Food Law

Food safety has become a major concern for consumers in the developed world and Europe in particular. This has been highlighted by the recent spate of food scares ranging from the BSE (mad cow) crisis to Chinese melamine contamination of baby formula. To ensure food safety throughout Europe, stringent food safety standards have been put in place 'from farm to fork'. At the same time, poor African countries in the COMESA rely on their food exports to the European market to achieve their development goals yet have difficulty meeting the EU food safety standards. This book examines the impact of EU food safety standards on food imports from COMESA countries. It also critically examines both EU and COMESA food safety standards in light of the WTO SPS Agreement and the jurisprudence of the WTO panels and Appellate Body. The book makes ground-breaking proposals on how the standards divide between the EU and the COMESA can be bridged and discusses the impact of EU food safety standards on food imports from poor African countries.

The question of what rights might be afforded to Indigenous peoples has preoccupied the municipal legal systems of settler states since the earliest colonial encounters. As a result of sustained institutional initiatives, many national legal regimes and the international legal order accept that Indigenous peoples possess an extensive array of legal rights.

Some states deny their own citizens one of the most fundamental human rights: the right to food. Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, a leading scholar of human rights, discusses state food crimes, demonstrating how governments have introduced policies that cause malnutrition or starvation among their citizens and others for whom they are responsible. The book introduces the right to food and discusses historical cases (communist famines in Ukraine, China and Cambodia, and neglect of starvation by democratic states in Ireland, Germany and Canada). It then moves to a detailed discussion of four contemporary cases: starvation in North Korea, and malnutrition in Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and the West Bank and Gaza