Food First Information and Action Network

FIAN or FIAN International, the Food First Information and Action Network, sets itself as an international human rights organization to ensure that all people live free from hunger and to feed themselves.

FIAN fights for the right to adequate food on the basis of international human rights treaties, in particular the social pact. FIAN International has members and chapters in 60 countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. German -speaking (sometimes multi-lingual ) Sections of FIAN International are FIAN Germany, FIAN Austria, Switzerland and FIAN FIAN Belgium.

Organization Profile and Structure

FIAN 2012 has several thousand members in over 50 countries. In fourteen countries, country sections have established and to register as a club - in Belgium, Brazil, Germany ( FIAN Germany ), Ghana, Honduras, India ( and there in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal ), Mexico, Nepal, Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Philippines, Sweden and Switzerland. Exist in four other countries coordinations, ie under construction sections - in Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Colombia and Zambia. As a membership organization FIAN benefited many volunteers that have often joined together in local groups and dedicated to handling cases of human rights violations there.

The highest body is the biennial International Council together kicking. The members of each section to send representatives to the council. The Council falls the most important for the overall organization decisions and elect the Executive Committee, the International Executive Committee. The International Secretariat in Heidelberg implements the decisions of the Council and of the Executive Board and supports the country sections and coordinations. FIAN has consultative status with the United Nations and is independent of political and religious groups, political parties, governments and ideologies.

Objectives and Methodology

FIAN is committed to individuals and groups on nutrition are not strong enough for violations of their right to defend their interests alone: small farmers, sharecroppers, agricultural laborers, landless, female-headed families. The company is looking for collaboration with stakeholders.

Concrete her known cases of violation of the right to food, for example, Expulsion of peasants from the land they need to feed themselves, the organization organized protest letter campaigns and appeals publicly to those responsible for human rights violations political authorities. The required collection of facts and case documentation based FIAN often on political research trips to the places of events. Together with the global peasant network Via Campesina, FIAN leads for several years a "world campaign for agrarian reforms".

Starting from a universality and indivisibility of human rights struggles FIAN for the global realization of the right to feed themselves. The aim is not only the political support for, but also the "empowerment" of starving or threatened by hunger people. What is meant by "empowerment" that political and legal means, and of course the necessary educational requirements for the self- perception of the interests of those affected are created. FIAN has been operating its lobbying at the United Nations, committed to human rights education and strives to establish or to use legal remedies before domestic and international courts.

Achievements

Important impulses for the opinions of the UN Social Committee in Geneva came from FIAN. A notable success for the human rights organization, after ten years of lobbying - was when in November 2004 the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO ) voluntary guidelines on the right to adequate food adopted at its World Food Summit in Rome. Thus, there is now a volunteer, but the official catalog of policy measures demonstrating the feasibility of the right to food.