This study addresses the usage and meaning of the right to food at the level of discourse, regulation, social practices in the context of agricultural modernisation in Papua, Indonesia. In struggles about land and food, tensions and compromises between norms, rules and procedures to implement the policies related to agricultural modernisation define the relationships and mechanisms related to the human right to food. Such processes of negotiations of human rights are studied in the context of plural legal orders, where formal and informal legal orders coexist. The study also focuses on the ways in which the negotiations reshape and give new meanings to human rights norms and rules pertaining to food and land. In this regard the research will allow an examination of the (re)conceptualisation of the right to food, outside its conventional place of birth, that will, in particular, revitalise the global debate about the right to food as a human right and its relation to the world-wide expansion of large-scale agriculture.
The objectives of the research are:
- To gain insights in processes and effects of negotiating the right to food in the legal complexity of agricultural modernisation in Indonesia.
- To design a theoretical framework to study struggles about the right to food in interactions between global and local domains as well as in a plural legal order.
The research uses Merauke, Papua as a case study.