The United Nations Human Rights Council today urged Putrajaya to move away from charity-based schemes to rights-based programmes to avoid exclusion of groups, graft and leakages.

Olivier De Schutter, who is the UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur to Malaysia on the right to food, said while cash aid programmes such as Bantuan Rakyat 1Malaysia (BR1M) and Kebajikan Rakyat 1Malaysia (Karisma) can offer assistance to the needy, it is unsustainable for Malaysia to continue with such schemes.

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NEW YORK – Trade negotiators in Singapore recently failed to finalize a deal on the long-awaited Trans-Pacific Partnership; they will soon have another chance to complete what would be the world’s largest regional free-trade agreement. But, given serious concerns that the TPP will fail to consider important human-rights implications, that is no cause for celebration.

The TPP talks involve the United States, Canada, and ten other Pacific Rim countries with a combined annual output of around $26 trillion, or about 40% of global GDP. Their economic clout is matched by their ambitions; the talks go beyond traditional trade issues, which account for only five of the 29 proposed chapters, and consider a wide range of investment and regulatory issues that will affect many millions of people – and not always positively.

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It is striking that the majority of those who are hungry in the world today are also part of the food system. Small, independent food producers and waged agricultural workers represent an important percentage of people who appear in statistics on undernutrition or malnutrition.

They probably represent around half of the world’s undernourished. It is therefore essential to consider how the sourcing, pricing, and wage policies of commodity buyers, food processors and retailers are aligned with the requirements of the right to food.

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I took on the role of UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food in 2008, just as food prices were soaring to unprecedented heights on global markets.

Food riots ensued and hunger deepened in poor, food-importing countries - but there was one silver lining. The imbalances of our food systems, which had been building up over the past forty years, suddenly became visible.

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