A/HRC/22/50/Add.1 the availability, accessibility and adequacy (including cultural appropriateness) of food as well as non-discrimination.60 IX. Conclusions and recommendations 69. By recognizing access to sufficient and adequate food as a legal entitlement, the right to food provides an important tool for combating hunger and malnutrition. It protects the rights of people to live with dignity and ensures that all have either the resources required to produce enough food for themselves or a purchasing power sufficient to procure food from the market. It imposes obligations on the State, requiring that individuals and communities have access to recourse mechanisms when these obligations are not met. The right to food also requires that States identify the hungry and malnourished by adequate food insecurity and vulnerability mapping, and that they adopt policies that remove the obstacles to its enjoyment by each individual. Consistent with this understanding of the right to food as a human right, the Special Rapporteur offers the following recommendations: (a) Formulate a comprehensive rights-based national food strategy clearly delineating the responsibilities of public officials at the federal, provincial/territorial, and municipal/local levels, identifying the measures to be adopted and the associated time frames, and ensuring that initiatives adopted at municipal and provincial levels, particularly for the rebuilding of local food systems, are adequately supported; as part of this strategy, create a nationally funded children and food strategy (including school-feeding food literacy and school garden programmes) to ensure that all children, at all times, have access to healthy and nutritious food; launch the process of adoption of a framework law on the right to food, for the regular updating of the Canadian food strategy; (b) Revise social assistance levels to correspond to the costs of basic necessities required to enjoy the human right to an adequate standard of living, establishing the market basket measure (MBM) as a federal guideline for provincial and territorial social assistance schemes; revise the system of housing benefits to ensure that the poorest families are not obliged to sacrifice food in order to pay for the non-compressible and non-divisible costs of housing; re-establish a national programme with specific cash transfers for social assistance and social services that includes universal entitlements and national standards and lays down a legally enforceable right to adequate assistance for all persons in need,61 seeking inspiration from the success of the Old Age Security programme; (c) Set the minimum wage as a living wage, as required under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and consistent with ILO Conventions No. 99 (1951) and No. 131 (1970), particularly as regards the requirement that the minimum wage should be fixed taking into consideration, inter alia, “the needs of workers and their families, taking into account the general level of 60 61 20 Indigenous peoples cannot be discriminated against in the exercise of their rights, embodied in, inter alia, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, art. 5, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, art. 2. See also Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, general comment No. 20 (2009) on non-discrimination in economic, social and cultural rights, para. 18. E/C.12/CAN/CO/4-5, para. 40.