There is No Right to Food, Jean Ziegler

Prensa Latina : Globalized Capitalism Blamed for Increasing Famine in the World

Globalization of neoliberal capitalism and its resulting injustice is the main cause of the expansion of hunger in the world, said UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler.

In a report presented to the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) here, Ziegler said than in less than a year, 10 million people have joined the planet´s army of starving people.

At least 100,000 people die of lack of food every year, and one of every four is permanently blinded due to lack of vitamin A, he said.

Ziegler told Prensa Latina that his performance as UN official and his re-election to the post have been rejected by the US, a country whose delegation votes almost solo against his term at the UNCHR.

"I have not fabricated these figures, he said. "They have been provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)."

"All governments in the world should be concerned that there are 852 million people starving while a program to address the scourge is in existence."

"FAO itself has stated that world agriculture could currently feed twice the world´s population. Thus, we can say that every person who dies of hunger has been assassinated," the Swedish jurist and sociologist stressed.

"What this is all about is a daily genocide against people who are starving amidst rich countries´silence," he said.

Copyright © 2004 - All Rights Reserved.
Prensa Latina

My emphasis.

I could not find other news sources reporting these statements, but I did find Mr. Ziegler saying other things:

"In Brazil, where there is fertile land, wealth and a tropical climate," said Jean Ziegler, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, after a recent visit there, "hunger is not a destiny." Rather, it is "the product of a totally unjust order. Those who die of hunger in Brazil are assassinated."

-Dollars and Sense, May/June 2002, quoted in Seeing Red: "Brazilian Peasant Leader"

Ziegler also told the commission he was concerned about hunger in North Korea, Palestinian areas, Sudan's conflict-ravaged Darfur region, Zimbabwe, India, Myanmar, the Philippines and Romania.

Worldwide, he said, more than 17,000 children under 5 die daily from hunger-related diseases.

"The silent daily massacre by hunger is a form of murder,'' Ziegler said. "It must be battled and eliminated.''

-The Guardian, March 30, 2005: "Expert: Malnutrition Affects Iraq Kids"

All above italics are my emphasis.

Ahh, well, now I see.

This means that, given the existence of both hungry and food-possessing humans, every single person who does not give away all of his or her wealth beyond the exact point what is necessary for his or her own survival is, at the very least, party to repeated mass murder. At the most, those people are directly responsible for daily mass murder.

I - by my inaction - am to blame for the deaths of people who starve.

You, dear reader, are a filthy moral stain because you perpetuate genocide by not stopping it.

Yeah, that makes sense. No perversion of causality, responsibility, or anything. It is entirely reasonable to say someone is a murderer when that person didn't actually kill anyone. It isn't outrageous at all that Mr. Ziegler compares dormancy in the face of a hungry child with the deliberate liquidation of an entire race of people.

If sneers could kill, the one distorting my face right now would be engaged around the throat of this utterly hideous idea.

There is no "right to food." By asserting there is, you imply that it is permissible for anyone who owns no food to use force in order to possess food. That is what the concept of a "right" demands: universality and enforceability. Without either, the purpose of rights - the nature that makes it different from other concepts - falls apart. But this means that every human's wealth that crests over the level of bare subsistence would be at the mercy of anyone who is starving and does not own the means to procure nutrition for him- or herself.

It would be a permanent global hall pass for larceny, a "right" that one could conceivably have one minute; but upon feeding himself after walking into a grocer and taking the materials for lunch, that "right" would no longer apply. But wait! It would return as soon as that man was hungry and simultaneously didn't own any food of his own. This flip-flop could happen a dozen times a day. A right does not have that kind of nature.

It should be obvious the kinds of problems this supposed "right" creates and this is directly related to my previous post, William J. Bennett and Brian T. Kennedy Need Slaves. In order to enforce a "right to food" you would have to enslave people to provide your food if you possessed none.

Posted by Drizzten at April 07, 2005 12:43 AM