First World Hunger Revisited

Food Charity or the Right to Food?

G. Riches, T. Silvasti, G. Riches, T. Silvasti

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137298713
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137298737
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Is food aid the way of the future? What are the prospects for integrated public policies informed by the right to food? First World Hunger Revisited investigates the rise of food charity and corporately sponsored food banks as effective and sustainable responses to increasing hunger and food poverty in twelve rich 'food-secure' societies.

1

Hunger in the Rich World: Food Aid and Right to Food Perspectives

Graham Riches and Tiina Silvasti

Introduction

The relationship between food poverty and food charity in developed countries was initially explored in the book First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics (1997), the first cross-national study of the development of food aid and the charitable food bank movement from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s. It examined the rise of food banks as community and philanthropic responses to the growing issue of food insecurity in five residual welfare states: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. It revealed a growing reliance on the collection and redistribution of surplus and wasted food to feed hungry people. During this period of neo-liberal welfare reform publicly funded social safety nets were being dismantled and government obligations to ensure the adequacy of social benefits sufficient to both pay the rent and feed oneself and one’s family, even during times of strong economic growth, were increasingly neglected. These residual approaches to hunger and poverty turned out to be highly problematic particularly in the short term and pointed to food banks as symptoms and symbols of welfare states in decline if not in crisis. The book anticipated the international growth of charitable food banking in the North as a system comparable to emergency food aid in the South. It argued for right to food approaches and strategies for public action including the importance of inter-sectoral collaboration and a stronger advocacy role for civil society.

A decade and a half later this initial cross-national study of the early period of charitable food banking has been updated and expanded so as to explore newly emerging issues and right to food perspectives to provide a more informed and enriched understanding of increasing hunger and food poverty in high and upper income states; and what to do about it. The period since 1997 has been one of ever stronger and more and more ‘uni-dimensional’ global neo-liberal economic and welfare policy, as well as more extensive international debate about global hunger including domestic food insecurity in rich societies and right to food discourses, strategies and analyses. Not unexpectedly it has also witnessed the national and global expansion of charitable food banking in First World states, increasingly supported by transnational food corporations, in the absence of public policy, inviting questions why, and who is actually benefitting from such food charity.

Against this background First World Hunger Revisited explores and analyses the rise and development of charitable food banks and emergency food aid since the mid 1990s as a continuing response to growing domestic hunger in basically food secure, rich ‘First World’ countries. While recognizing the strength of human compassion and the moral imperative to feed hungry people it challenges food charity as a practical, effective and ethical response to hunger and poverty. It examines the origins and development of food banking and asks whether this increasingly influential form of global food charity – collecting, sorting and distributing surplus or wasted food to feed the hungry poor in wealthy nations, is part of the solution to, or part of the problem of entrenched food poverty (Dowler, 2003, p. 151).

The book offers a cross-national study of the intended and unintended consequences of global and increasingly corporate food charity and its implications for the role of nation states and public policy informed by the right to food in addressing domestic hunger and food poverty. The focal questions posed are to what extent does charitable food banking, now more often institutionalized and corporatized in many countries, undermine food justice and the human right to adequate food and nutrition; and, in what ways, does it extend and exacerbate food poverty and inequality? It has been suggested that food charity acts as a moral safety valve (Poppendieck, 1998, p. 298) and that it de-politicizes First World hunger as an issue requiring the full attention of states and their governments. The book also considers the possibility that the human right to adequate food (Eide, 2005; Kent, 2008; Ziegler et al., 2011) and ‘joined-up’ food, health, income and social policy (Lang et al., 2009) might offer alternative approaches to achieving universal food security inclusive of disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, people whose lives are surplus to the requirements of global and local labour markets.

The text includes 12 national case studies invited from a mix of high and upper income states of which the majority are members of the Paris based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and non-OECD states and of emerging upper income states which, in aggregate terms, are food secure by internal production or import, and where food aid and charitable food banking are either established or being introduced. They comprise the original five residual ‘Anglo-Saxon’ welfare states and seven additional countries selected in Africa, Europe, South America, the Middle East and Asia, thereby expanding the study to include cases from the five continents.

The additional cases are from Estonia, Finland, Spain, South Africa, Brazil, Turkey and Hong Kong SAR/China. Spain is a eurozone state experiencing a deep financial crisis and a catholic country with a very different cultural background for delivering food aid compared for example to the Lutheran Nordic welfare state of Finland. Estonia, the neighbouring country of Finland, is a post-socialist hard line capitalist country and an emerging economy with high income disparities and growing food poverty.

The rapidly expanding economies comprise Turkey which has been used as a model within the Middle East and combines Islamic approaches to welfare within its philanthropic model; South Africa where the right to food is entrenched in its constitution as it is also in Brazil, which has a specific ‘zero hunger’ policy for food relief; and Hong Kong SAR/China which is now experiencing the introduction of food banks, and offers an example from the rich rising Asia. In 2004 national case studies regarding the right to food in Brazil, South Africa and Canada as well as India and Uganda were the subject of an FAO Intergovernmental Working Group seminar held in Rome, which were to inform the development of the UN FAO Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food, approved later that year (CFS, 2004).

Food aid perspectives

Three different but interrelated perspectives of food aid inform the book’s analysis dating back to the mid-1990s. The first considers the steady rise, institutionalization, corporatization and globalization of charitable food banking in selected rich food secure countries attested to by the growth of national food banks organizations in which, with the exception of Finland, the Global Foodbanking Network (GFN) and the European Federation of Food Banks (EFFB) are now active. This invites the question why domestic hunger and food insecurity continue to remain obscure issues for public policy in relation to food, income security, public health and social policy. One possibility is that the social construction of First World hunger as a matter for charity and privatized welfare has resulted in domestic hunger being largely de-politicized and neglected by national governments despite its increasing prevalence. Also, from an ethical and right to food (RTF) perspective there is a pressing need to explore the benefits, failures, latent functions and unintended consequences of the moral imperative to feed hungry people with surplus and wasted food in hitherto neglected areas of food, nutrition, public health and social policy.

Second, we are interested in the relationship, if not tension between food charity, now increasingly corporatized by the global food industry, and the legal and political obligations of First World states to advance public policy informed by the human right to adequate food and nutrition in the context of national food security. In evaluating corporatized food charity the case studies give voice to new conversations and public debate about food justice in relation to the hungry poor. In so doing the book considers the de-politicization of food poverty and hunger as matters requiring priority attention by governments, particularly so in light of the large majority of UN member states’ having today ratified the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) including the right to food, with the USA being a notable exception.

Third, the case studies consider possibilities for public policy informed both by the right to food and ‘joined-up’ food, health, income and social policy in First World countries. In this context domestic hunger and food poverty are understood as ideological and political questions of distributional justice, asking what can be learned from the experiences of different countries. In particular there is a need, emphasized by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, for states to prioritize social protection policies in their national agricultural, food policy, income security, public health and social welfare debates.

Changing global context of First World hunger

Several factors invite this re-examination of charitable food aid as a solution to food poverty in high and upper income states. The 2008 economic meltdown; the Eurozone crisis; deep cuts in many countries to social spending and widening income inequalities in the rich world combined with continuing economic uncertainty; the aftermath of the 2007–2008 world food crisis and the ongoing instability of global food markets; and the seemingly permanent crisis of precarious living and economic livelihoods for surplus and marginalized individuals, families and populations. Due to increasing social inequality and growing income differentials, an ever-growing number of people living in wealthy countries are coming to depend on food aid. Populations at risk include women and children, especially single parent families, unemployed and underemployed individuals, and the working poor, as well as refugees and Aboriginal peoples for whom the further dismantling of publicly funded social safety nets can only lead to increased poverty and social deprivation.

In the context of global hunger, the stubborn prevalence and recent growth of food poverty and undernourishment in high and upper income states requires attention. First and foremost, food insecurity is a problem of developing countries. Hence, it is important to distinguish First World hunger from undernourishment in developing regions, currently estimated by the FAO’s most recent study, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013, at 842 million people, continuing its two decade decline since the early 1990s. It reports that over that same period undernourishment has also declined in the world’s developed regions, yet indicating that between 2005–2007 and 2011–2013 it rose from 13.6 to 15.7 million people, a 15.5 per cent increase (FAO, 2013a).

These FAO-developed region numbers are, however, likely underestimates when compared with the numbers given by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) of the people in need of food aid in the USA. On this account alone in 2012, 14.5 per cent of households (17.6 million households) were food insecure (Coleman-Jensen et al., 2013). To be food insecure does not necessarily mean to be undernourished, but it means that these households had difficulty at some time during the year in providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources (Nord et al., 2010). During 2008–2009 the prevalence of food insecurity was the highest observed since nationally representative food security surveys in the USA were initiated in 1995 (Nord et al., 2010) and it has stayed essentially unchanged since then. Thus, more and more people who are living in advanced industrial societies simply cannot afford to buy their food normally in the marketplace. The fact that not even the richest countries in the world can guarantee food security for all their citizens indicates that food policy as well as social and public policy is badly failing.

Clarifying the meaning of food poverty

Food poverty is primarily a matter of access to healthy food and its affordability, and in the context of this book is informed by two basic concepts, hunger and food security/insecurity, which require clarification. Given that hunger is politically as well as emotionally a polysemic and contestable concept and, thus, sometimes difficult to apply in First World societies, many researchers prefer nowadays the concept of food security. There is no single definition of food security, but in the context of global hunger different multilateral organizations, such as the FAO, the International Fund for Agriculture and Development (IFAD) and the World Bank, continuously tend to redefine the term according to their topical needs or interests. Critics of this concept sharply point out, that the food security model is basically a derivative of the model of globalization that reduces human relationships to their economic value and understands human beings as homo economicus. Accordingly, the driving force behind food security rests on the idea that economic growth, mediated via market mechanisms, will offer the best solution to reduce poverty and to achieve food security. The means to economic growth, again, are familiar in terms of neo-liberal economic policy: deregulation, free competition, privatization and trade liberalization (Schanbacher, 2010, p. viii–xi).

Food security/insecurity

The World Food Summit of 1996 defined food security as existing ‘when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’ (FAO, 1996), reasserted in the Declaration of the 2009 World Summit on Food Security (FAO, 2009). Food insecurity, consequently, means ‘limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways’ (Andersson, 1990). Food banks, soup kitchens and breadlines are not socially accepted ways to acquire food for oneself or for the family in the developed world, nor is begging, shoplifting or dumpster diving, that is searching for thrown away food in skips.

According to definitions of food security/insecurity, people who receive food aid are not inevitably hungry, but they are food poor: they either lack the financial ability to put food on the table and/or do not always necessarily know how they will manage to provide for their families and themselves the next sufficient, nourishing and culturally acceptable meal for an active healthy life. This does not, though, exclude the possibility of hunger as a sign of absolute poverty also in First World countries. As Riches (1997a) indicated in the introductory chapter of First World Hunger, food expenditure is the most flexible part of the budgets of vulnerable people. When the food budget gives way, individuals and families easily become and remain hungry and are in need of immediate help.

Critics of the concept of food security underline this fact. From their perspective, food security embraces charitable food aid as a solution to food poverty rather than empowering sovereign actors to democratically manage their own food production and distribution systems. This has been taken seriously within the food sovereignty movement, which promotes the ‘right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through sustainable methods and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’ (Via Campesina, 2012). Both as a concept and a movement food sovereignty challenges the prevailing global food system and offers a powerful response to the current global food, poverty and environmental crises.

Hunger

Hunger is a difficult term to conceptualize, but three dimensions are typically distinguished: biological, social and economic. According to Poppendieck (1998, p. 79) defining hunger as food insecurity neglects human sensations, the fact of ‘hunger as the uneasy and painful personal sensation caused by a lack of food’ (Andersson, 1990, p. 1560). Consequently, this definition is not just semantic but conceals moral sentiments and political motives. An answer given to the question whether people receiving food aid are really hungry at all is thoroughly political. The response depends on the ideological standpoint and is thereby dependent on moral values. In the research literature and practical discourses both concepts, hunger and food security/insecurity, as aspects of food poverty, are often used in parallel fashion without paying careful attention to their politically distinctive differences. Both of these concepts are also widely used in this book but an informed effort is made to keep in mind their differences in orienting and coordinating human action.

The new food policy: A more equitable, ecological and healthy global food system

The previously emphasized need for a public policy informed by the right to food inclusive of ‘joined-up’ food and social policy in developed countries focuses attention on the concept of food policy. According to Lang et al. (2009, p. 6–8) it is necessary to re-think the interface betwee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Hunger in the Rich World: Food Aid and Right to Food Perspectives
• 2  Food Banks in Australia: Discouraging the Right to Food
• 3  A Right to Food Approach: Public Food Banks in Brazil
• 4  Canada: Thirty Years of Food Charity and Public Policy Neglect
• 5  Hunger and Food Aid in Estonia: A Local Authority and Family Obligation
• 6  Hunger in a Nordic Welfare State: Finland
• 7  Poverty Amid Growth: Post-1997 Hong Kong Food Banks
• 8  Privatizing the Right to Food: Aotearoa/New Zealand
• 9  Between Markets and Masses: Food Assistance and Food Banks in South Africa
• 10  Erosion of Rights, Uncritical Solidarity and Food Banks in Spain
• 11  Food Banking in Turkey: Conservative Politics in a Neo-Liberal State
• 12  Food Banks and Food Justice in Austerity Britain
• 13  Food Assistance, Hunger and the End of Welfare in the USA
• 14  Hunger and Food Charity in Rich Societies: What Hope for the Right to Food?
• References
• Index