Read Mary Wollstonecraft

Read Mary Wollstonecraft.
That advice was at the core of the keynote speech that Amartya Sen delivered yesterday to open the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, under way through Saturday in Washington, D.C. (Prior posts available here.)
In his address on the history and nature of human rights, Sen, a Harvard professor and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics, Sen referred frequently to Wollstonecraft (right). (image credit)
As we've posted, Wollstonecraft, an IntLawGrrls foremother, was born in 1759 in London. She was a noted theorist and intellectual during her short life -- she died in 1797 giving birth to Mary Shelley, future author of Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft often is categorized as a feminist, but Sen described her more generally, as

'the most neglected thinker of the Enlightenment period.'

Wollstonecraft's works included A Vindication of the Rights of Women, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, occaisioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and and various travelogues. Insights within these works, Sen said, include:
► Demonstration that rights were not dependent on legislation, but rather could serve as a precedent inspiration for legislating human rights; and
► Emphasis on the importance of rights within the family.
Sen further noted the "very strong normative claim" about rights made by another Englishwoman about whom we've posted: suffragist Christabel Pankhurst (below right). In 1911, nearly 2 decades before British legislation would accord women the vote, Pankhurst said:

'We are here to claim our rights as women. Not only to be free, but also to fight for freedom.'

As the discussant at yesterday's lecture, our colleague and Princeton Professor Kim Lane Scheppele, said, this emphasis on the capabilities of individuals to open doors to opportunities is central to Sen's thinking -- thinking that, in her view, could benefit from greater engagement with the significance of law in effecting human rights.

ASIL early bird alert

Early bird discounts for the annual meeting of American Society of International Law expire this Friday, February 11. Register here now before costs go up.

The theme for this year's annual meeting -- the Society's 105th -- is “Harmony and Dissonance in International Law.” The meeting will take place March 23 through 26, 2011, at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, 1150 22nd Street, N.W., Washington, D.C.

The full program is here. Among the highlights:

► Grotius Lecture by Nobel Prizewinning economist Amartya Sen (prior IntLaw Grrls posts here).

► Address to WILIG, the Women in International Law Interest Group, by IntLawGrrl Lucy Reed (right), ASIL's immediate past president.

► Award of the Goler T. Butcher Medal to IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Gay McDougall (near right), U.N. Independent Expert on Minorities. (The medal's namesake is herself an IntLawGrrls foremother.)

Keep an eye out for IntLawGrrls' annual "Women @ ASIL" feature (previous posts here, here, here, and here).

Biofuel versus food?

Yesterday, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Organization for Economic Coordination and Development (OECD) released their joint Agricultural Outlook 2008-2017. The Report makes for sobering reading. All of the commodities covered in the report (cereals, oilseeds, sugar, meats, milk and dairy products) are at record highs. When the average for 2008 to 2017 is compared with that over 1998 to 2007, the Report projects that

beef and pork prices may be some 20% higher; raw and white sugar around 30%; wheat, maize and skim milk powder 40 to 60%; butter and oilseeds more than 60% and vegetable oils over 80%.

The Report attributes these price increases to fundamental changes in demand (ethanol and increased demand for meat in developing countries) as well as changes in agricultural productivity due to climate change. It seems that higher food prices are here to stay.
The only glimmer of good news comes in the form of FAO/OECD projections that prices will retreat from their record highs. Of course, these projection rest on the assumption that weather patterns have been only temporarily disrupted and will return to "normal." Even if this optimistic projection about the effects of climate change is proved right, prices that are merely elevated will still put hundreds of millions at risk of hunger and malnutrition.

Food insecurity is growing
The FAO's slogan is "helping to build a world without hunger." It seems a fairly modest goal, particularly since Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen convincingly demonstrated decades ago that food insecurity is primarily a distribution problem. If that remains true, all it should take to make the FAO slogan a reality is political will. And, that of course is the catch. In our globalized economy, food is a commodity available to the highest bidder. If that high bidder wants to turn food into biofuel rather than feed it to those in need, so be it.

The real world consequences of this approach are ugly; and they are only going to get worse! In many low-income countries, food expenditures already average over 50% of income. Higher prices mean that more people will be undernourished. This hunger map compiled by FAOSTAT shows how high the percentages of food insecurity already are.

In the poorest countries, more than half the population is undernourished! The UN Millennium Development Goals set a target of halving the number of people suffering hunger by 2015. It is important to read the FAO/OECD Report with these Millenium Goals in mind.

There are relatively easy steps that could take us closer to the Millenium Goals. For example, the FAO/OECD Report calls biofuel demand

the largest source of new demand in decades and a strong factor underpinning the upward shift in agricultural commodity prices.

Characterizing the energy, environmental and economic benefits of biofuels made from agricultural commodities as "at best modest, and sometimes even negative,” the Report recommends considering alternative approaches that offer potentially greater benefits with less of the unintended market impact.

Food prices and the global economy will be one of the issues addressed at the June 4-5 OECD Ministerial Council Meeting in Paris. FAO is holding a separate High-Level food crisis summit in Rome on June 3-5. Let's hope that they focus more on feeding those in need, and less on boosting nascent biofuel industries.

This I believe

National Public Radio resurrected a segment recently called “This I believe.” People from all walks of life recite essays in which they articulate—in a clear, strong and decisive voice—exactly what they have come to know of the world. The first time I heard the broadcast, I was overwhelmed with envy. It was well into the night, and I was driving aimlessly in my car with my two long suffering (but ever-forgiving) daschunds in search of a firm set of beliefs about my project. At the time, I was researching the implications of U.S. national security measures on trade in developing countries. I couldn’t figure out what my position should be: On the one hand, I recognized the need for greater security in the wake of September 11. On the other, I was troubled by the knee-jerk reaction of the Bush Administration that typically separated the world into rich/poor only to privilege the former. The NPR commentator droned on while I listened in awe at the absolute conviction with which she spoke.
It seems I am in a perpetual search for certainty in my life. There was the time in college when I joined a cult. Ok, my friends called it a cult because the members smiled vacuously, lived and prayed together (constantly), and went to church all day on Wednesdays and Sundays—which, for a lapsed Catholic like me, was probably the most onerous requirement. I wasn’t interested in drinking the Kool-Aid, but boy did I want their conviction! While I struggled to make sense of how I felt about the feminism/race divide (are black women first women or black?) and fought both the peace loving exhortations of Dr. King and the defiant militancy of Brother Malcolm, those folks had answers. They knew, for example, that if you do not belong to the one TRUE church, you are going to hell. They were certain that if you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your Personal Lord and Savior, the devil would leave the lights on for you. I admired their firmness, their constancy, their smugness. And I wanted a bit of that just for myself. I lasted all of one week—well, five days if you don’t include the two they spent trying to bring me back into the fold before realizing the sad truth: There was nothing to be done. I was going straight to hell.
I feel the same sometimes when I talk to the various camps about free trade: There is something of a Baptist Revival spirit to their beliefs. Most people seem rather single minded in their stance, utterly convicted as to the truth of their position while I stagger around in an unending search for meaning. My hairdresser is certain that trade is the root of all evil. She lost a job to NAFTA once (exactly how she knows this, I dared not ask) and now curls her lips at the slightest mention of trade agreements. They are tools of the rich to subjugate the poor. Unbeknown to her, she shares the view of the Soviets who negotiated GATT in the 1940s; they proclaimed non-discrimination—the hallmark of free trade—“a device of the devil to ensnare and enslave small countries.” Equally adamant are my economist-type friends who think any disparagement of trade is the result of a kindergarten-level IQ. Now that WTO members have liberalized the services trade and their jobs too are ripe for outsourcing, their opinion may shift slightly. What I admire about these two camps of course is their certainty. I’d really like to join them, but I am challenged. I am challenged by that uneasy sense of “yeah, but . . .” I get every time I try to corral my slippery sense of certainty. I decided to put together this post as an exercise in hope: Could I come up with a set of beliefs to which I too could swear allegiance? Well, I did manage to come up with something. True to form absolute conviction escapes me, but I decided to lay out my credo anyway. This I believe: There is much good to come from free trade. Where would the world be without Belgian chocolates, Rwandan coffee beans or the Italian Lamborghini? Seriously, the great economist Amartya Sen tells us that development is about far more than producing wealth or income; it is truly about freedom. Well, trade is a part of that equation. Trade is not really about producing the cheapest toy or all the Ramen noodles you can eat for a dollar. The end goal is to grant us freedom. Freedom from what? From scarcity, from want, from the tedium of our own limited potential. Trade allows us to produce the best we are able, and in a dance of mutual reciprocity, exchange that for the cultivated achievement of another. We are not all consigned to producing the basics for survival. We can focus on growing cotton in exchange for fluffy white t-shirts, towels, and those heavenly 600 thread count bed sheets. Let others produce the grapes while we give the world a rich merlot or the lusciousness of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Those who are so inclined can invent computers, software and social network sites, but when they need a place to rest, Fiji’s tourism trade might be just what the doctor ordered.
But here’s the rub: What happens when your very best—your “comparative advantage” in trade parlance—consigns you to the world’s raw materials supplier? What happens when opening up to trade leads to large-scale trade deficits that bring an avalanche of “significant economic dislocations”? Developing countries deal with the former question every day, while rich countries like the United States utter quarterly gasps at their rising trade deficits. Interestingly, both respond to the challenge in the same way—with a call to curb the “negatives” of trade. Are they wrong for employing the breaks to free trade by imposing measures like safeguards, quotas, high tariff walls, protection for infant industries, and balance of payment provisions, to name just a few? Economists call many of these tools “protectionist,” but aren’t governments supposed to do exactly that—protect us from certain preventable harms?
The virulently nationalistic Lou Dobbs once said “free trade has been the most expensive trade policy this nation has ever pursued.” While I can hardly watch one of his broadcasts without throwing my shoe at the (imported) television set, I must agree that free trade comes at great cost. We have to manage those costs, and if that means occasionally straying from the path of absolute openness, than so be it. Of course “the devil is in the details.” When do we adopt such protections and how (and what is our response when others employ the same tools) are difficult questions that politicians and trade officials have routinely bungled. Protecting an inefficient steel industry because it is a significant campaign contributor, for example, would not be a permissible reason to close the door to free trade. My point, though, is that free trade is not a religion. We do not get into heaven based on the purity of our adherence to dogma. Trade is a tool we must manage in pursuit of the ultimate aim of freedom.

What if I’m wrong? Well, then I guess I’m going to hell.

On September 16, ...

... 1927 (80 years ago today), Dr. Sadako Ogata was born in Tokyo, Japan. After earning her B.A. degree from the University of the Sacred Heart in that city, Ogata moved to the United States, where she earned an an M.A. in International Relations from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Long prominent in academia -- she served as Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Studies at Tokyo's Sophia University -- Ogata's had a long, distinguished U.N. career. A small sample of posts: U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (1991-2000); U.N. Commission on Human Rights (1982-1985); and co-chair, U.N. Commission on Human Security (2001-2003). She's pictured at right presenting that Commission's report, along with co-chair Amartya Sen, to then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
... 1928, Patricia McGowan was born in "the manufacturing town of Torrington, Connecticut," where she "spent her summers working in the brass mills." She graduated 1st in her class at Connecticut College for Women, then became 1 of a very few women students at Yale Law School. On earning her J.D. she worked in the chambers of Judge Jerome Frank -- the 1st woman law clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit. After a 10-year hiatus as she and her husband raised a family, she returned to law practice and public service; in particular, on matters of criminal justice and mental health. In 1979, Patricia M. Wald became the 1st woman to Judge on a U.S. Court of Appeals, serving as the D.C. Circuit's Chief Judge from 1986 to 1991. On retirement from the federal bench, she was a Judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1999-2001). Since then she's served on the President's prewar intelligence commission, and is on the board of a number of groups concerned with international law.
... 1950, U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) was born in Bethesda, Maryland.
... 1987 (20 years ago today), the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer was adopted; it entered into force on January 1, 1989. Nearly all the world's countries now are states parties to this protocol and, in large part, to subsequent instruments that have amended and added to it. For details on why it's sometimes called the "most successful international environmental treaty," see the "When A Treaty Works" post by our Opinio Juris colleague Duncan Hollis.