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Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Is Food Scarce?

On: "The Scarcity Fallacy" (http://contexts.org/articles/winter-2010/the-scarcity-fallacy/) by Stephen J. Scanlan, Craig Jenkins and Lindsey Peterson.
and The One Campaign (www.one.org/us/issues)

The name of this article "The Scarcity Fallacy" is self-explanatory. It argues the simple but commonly unrecognized idea that world hunger is not the result of a food shortage, but rather it is a consequence of many other sociological and environmental factors that result in a shortage of effectively distributed, accessible, affordable foods. Essentially our attention has been turned to the wrong issue, or rather, something that is not the issue at all.
The problem of hunger has been wrongly approached by a method called the "supermarket model," which works to grow dependence on large global food industries. This method has been found to be counterproductive in the sense that there are many increased prices that come along with this market-based mode of production, which in the end makes food unaffordable to people struggling with feeding themselves and their families.
Global shortage of food is not the problem- in fact, today, there is more food available per person in the world than ever before. The issue is the making this abundance of food available to the people who need it most. Scanlan, Jenkins and Peterson identify underlying causes of hunger as poverty, gender and ethnic inequalities, conflict and corruption of food aid programs. These factors come into play most often in developing countries but are also prevalent in developed countries such as the US. The One Campaign also cites factors such as HIV/AIDS, Education, Climate and Development, and trade investment as playing a role in world wide hunger.
In "The Scarcity Fallacy," the authors claim that "food must be upheld as a human right." While I agree that hunger is an unfortunate consequence of many of the factors mentioned, and that ideally everyone should have the right to food, it is hard to comprehend how exactly this right would be up held. Could this actually work? How would we guarantee this right to everyone and how might people react if their right is not fulfilled? Who would be responsible if food availability came to a halt? And how would this right be enforced/ distributed to the rich (buy their own food) and the poor who can not afford to purchase or grow their own food source?

1 comment:

  1. Food should not be an universal right. I do not think that fully capable people who sit on their ass all day deserves to be fed by the government. On the other hand, people should not be made to go hungry due to circumstances out of their control. Such people do have a right to be full.

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