BETWEEN HUNGER AND SILENCE

An analysis of the jurisprudence of the Superior Court of Justice regarding the Human Right to Adequate Food

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In 1991, with the ratification of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Brazil recognized food as a right. This recognition was corroborated by the publication of Federal Law 11346/2006 and the promulgation of Constitutional Amendment 64/2010, which included the Human Right to Adequate Food (HRAF) in the list of explicit Social Rights of the Federal Constitution. Despite the standardization of the HRAF, in practice, in 2022, Brazil had 125.2 million people in food insecurity, included in this group, the more than 33 million people in a situation of hunger, the most serious type of food insecurity. With the normative scope of the aforementioned texts and the hunger crisis observed in the country, the hypothesis was raised that there would be a large number of demands involving the HRAF within the scope of the Superior Court of Justice – the jurisdictional body responsible for the interpretative standardization of the federal legislation. It was also suggested that the HRAF interpretative approach in the Superior Court of Justice jurisprudence was primarily guided by the fight against hunger. Based on a descriptive methodology, based on data collected directly from the jurisprudence of that court, analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively, the research aimed to know how many and what demands about HRAF reached that Court and how it manifested itself. It was concluded that only 04 (four) rulings explicitly dealing with HRAF were handed down by Superior Court of Justice throughout its existence, with none focusing on combating hunger, limiting HRAF to Sanitary Adequacy, that is, the search for food free from substances harmful to health.

Keywords: Food; Right; Jurisprudence.