Maybe rename it World Hunger Day?

Happy World Food Day.
In his 1964 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged the world to confront the problem of hunger. He stated:

I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for the minds and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.

(Watch the speech here.)

Almost 50 years later, we are still waiting.

It's not like nobody else noticed that we had a Hunger Problem.

The right to food has been at the heart of international discourse as long as the international community has been discussing human rights:

► Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognized the right to food as a basic human right.

► Article 11(2) of the United Nations Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognizes the right to be free from hunger. (The United States is still not a signatory to that convention).

► The 1974 World Food Conference declared that "every man, woman and child had an inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition." It committed the international community to eradicating hunger by 1984. (Report available here.)

► The World Food Summit of 1996 set a goal of halving the number of chronically people by 2015.

► The Millennium Development Goals set a target of halving the proportion of people living with food insecurity by 2015. (Notice how much less ambitious the goals have become over time.)

In 1979, the Food and Agriculture Organization declared its intention to designate October 16th -- the date of its founding in 1945-- to be World Food Day. The reason for World Food Day was to "heighten public awareness of the world food problem and strengthen solidarity in the struggle against hunger, malnutrition and poverty." In 1980, recognizing that "food is a requisite for human survival and well-being and a fundamental human necessity" the U.N. General Assembly, in Resolution 35/70, endorsed observance of World Food Day.

Today marks World Food Day's 30th celebration. The clock ticks ever closer to the 2015 deadline for achieving the Millennium goals and the World Food Summit Goals.

So, how are we doing?

In its report entitled the State of World Food Insecurity 2010, the FAO states that almost 1 billion people are undernourished. That is more, in absolute terms, than were undernourished in 1979, and roughly the same in percentage terms.

How can it be that in all those years, with all those international proclamations, and all that investment we have made, basically no progress?

Or, phrased differently:

We produce more food today than ever before in the history of the world. So, why are more people hungry today than ever before in the history of the world?

Perhaps the problem is that we are thinking about hunger the wrong way.

This year, the Agricola Medal was given posthumosly to Dr. Norman Bourlag, the man commonly credited with starting the Green Revolution. (prior post) Dr. Bourlag was right when he said that

the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind.

With all due respect to Dr. Bourlag, who devoted his life to eradicating hunger, no amount of new and better technology will solve this problem -- because it is not a food production problem. The problem with Dr. Bourlag's technology-based approach is that today's hunger is a food distribution problem. We already produce enough food to feed all the people on the planet. We just don't use that food to feed the people who are hungry.

Hunger today revolves around the way that global trade is structured. Indeed, since the global food price crisis of 2008, Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on the right to food, has been cautioning about the need for structural measures to address food price increases. Even though this year's wheat crop is one of the largest ever recorded, food prices are skyrocketing. The Special Rapporteur identifies main culprits responsible for increasing prices in a time of plenty seem to be commodity speculation on international food markets, disinvestment in social protection schemes, and a global governance scheme that hinders the ability of governments to mitigate price shocks.

Perhaps we should rename it World Hunger Day.

(Personal note: About 195 million children are part of that 1 billion who suffer from food insecurity. As I watched my 4 year old eat her dinner after writing this post, all I could think about was the unbearable pain that a parent unable to feed her child must suffer. I made a donation to Doctors Without Borders' Starved for Attention campaign. Please consider doing something similar.)

Enforcing Violence

Most of you are likely by now aware of President Obama's decision on Tuesday to send over 1,000 National Guards to the southwest border in order to assist local police in tracking down drug smugglers. While these soldiers will not arrest undocumented immigrants crossing the borders, their presence is likely to (indeed, intended to) increase such arrests by local law enforcement. I've posted before (here and here) about the myriad forms of violence suffered by those who attempt to cross the border. Without a coherent immigration policy that creates safe and legal migration routes for low and unskilled workers and those fleeing persecution, increased border enforcement will increase migrants' vulnerability to violence perpetrated by a variety of actors, not least the very drug smugglers against whom Obama is taking aim.
But it turns out that Obama's not alone in his approach; on Wednesday, South African special forces arrived at the border with Zimbabwe in the first phase of a long-term deployment of various units of the South African military to combat violent border gangs. Medecins Sans Frontieres reported earlier this month that as many as 300 Zimbabweans were arriving per day at just one border post in order to apply for asylum. Ironically, these Zimbabweans are eligible for a 90-day visa to South Africa, which has instituted a moratorium on deportations to Zimbabwe -- in other words, they have a legal route to enter and remain in South Africa. But in a Kafkaesque twist, many Zimbabweans cannot afford a passport and must therefore cross the border illegally. (The South African Department of Home Affairs has yet to create a promised special dispensation permit that would enable such migrants to cross the border legally and safely.) Their resultant vulnerability has enormous costs; MSF reports that at least 20 women, children, and men are raped per month at that same border crossing. In a country in which one in seven adults is living with HIV, rape can have consequences far beyond the initial physical and emotional trauma. Again, increased border enforcement alone, in the absence of a legal route to entry for those seeking safety, is likely to increase migrants' vulnerability to the violence of the border. In other words, without a sensible immigration policy, the border will enforce rather than control violence.

On August 30, ...

.... 2003, after "'nonstop'" negotiations, the General Council of the World Trade Organization agreed to let developing countries to import generic drugs without violating patent rights with regard to those drugs. Many lauded the accord, given the mouthful-of-a-title "Implementation of paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and public health." But others, among them Ellen 't Hoen, coordinator of a medicine-access campaign for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, said that the agreement "offers little comfort for poor patients," for the reason that "[g]lobal patent rules will continue to drive up the price of medicines."
... 1967 (40 years ago today), "[a]fter lengthy and often very heated debate the Senate confirmed the appointment" of Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court. He became the 1st African-American person to serve on the country's highest court. (Mightn't he have been the 1st person of African ancestry to serve on any supreme court outside of Africa?) Marshall (left), who'd appeared frequently before the Court to argue landmark civil rights cases and then as Solicitor General, served as an Associate Justice for 23 years. He died at age 86 in 1993. (portrait by Simmie L. Knox from the Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States)

French diplomacy in Iraq?

"It's time to stop lecturing the Americans about their errors and start contributing to a solution," declares a LeMonde editorial in approval of the new interest in Iraq displayed by new French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières.
France’s intervention will definitely not be military. But playing on the 30-year relationship between Kouchner and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who has close ties to Kurdish and Shiite leaders, may help speed a political solution. France’s involvement in Iraq since 2003 has been limited to writing off about $5.5 billion in debt and pushing for greater UN role. British and German leaders welcome the move as much as the United States does. But the “prevailing view” in the French diplomatic corps is that negotiating is futile; “the civil war needs to run its course”. Some also fear that getting involved will ruin France’s diplomatic standing in the rest of the Arab world and open it up to more terrorist attacks. But both conservative and left newspapers agree that it’s time to stop gloating about being right and get back to playing on the international scene. Does this mean we can get back to eating "French" fries?