Congratulations to Malavika Rao, who has received funding from the SNSF through a Postdoc.Mobility Fellowship, for her new research project "The International Legal Infrastructure Underpinning Food Flows and Distribution". Hosted by the Global Governance Centre, the project demonstrates how fragmented legal regimes governing food distribution create inconsistencies that undermine the effectiveness of responses to hunger.
More About the project
As Amartya Sen argued, global hunger is not primarily a problem of food scarcity but of distribution and access. Despite the formal recognition of the right to adequate food as a fundamental human right in international law, recent crises such as disruptions to global supply chains during the Russia-Ukraine war, the prolonged conflict in Gaza and Sudan, and climate-induced drought in Madagascar have revealed persistent failures in ensuring equitable access to food. While international legal scholarship has extensively examined food production and humanitarian assistance, it has paid comparatively little attention to the legal infrastructure governing food distribution across borders and within crises.
The project "The International Legal Infrastructure Underpinning Food Flows and Distribution" addresses this gap by examining how international law regulates food flows and by assessing whether fragmented legal regimes collectively enable or undermine equitable food distribution.
The International Legal Infrastructure Underpinning Food Flows and Distribution
About MALAVIKA RAO
Malavika Rao is a Postdoctoral Researcher at CEENRG, Department of Land Economy, and a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge. She is a recipient of the Post-doc Mobility Fellowship (2024-2027) for the project ‘The International Legal Infrastructure Underpinning Food Flows and Distribution’ (SNSF grants: 217768 and 242392) awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Malavika holds a PhD in International Law from the Geneva Graduate Institute (2024), an LLM in Environmental Law and in Energy and Clean Technology Law from the University of California, Berkeley (2017), and a BA.LLB(Hons.) from Christ University, India (2016). Malavika has experience in legal practice as a Utility Justice Legal Fellow at The Utility Reform Network (TURN) in San Francisco (2017-2018).
Malavika’s areas of research are international migration law, socio-economic rights, environmental law and climate change, and global health law. Her PhD thesis was awarded the 2025 Ladislas Mysyrowicz Prize and explores the application of the principle of non-refoulement in international law to people fleeing food deprivation. She is working on her book with Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2027). Malavika is a NextGen Humanitarian Scholar for the CHH-Lancet Commission on Health, Conflict and Forced Displacement and contributed to the Lancet Report ‘Health in a World of Crises and Impunity’ (2026).
Her broad research agenda examines the rights bearing on the survival of people in times of global emergencies — displacement, conflict, climate change and health crises.