The Right to Food – A Conversation – Part I

Can the Right to Food be a fundamental right? More importantly, are fundamental rights “natural”? I posted a poster on my facebook wall only to get an interesting an interesting reaction that made me think. First the poster:

A friend commented:

Why do humans have rights to food? I believe life is equal only in the perspective that all living species will survive if they are strong enough to provide the means necessary for the survival of themselves and their offspring. Human Rights is a human invention that conflicts with the natural life cycle.

To this, my reply was:

That almost sounded like “Social Darwinism”, ie, Darwinian concepts of evolution, such as the Survival of the Fittest, applied to the human society, where survival refers not just in regard to the natural environment we live in, but rather the social environment created by humans collectively working as a people. The concept of human rights with regard to rights of food can’t unfortunately be explained comprehensively of fairly in a conversation like this, but I’ll try my best to explain my view.

Fertility rates of societies tend to reduce with greater economic development, a concept that’s called Demographic Transition. Our economy, however, is not run “naturally”. By that, I mean that proper forces of the market (demand and supply) don’t work efficiently due to a host of factors, mainly political. I refer to political here as a term that goes beyond the narrow meaning referring to the political system of a country. Here, “political” refers to the leftist economists’ ideas about political power wielded in the economic realm in the form of economic power of the few, by virtue of market position.  This would hold true even in the freest of economies, even the kind libertarians propose.

I’m trying to get to the point that something natural (like fertility and survival) is restricted by something not-natural (like political and economic influence of the few). There is enough food in the world to feed everyone. There is demand. There are means to meet such demand. But supply is restricted due to a host of “unnatural” reasons (like political violence in a few states guided by ideology rather than human need and economic reasons of the profit principle).

You wrote, “Human rights is a human invention that conflicts with the natural life cycle.” I reply, “Human rights is a human invention, guided by natural survival instincts, that conflicts not with the natural life cycle, but the unnatural cycle of economic and political activity.” Human rights, like the one for food, is precisely to conserve the natural life cycle, and shunt the unnatural.

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To this, I got a reply by another friend who had a point to make; a point which naturally follows this argument. The comment was interesting, and it can be found in Part II of this conversation.