Our message is that the United States economic boom has bypassed millions. Despite a decade of economic growth, the U.S. remains afflicted by pervasive poverty and a growing wealth and income gap between the rich and poor. The persistence of poverty, hunger and millions without healthcare represents a massive violation of people's basic human rights. It is a national shame that millions of Americans work full-time yet live in poverty. Our campaign will work with groups to challenge these conditions and build a national movement for economic human rights. This national campaign is coordinated by Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy, and has been endorsed by more than 140 organizations nationwide.

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Article 25, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Although the U.S. was instrumental in designing and drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), it has not ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which it must for these economic rights to become legally binding in the U.S. A world with human dignity for all must be based on economic, social and cultural as well as civil and political rights. As President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt described in a 1944 State of the Union address to Congress, human rights are indivisible:

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men."

The Time Has Come! campaign demands the US Senate support economic human rights by joining 142 countries (as of September 2000) in ratifying the ICESCR. In support of this goal the campaign is introducing the tools and language of economic and social human rights into the debate on hunger and poverty in America. Specifically the campaign is working to:

• Assemble a coalition of organizations working on economic and social human rights.

• Develop and distribute materials for training local hunger and poverty groups in the use of the language of economic and social rights - including fact sheets, and a book and documentary titled America Needs Human Rights.

• Organize Congressional and town hall hearings on human rights implications of hunger and poverty in the US

• Work with city councils to declare themselves to be human rights communities respecting, protecting, facilitating and fulfilling economic human rights of all people.

• Push for US ratification of the International Covenant for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

Why Economic Human Rights?

Many activists and community organizations are working on the premise that their struggles to help people meet basic needs (food, security, health care, shelter, etc.) are struggles to help people realize their basic human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) guarantees all people the right to food, shelter, employment and adequate health care.

The guarantee of Economic, Social and Cultural rights means that it is a violation of human rights to be starving, to be homeless or to not have adequate resources to support a family. The guarantee of Economic, Social and Cultural rights means that everyone has a right to live in dignity and a right to a secure livelihood. It means that everyone is entitled to a safe, secure work environment -- and to the means necessary to assure his/her well-being and to realize her/his potential.

It is imperative that activists and organizations working on, for example, food issues, women's issues, homelessness, housing, health care, welfare, and the environment form coalitions and use the arsenal of economic and social human rights law to forward their work!

Economic Dislocation in the US: A Violation of Human Rights

A recent nationwide survey reveals that approximately 35 million Americans are hungry, at least 12 million of whom are under eighteen. These figures represent a 50% increase since 1985. Hardest hit among poor Americans are children under six years -- one in four lives in poverty. As Food First's co-founders, Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins pointed out two decades ago, hunger is caused not by an absolute shortage of food but rather by political and economic factors which result in unfair distribution and access.

Americans are hungry because they are poor and the number of poor Americans has been increasing since the 1970s. The percentage of Americans living in poverty has increased from 11.6 % in 1970 to 14.2 % in 1994. In 1991, the percentage of American children in poverty reached 22%, the highest among industrialized countries. Recently, a team of researchers estimated that 8.4 million people suffer from food insecurity in California alone. They predict that by the year 2000 that number may include as many as one-third of the state's children. A survey conducted in four California Central Valley counties estimated that 65,000 children were hungry and an additional 54,000 at serious risk of hunger. While sufficient resources certainly exist in San Francisco so that no person should ever go hungry, there are 90,000 San Franciscans (1 in 7) living below the federal poverty line who experience difficulty in obtaining enough food and adequate nutrition.

Nowhere are values more absent from the discussion of hunger than in the United States. In 1996 President Clinton signed the Welfare Reform bill which will eliminate Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The Urban Institute has predicted that the new law will push an additional 1.1 million children below the poverty line. The same legislation also denies food assistance to non-citizens, expanding the number of people denied the right to food. Melinda Kimble, the head of the United States government delegation to the November 1996 World Food Summit, even stated that the U.S. could not support language around the right to food in the Summit's Plan of Action because the new welfare reform law would then be in violation of international law.

In this context we feel it is imperative to bring the value-based language of human rights to bear on hunger in the U.S.. We are convinced that human rights tools will be a significant contribution to the arsenal of organizing and media work methodology available to hunger and poverty activists here in the U.S., and that raising human rights abuse as an issue in our domestic debate will help create more favorable conditions for a much needed shift in policy direction.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees a full range of economic human rights which include: the right to social security, the right to work, the right to just and favorable conditions of work, the right to protection against unemployment, the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of one's interests, and the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself, including food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services. Yet the figures briefly cited above show starkly how far the U.S. has fallen short of our commitments under the UDHR, and how far from acceptable our social conditions really are. This continuous flagrant disregard for people's economic welfare and rights demands a strong and a well-resourced response. Our economic rights campaign's call to action is that necessary response in the U.S. Human rights are a significant contribution to the arsenal of organizing and media work methodology available to hunger and poverty activists here in the U.S., and raising human rights abuse as an issue in our domestic debate will help create conditions for a much needed shift in policy direction.