The noted legal scholar Philip Alston has said that the right to food is the most urgently and frequently endorsed of any basic human right but is also the most systematically violated.
Violation is almost entirely the result of the absence of enforcement mechanisms.
The World Food Summit is an occasion for revisiting commitments already made and finding practical means to make them concrete and measurable. Various UN documents and declarations have reasserted the right to food, including the 1974 World Food Conference Declaration and the 1992 Declaration of the International Conference on Nutrition. The World Food Programme and the World Food Council have both articulated this right as a fundamental human right and a central precondition for development. Article 27 also specifies good nutrition as part of the adequate standard of living to which children have a right. The hungry cannot wait.