Food Is Not a Human Right

Ian Murray seamus2001 at attbi.com
Wed Mar 27 19:12:00 PST 2002


----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2002 2:48 PM Subject: Food Is Not a Human Right


> ***** Food is not a human right
>
> ...[I]n 1982 and 1983, the US was alone in voting against a
> declaration that education, work, health care, proper nourishment
and
> national development are human rights. It would appear that even 13
> years later, official American attitudes had not "softened". In
> 1996, at a United Nations-sponsored World Food Summit, the US took
> issue with an affirmation by the summit of the "right of everyone to
> have access to safe and nutritious food". The United States
insisted
> that it does not recognize a "right to food". Washington instead
> championed free trade as the key to ending the poverty at the root
of
> hunger, and expressed fears that recognition of a "right to food"
> could lead to lawsuits from poor nations seeking aid and special
> trade provisions. [2]
>
> [2] _Washington Post_, November 18, 1996
>
> (William Blum, _Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only
Superpower_,
> Monroe, Maine, Common Courage Press, 2000, p. 198) *****
> --
> Yoshie

==================

Once again the US votes against the precepts of Adam Smith and A R J Turgot.....

Semi-tangentially; from Nicholas Lehman's latest in the New Yorker:

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dick Cheney, then the Secretary of Defense, set up a "shop," as they say, to think about American foreign policy after the Cold War, at the grand strategic level. The project, whose existence was kept quiet, included people who are now back in the game, at a higher level: among them, Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense; Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; and Eric Edelman, a senior foreign-policy adviser to Cheney-generally speaking, a cohesive group of conservatives who regard themselves as bigger-thinking, tougher-minded, and intellectually bolder than most other people in Washington. (Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, shares these characteristics, and has been closely associated with Cheney for more than thirty years.) Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mounted a competing, and presumably more ideologically moderate, effort to reimagine American foreign policy and defense....In 1992, the Times got its hands on a version of the material, and published a front-page story saying that the Pentagon envisioned a future in which the United States could, and should, prevent any other nation or alliance from becoming a great power. A few weeks of controversy ensued about the Bush Administration's hawks being "unilateral"-controversy that Cheney's people put an end to with denials and the counter-leak of an edited, softer version of the same material.

When we juxtapose the above with the not quite ancient wisdom of Nicholas Kaldor's "Advanced Technology In A Strategy of Development":

"Export earnings through agriculture or mining do not, however, in themselves suffice to launch the process of industrialization without State support in the form of subsidies to industry or the adoption of protective tariffs. In the absence of these, the high initial costs [in terms of agricultural products] of home produced manufactures imposes too severe a handicap on any latecomer to industrialization to make manufacturing activities commercially profitable. The advantage of any underdeveloped country in the industrial field resides in low wages. In the initial stages of industrialization this advantage is more than offset by low productivity. Hence under conditions of free trade, when the domestic price of manufactures in terms of primary products is determined by world prices, the process of industrialization may never begin."

Finally, from Trebilcock and Howse's "The Regulation of International Trade":

"[W]ith respect to exports that could immediately figure in an export-led growth strategy, such as textiles, light manufactures, and processed agricultural products, developed countries maintained extremely high trade barriers, including high tariff rates, and also in the case of textiles, quantitative restrictions under a special GATT-exempt arrangement that came to be known as the Multi-Fibre Arrangement...Tariff escalation denotes the tendency for developed countries to impose very low tariffs on imports of raw materials and much higher tariff rates on processed or finished products that are made from those raw materials. This practice makes it very easy for developing countries to export raw materials in an unprocessed state and much more difficult to export products that have a significant value-added component. The escalation effect occurs because while developed country producers of the processed or finished products have access to raw materials at almost the same price as developing country producers [due to the low tariffs on the raw materials], they also have a protected market against the developing country producers by virtue of the significant tariff imposed on the processed or finished products in question. The end result is to discourage export driven strategies of moving up the value chain from the extraction of raw materials to increasingly sophisticated processing industries."

And we wonder why 'the global south' wants to dump the entire discourse of development. Thus the denial of the right to food may signal that while the US thinks the short run may be Keynesian for the world market, they have no illusions as to whether they want the long run to be Darwinian...............

Ian



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