Feeding human rights : global hunger, development, and free markets in the long 1970s, 1962-1980

Abstract

This study explores how the notion of human rights developed and responded to the social and economic development of food-based issues—agricultural development, food aid, land use, and famine—in developing countries during the Cold War. The idea of development, when integrated with the Cold War logic of superpowers, shaped the direction of discussions, approaching food as a scientific matter and malnutrition as a political matter within the conventional paradigm. The Third World should pursue development as defined by the US and other Western nations. This tradition argued that state-driven development schemes and their liberal values provided examples of what a truly modern society could be. The idea of modernization and economic development imagined a new world order that extended from the promise of the previous era. In this sense, the modernization ideology garnered a broad range of support and peaked in the 1960s. The transition of international politics in the 1960s and in the 1970s—preferably called “the long 1970s,” led to the individual and neo-liberal value policies replaced previous collective-oriented socioeconomic interests and prolonged welfare policies. Above all, human rights were powerful and, more importantly, pervasive when they had transformed their ideas and subsumed previously disregarded ideas in Western society. People who engaged in global food politics paid attention to this layer of human rights because the idea can be beneficial to overcoming their crises and to supporting a new discourse. This transformation changed the relationship between the state and market in the global arena during a critical period of the 1960s and the 1970s. Human rights actions were designed and implemented not to undermine the essential interest of the developed countries; rather, it engaged in the support of other nations and multilateral organizations. Those visions ultimately undermined governmental power in the Third World and finally supported individual liberalism in social and economic areas. Human rights were only one aspect of this, but they gave powerful morality to the changes. By focusing on these issues, this research explores why human rights appealed to such a wide spectrum of groups, including some who generally regarded one another as adversaries.