By Food Security,Stabroek News

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Dr. Mark Chatarpal is the Executive Director of the NYC Food Policy Center, a Food Anthropologist, and a Doctoral Lecturer at the Department of Nutrition and Public Health at Hunter College. His research across Guyana, Belize, and Ghana examines food sovereignty, Indigenous land rights, and agricultural policy. He has collaborated directly with several Indigenous organizations working to protect their traditional food systems and strengthen land tenure rights. This article is based on a chapter of his dissertation titled, “What do you mean by Food Security? The Politics of Agrarian Policymaking in Guyana and the Caribbean Com-munity”. For more information about the NYC Food Policy Center, visit: www.nycfoodpolicy.org

World Food Day is observed annually on October 16th (yesterday) to highlight global issues about hunger and reinforce the United Nations’ efforts to address this problem. For Guyana, one of only 23 countries in the world with an explicit constitutional right to food (RTF), that commitment was made decades ago in Article 40:1. The question is why the nation has systematically avoided enforcing it. The constitution, through Article 40:1, declares that every citizen is entitled to “a happy, creative and productive life, free from hunger, disease, ignorance and want.” The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has recognized this as an explicit constitutional protection of every individual’s RTF. In addition, Guyana has signed binding treaties, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which places food alongside other essentials, including housing and healthcare. In principle, Guyana has established both constitutional and international legal foundations to ensure that none of its citizens go hungry. In practice, however, the reality has been far more complicated.

The drafters of Article 40:1 were visionary, but after 45 years, this constitutional promise continues to be underutilized. Extensive fieldwork conducted in 2018 to 2019, which included interviews with senior govern-ment officials from all major political parties, legal experts, and indigenous organizations, revealed how policymakers have systematically avoided account-ability by replacing the enforceable RTF with the politically convenient but legally meaningless term “food security” (FS). Many policymakers admitted to being unfamiliar with the concept of food sovereignty, which is rooted in the right of local communities to define their own food systems, as well as with the UN’s framing of the RTF as a matter of dignity rather than dependency.

To policymakers, FS represented what scholar Stuart Hall described as a floating signifier—a term so flexible it could be adapted to suit almost any agenda. Unlike constitutional rights or international treaty obligations, FS could mean whatever politicians needed it to mean. In Guyana’s political discourse, parliamentarians often use this signifier when talking about national issues. It functions as a mechanism that justifies development projects rather than as a principle grounded in justice and accountability. The phrase first entered Guyana’s parliamentary debates in 1981 and quickly gained traction. By the 2000s, it was used to support vast agri-cultural land grants, forestry projects, and even mining concessions.

The problem here is that FS, as defined by policy-makers, often means increased production or revenue rather than equitable access to culturally appropriate food. Under this framework, politicians can argue that virtually any policy boosting agricultural output increases FS. Large-scale soybean monocultures and mechanized mega-farms all qualify as metrics of FS because of increased tons produced, hectares cultivated, or revenue generated. Meanwhile, the ability of everyday citizens to afford food or maintain traditional food systems becomes irrelevant to the formulation of food policy. These omissions allow policies that ignore pesticide runoff contaminating fishing waters within indigenous territories to still count as improving FS—simply because soybeans and corn are produced, even though the production process undermines people’s ability to feed themselves. The use of this vague term has allowed the constitutional promise of freedom from hunger to become conflated with economic growth strategies that benefit elites while leaving small farmers and indigenous communities vulnerable.

Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo’s positions illustrate precisely how this contradiction plays out in practice. In an interview, Jagdeo articulated a clear understanding of what Article 40:1 demands. He acknowledged that the constitutional provision must find “expression in policy” and that policy must “be crafted to ensure that it meets the need of no hunger.” Most significantly, he stated that Article 40:1 requires the government not to destroy the people’s capacity to feed themselves. To illustrate this principle, Jagdeo pointed to what he views as a violation by the previous administration: the closure of sugar estates that left thousands of workers unemployed and facing severe food insecurity. By eliminating these jobs, the government destroyed workers’ economic means to feed themselves, a policy failure that, according to Jagdeo, the enforcement of Article 40:1 could have prevented.

Yet Jagdeo simultaneously champions agricultural policies that threaten to destroy indigenous commu-nities’ capacity to feed themselves through the very same mechanism he criticized. He has consistently promoted the large-scale mechanized farming of soybeans and corn, modeled on Brazilian agribusiness, in the country’s interior savannahs. The stated rationale appears pragmatic: imported chicken feed is expensive, and local production could reduce costs. However, this agricultural model carries severe risks that directly contradict Jagdeo’s interpretation of Article 40:1. Studies from Brazil, which pioneered soy expansion, demonstrate that this form of industrial agriculture produces devastating environmental effects, including pesticide runoff, deforestation, and contamination of water systems. These impacts became so severe that Brazil implemented regulatory legislation known as the Soy Moratorium.

In Guyana, no scientific study has examined the environmental impact of pesticide and fertilizer runoff from existing mega-farms like the Santa Fe Farm in north Rupununi bordering the Ireng River, which scientists from the Keller Science Action Center have shown forms part of a crucial “hydrological connection between the Guiana Shield and the Amazon basin.” Or the Tacama Gold and Dubulay Ranch partnership in Region 10 near the Berbice River, Guyana’s third-longest river.

These tributaries and waterways are deeply interconnected to indigenous food systems and their respective livelihood strategies. Replicating this agricultural model risks destroying indigenous food systems, violating Article 40:1. When pesticide and fertilizer runoff destroys traditional food sources, the government has effectively destroyed people’s capacity to feed themselves—precisely what Jagdeo argued Article 40:1 prohibits. The paradox is stark: Jagdeo correctly identifies the constitutional violation when sugar workers lose their livelihoods, yet promotes policies that could eliminate indigenous peoples’ food sources through environmental destruction. Both scenarios involve government policy destroying people’s capacity to feed themselves. The difference lies in whose capacity to self-feed is being protected and whose is being sacrificed in the name of FS.

This contradiction becomes more comprehensible when viewed through the ideological lens of settler colonialism, which treats indigenous customary lands as empty spaces awaiting development, despite their cultural, ecological, and traditional value. One former Minister of Agriculture dismissed the country’s interior savannahs as “barren lands.” Another senior member of the APNU+AFC administration declared bluntly that indigenous groups “got too much land” that should be taken back for Afro-Guyanese communities. Similar sentiments were conveyed by Indo-Guyanese politi-cians within the PPP. Other technocrats kept referring to indigenous territories as underutilized spaces “ripe” for investment. This framing erases indigenous food systems from the policy calculus entirely. If indigenous lands are viewed as barren or underutilized, then policies that industrialize them register as pure gains in FS regardless of their impact on the people who depend on those ecosystems for sustenance.

Despite this political hostility towards indigenous rights, indigenous organizations, such as the National Toshao Council, can play a critical role in challenging this erasure and enforcing Article 40:1. As a constitutionally mandated body, the council has the legal authority to advise the government on policies that affect indigenous villages, including those related to agriculture. The 2006 Amerindian Act even empowers village councils to regulate agriculture locally. These provisions offer a pathway to reframe Article 40:1 not just as the RTF but as a principle that can be grounded in indigenous worldviews and practices.

The path toward enforcing constitutional food rights is not without precedent, though international experience offers both encouragement and caution. South Africa’s constitution, specifically Section 27(1)(b), also guarantees the RTF, yet implementation has been uneven, with poverty and inequality continuing to drive hunger. In India, the case People’s Union for Civil Liberties v. Union of India (2001) saw the Supreme Court interpret the right to life as encompassing the RTF, resulting in landmark rulings that expanded school feeding programs but still left gaps in rural nutrition. Brazil, once celebrated for its Zero Hunger program, began backpedaling when political priorities shifted. These examples illustrate that enshrining the RTF is only the first step. Enforcement, political will, and cultural recognition determine whether such rights remain symbolic or become transformative.

For Guyana, the stakes are particularly high because the country has entered into a new era of oil wealth. This revenue could either fund policies that enforce Article 40:1 or entrench the very systems that violate it. Policymakers have already signaled their preference for large-scale agricultural investments, modeled after those of Brazil and the United States. Glossy images of soybean fields and high-tech silos may appeal to younger voters and international investors, but they risk undermining small farmers, eroding indigenous foodways, and worsening ecological damage, all while concentrating wealth among political elites and foreign investors.

At the same time, Guyanese are confronting skyrocketing prices for locally grown produce; organizations like the New Guyana Marketing Corporation have recorded food inflation increasing to over 75%. Other issues, such as the nutrition transition toward Western diets and ultra-processed foods, continue to persist. Food systems built on vulnerable monocultures or imported inputs are ill-suited for an oil economy that has the economic means to reconfigure itself away from reliance on an age-old colonial agricultural model. Several new indigenous food revitalization programs are currently underway globally, and Guyana could learn from these initiatives, but only if Article 40:1 is enforced before oil revenues entrench destructive agricultural policies.

Ultimately, transforming Article 40:1 from an aspirational clause to an enforceable law will require strategic legal action. In extended interviews, Guyana’s Attorney General, Mr. Anil Nandlall S.C, argued that recent Commonwealth legal trends suggest Article 40:1 “is not without teeth, and it’s not merely declaratory.” If brought before the courts, it could become a binding obligation for the State. However, this potential will likely need to be activated through civil litigation that compels the State to account for hunger and food insecurity as violations of constitutional rights. A successful court ruling would establish precedent throughout the CARICOM, obliging governments to move beyond electoral rhetoric and demonstrate how their policies fulfill constitutional obligations. It would require courage from both legal advocates and communities willing to challenge entrenched political power, but it would also align Guyana with a growing global movement to treat food not as a commodity or status symbol, but as a fundamental human right.

The choice before the Government of Guyana is clear. It can continue to use FS as political cover for projects that benefit political elites and foreign investors while violating its constitutional guarantees, Or it can take Article 40:1 seriously, transforming it into an enforceable law that protects farmers, empowers indigenous communities, and ensures the dignity of every individual, an act that would firmly establish the legacy of any senior politician worth their salt.