence within 250 feet, to cease keeping livestock.

The new state guidelines come only a few months after a Michigan Circuit Court ruled that a Williamstown Township family could not operate a farm on their 1.5 acre property.

Jeremiah and Jessica Hudson started Sweet Peas Farm at home, near the state capital of Lansing, to ensure their five children had a proper diet. The Hudsons’ children, like many American children, suffer from numerous food allergies. They had difficulty finding non-allergenic eggs and milk, that impairs their children’s ability to eat a balanced diet.

Buying organic is far beyond reach for most American families. Buying any type of food is beyond rach for thousands of people in Detroit.

Makeshift home in Detroit. (Credit: IB Times)

Right to Farm Act, Human Right to Food Declaration

Many urban and suburban farmers had assumed that the Right to Farm Act, that the state made law in 1981, extended to those raising livestock in residential areas and allowed ​them to do so without being considered a nuisance, as long as the rules of the Act were followed. The law was originally written to protect farmers from residential encroachment impacting their agricultural operations.​​ Now, Michigans face enforcement of corporate government over their human right to adequate food.

On the other hand, the right to food definition is in line with core elements of the right to food as defined by General Comment No. 12 of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (the body charged with monitoring the implementing the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in those states party to it).

The Committee declared “the right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement. The right to adequate food shall therefore not be interpreted in a narrow or restrictive sense which equates it with a minimum package of calories, proteins and other specific nutrients.”

“States have a core obligation to take the necessary action to mitigate and alleviate hunger even in times of natural or other disasters,” the Committe says.

Ellen Messer and Marc Cohen in the first section of their article US Approaches to Food and Nutrition Rights, 1976-2008 provide a succinct introduction to developing the human right to food in the United Nations system.

One in six Americans are hungry. 28% of people receiving emergency food in the United States are children. 

If all 33 million hungry American adults held hands, they would stretch from coast-to-coast.

Source: AlterNet / Cliff Weathers, United Nations