Who Says Food is a Human Right

Check out this article on the debate about world hunger. Thought provoking about the root of power in giving and withholding food and proper nutrition.

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In 1981, Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen published Poverty and Famines, challenging the common perception about the root causes of hunger. Through careful analysis of hunger in India, Bangladesh and Saharan countries from the 1940s onward, Sen documented that famines had occurred amid ample food supply, even in some countries exporting food. His conclusion—radical at the time—was that famine is not a crisis of productivity but a crisis of power. Ten years earlier, in her 1971 book, Diet for a Small Planet, my mother, Frances Moore Lappé, put forward a similarly heretical notion: on a planet that produces more than enough calories to make us all chubby, hunger’s root cause is clearly not a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy.

Forty years later, the debate about the roots of hunger, and therefore the most effective solutions, persists. Yet, an idea once heretical—that to address hunger we must talk about democracy, power and human rights—is now gaining traction.
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Anna Lappé  September 14, 2011   |   
This article appeared in the October 3, 2011 edition of The Nation.

http://www.thenation.com/article/163390/who-says-food-human-right