Food security

In December of 2010 the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations announced that regional crop failures Russia and the Ukraine had pushed global food prices to record highs. In January of 2011, The Economist published an article on the economic benefits of this price surge for farm producers. Although the tone of the piece virtually chortled with delight over the windfall profits for developed world food producers, the lead paragraph aptly summarized the fundamental problem of food ethics: What’s good for farmers is bad for people who must buy food in order to eat. At the surface level, this is a very simple problem to understand. Farmers grow crops and sell them to make a living. Their profits are determined by the gap between their production cost and the price they receive from buyers. When production costs are stable, the gap is bigger when food prices are higher. From the consumer perspective, eating is not optional consumption. When food prices rise, disposable income for other goods declines. For people living at or below the poverty level, food prices can outstrip their ability to purchase altogether, leaving them at the mercy of hunger and the attendant diseases of deprivation. After many decades of decline, global food prices began to rise during the last years of the 2010s, just as a global economic downturn took a large bite out of household income. A quick analysis of the ethical issue suggests that these economic trends challenge the poor’s ability to enjoy a secure right to food. However, thinking of this problem as a simple tension between the economic interests of producers and consumers is a good way to overlook a deep problem in food ethics. First, I will argue that many current treatments of hunger as a moral issue do not recognize the significance of this fundamental problem at all. The too simple characterization just given leads to a misdiagnosis of the ethical problem. The balance of the paper will develop a still schematic but more economically rich characterization of the problem, and explore how moral philosophy and the philosophy of technology can help point the way toward more responsive strategies. Hunger as a Moral Problem The plight of the hungry is morally compelling. One does not need a philosopher to explain why hunger is a bad thing, and why alleviating hunger is morally significant, yet philosophical treatments of hunger can be quite influential in shaping both public attitudes toward hunger as well as policy responses. Peter Singer and Amartya Sen have offered the most influential treatments in recent years. Both Singer and Sen have sparked lots of commentary, but a full review of their positions is not really necessary. A very succinct discussion shows why the most obvious ways of developing their analyses have failed to uncover the fundamental problem in food ethics. Singer’s argument attempts to establish a morally-based rationale for coming to the aid of hungry people that would be accepted by all, no matter what their basic orientation in moral theory. His principle is that if one can alleviate a serious harm at little cost to oneself, one is obligated to do so. The principle is made persuasive through an example that is now widely known. One is asked to imagine a child struggling in the shallow water of a fountain. The passer-by can save the child by suffering only the inconvenience of damp clothing. Singer challenges us to deny that he or she has a moral obligation to jump in and rescue the child, then makes an empirical argument to suggest that all of us bear a similar relationship to hungry people in the developing world. Singer’s early treatment focused exclusively on famine and hunger, while his more recent effort generalizes the argument to the basic needs of people who live in extreme poverty. Singer Op. cit. Chapter One Much of the voluminous commentary on Singer’s argument examines the question of whether non-controversial obligations to nearby drowning children serve as a persuasive analogy to hungry people in distant places. Thomas Pogge has countered some of the skeptics with an argument intended to show that complex phenomena of globalization have made all of us complicit in causing the plight of those living in extreme need. Thus even if we think that our obligations to nearby people are much stronger than duties to help people in distant places, Pogge tells us that we should be willing to help in virtue of the way that we have participated in bringing about their plight. Pogge, Op. cit. Chapter One Given Pogge’s formulation, even libertarians who limit political obligation to non-interference in the affairs of others can be brought to Singer’s conclusion: Middle-class people in the industrial world have a moral obligation to help the hungry. But philosophically ingenious as the work of Singer and Pogge is, the fundamental problem in food ethics is somewhat orthogonal to it. The ongoing debate over duties to distant others that developed in the wake of Singer’s philosophically provocative thesis and Pogge’s creative adaptation of it fails to intersect with the sources of hunger for the majority of the world’s poor. In creating a moral analysis that is focused narrowly on our obligations to bring aid, this tradition of moral philosophy is insensitive to the problem of price-quantity relationships that put producers and consumers of food into a zero sum game. In fact, the original 1972 paper suggests that an appropriate way to aid victims of famine is feed them with farm surpluses from the industrial production systems of the developed world. Well before Singer had taken up his pen to write about famine and the moral duties of affluence Theodore Schultz had shown why food aid tends to hurt as many or more poor people as it helps. Giving away food in poor countries destroys the livelihood of the farmers living there, farmers who are as poor or poorer than the urbanites that food aid is designed to help. Theodore W. Schultz, “Impact and Implications of Foreign Surplus Disposal on Underdeveloped Economies: Value of U.S. Farm Surpluses to Underdeveloped Countries” American Journal of Agricultural Econonomics 42 (1960): 1019-1030 doi:10.2307/1235653. Singer’s recent book acknowledges that food aid can depress the prices that farmers in the recipient regions receive on local markets. This can actually cause poverty in rural areas at the same time that it relieves the effects of poverty in cities. His recent work thus reflects cognizance of the economic relationships that lie at the heart of global food ethics without also retreating from a position which articulates the issue in terms of obligations that relatively better off people owe to the poor. But as we will see, his qualification still fails to recognize how strategies that help some harm others. Sen’s work, in contrast, has been instrumental in exposing the ethical significance of underlying economic realities. Working with Jean Drèze, Sen has stressed the importance of food entitlements. It is not enough to look only at food availability, as an emphasis on providing aid implicitly suggests. Famine can strike even in situations where food is locally abundant. In order to understand the economic causes of hunger, one must recognize at least three different ways in which people’s ability to have the food they need to survive is secured. First, it is possible that they produce the food themselves, either through farming, herding, hunting or scavenging. Second, it is possible that their food security depends on having enough income to purchase food on local markets. Finally, they may depend on gifts, grants or other forms of supply that are secured by patrons, by charities or by the state. Food entitlements are a key element in Sen’s capabilities approach. People with secure food entitlements achieve a crucial capability to feed themselves. Correlatively, each type of food entitlement has its characteristic vulnerability. In particular, Sen’s entitlement approach makes it clear why rising food prices threaten the capabilities of people on limited incomes. When prices increase, their ability to secure food through purchase is weakened. Sen’s work on the Bengal famine 1943 showed that the income-based entitlement of the poor eroded under the pressure of inflation. Food was widely available in the shops, but its price rose faster than the income of poor people who needed it. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famine: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. New York: 1981, Oxford University Press; Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action. New York: 1989, Oxford University Press. Direct production entitlements are subject to a somewhat different vulnerability. Physical threats such as drought, flood or invasion by insects or animals can destroy a crop, placing a poor farmer’s food entitlement in jeopardy. Crops are, of course, physically vulnerable to physical destruction by human beings, too, so bandits, marauding armies and bands of refugees can threaten a direct-production entitlement. In many parts of the world, climate change is an immediate threat to the security of direct-production entitlements, though there are some cases where a change in climate may strengthen them. Only slightly more subtly, a direct-production entitlement depends on secure access to a physical resource such as land, a forest or a fishery. Social upheavals or policy shifts that threaten property, hunting or fishing rights or land tenure threaten poor people’s capabilities. Significantly, the importance of protecting access to and control over the resource on which a direct-production entitlement is based means that poor farmers may associate food security much more strongly with security of property than do the urban poor, or, for that matter, those whose conceptual model of food security is fixed by considering the case of the urban poor. This is not to stipulate any particular model of property rights, for many direct-production entitlements depend on common-pool resource regimes or non-exchangeable rights of use. Such details matter a great deal in specific cases, but this feature of direct-production entitlements will be set aside for the balance of my discussion. Sen’s approach also shows why simply buttressing income-based capabilities with grants of food can harm as many people as it helps. Having a secure direct-production entitlement implies being able to plant or fish not just for today, but tomorrow and next year. Even subsistence farmers must sell or trade some portion of their crop in order to meet their subsistence needs. Therefore, the ability to sell at least a portion of one’s crop for an amount that allows full recovery of one’s production cost plus something for meeting additional needs is crucial to the capabilities of people who live in rural areas and depend on farming. A response to famine that emphasizes grants and gifts can undermine the fragile well-being of poor people who farm when their ability to garner needed cash income is undercut by grants that inflate supply and decrease price. Sen’s work suggests that there are delicate relationships between each form of entitlement that must be brought into focus when undertaking programs of famine relief or even economic development. This is not, however, the message that philosophers have taken from Sen’s work. Instead a focus on income-based entitlements alone has largely subsumed discussions of hunger as a moral issue. Work in development ethics based on Sen’s capabilities approach has implicitly and occasionally explicitly de-emphasized the importance of access to food. The assumption in this work is that improving incomes will automatically result in more secure food entitlements for poor people, hence the focus of development ethics should be on economic development that improves income, and on infrastructure in areas such as healthcare where even those who have adequate income have limited capabilities. See Elizabeth Ashford, “The Duties Imposed by the Human Right to Basic Necessities,” in Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor? T. Pogge, ed. Cambridge, UK: 2007, Polity Press, pp. 183-218. I do not include Sen’s own work with Drèze or other adaptations of his approach by economists such as Bina Agarwal in this indictment. As discussed at more length in “Food Aid and the Famine Relief Argument (Brief Return),” I do believe that the interpretation of a capabilities approach that I sketch here is strongly evident in the work of many recent authors on development ethics, and may be implicit in the treatment of distinguished authors such as Pogge or Nussbaum. Even Martha Nussbaum’s somewhat more sophisticated adaptation of Sen’s capability theory displays insensitivity to the farming-identity of many women that she worked with in India. Her analysis seldom makes direct reference to the particular way in which Indian women are deriving their livelihood. In analyzing the concept of property from the somewhat abstract perspective of political theory, she expresses puzzlement at the concern that some poor women continue to express for strong measures to protect property rights. Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge, UK: 2000, Cambridge University Press. Here she reveals ignorance of how important it is for a poor person with a crop in the ground to have some means for preventing its destruction or theft by interlopers, or why someone whose life skills depend on secure land tenure might value an ability to hold title to land in their own name. In contrast, Bina Agarwal’s work on women in development reveals why securing this right was a crucial issue for women’s rights in a nation where a large percentage of poor women make their living through farming. Bina Agarwal, Gender and Green Governance: The Political Economy of Women's Presence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010. The defect in overly general interpretations of Sen’s work lies in its failure to recognize the role that agricultural production continues to play in securing capabilities for some of the world’s poorest people. United Nations Special Rapportuer for Food Security Olivier de Schutter estimates that fully 50% global population living on less than $1.30 per day live are food producers. Another 20% of the extreme poor depend on incomes that are derived from the food and fiber production economy. Their food entitlement may be a blend of income and direct production, but their income depends on agriculture either as labor for the production of crops and livestock or indirectly through transport, supply and other activities that support agriculture. An additional 10% are hunters or scavengers whose food entitlement depends at least partially on access to a forest or other common-pool resource. It is in one sense perfectly correct to say that improving incomes is important for this 80% of the poorest of the poor, just as it is for the remaining 20% of the world’s most poor living in cities. Poor farmers need larger and more secure sources of income in order to secure a wide range of their basic needs. However, the relationship between their ability to have a secure food entitlement, on the one hand, and other capabilities that would be enhanced by increasing their income is rather more complex than that of the urban poor. There is an enormous diversity of ways in which poor farmers derive a production-based entitlement. Most will literally produce a significant portion of the food that is consumed in their household, either through planting crops, managing available resources such as forests and lakes or tending animals for meat, milk, eggs and blood. But most also purchase another portion from locally available markets, especially when their own supply runs low. The income they need to make these purchases may be derived from selling what they produce, but it may be obtained through some other kind of work. Some will derive most of their income from the sale of an inedible cash crop (such as cotton, coffee or tea), which limits their ability to fall back on the consumption of their own crops or livestock to secure their food entitlement. In fact, the sheer difficulty of formulating generalizations about the way that rural people derive and secure their access to food challenges the process of abstract reasoning that is crucial to both ethics and economics. It is thus important to recognize that terms like “farmer” may conceal details that matter a great deal, and a term like “production-based food entitlement” can be equally problematic. A production-based entitlement includes both consumable goods like fruits, grains, meats and animal products, and goods that are purchased with income form selling the products of a subsistence-production activity such as farming, fishing and scavenging. Because these producers have some ability to allocate their labor between production for consumption and production for sale (as well as other labor for wages), their capability for securing food exhibits a flexibility that is vital to them in the context of extreme poverty and relative isolation. The production that creates a direct food entitlement may be organized at a group or village level, and land tenure or access to common-pool resources may depend heavily on traditional norms. What is more the Western age/gender association of “farmer” and “adult male” does not hold in many parts of the world. I use words like “farmer” as a placeholder for many types of production system, and I speak of “tending the crops” in place of constantly listing alternatives that may involve communal management of forests, pastures, wetlands or fisheries. When I write “selling the crop” one should recall that “the crop” may indeed be beans and millet, but it may equally be fish, meat, eggs or roots and insects gathered from a nearby commons. Selling can occur in a village market, but it can also take place at centralized facility where cotton or coffee goes directly into a world market. Given these qualifications, poor smallholders suffer from three inter-related types of vulnerability to developments that would otherwise appear to be supported by basic principles of distributive justice. First, as noted already, the local markets for their production can be destroyed by well-intentioned efforts to get food to poor people in urban areas. Schulz’s views have been confirmed repeatedly in the intervening decades. Christopher B. Barrett and Daniel Maxwell. Food Aid after Fifty Years: Recasting Its Role. London: 2005, Routledge. A recent book by two Wall Street Journal reporters provides a poignant illustration. They recount an episode of farm bankruptcies in rural Ethiopia and were shown warehouses of unsalable food during the height of their most recent food crisis. Roger, Thurow, and Scott Kilman. Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. 2009, Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs. There are cases where local disasters can create temporary food shortages: A typhoon or tsunami can wipe out local supply and there is little choice but to bring in boatloads of food. Yet it is more typical for food shortages to exhibit the double whammy of urban poor who cannot afford food, and urban suffering badly when they cannot sell the food they have. Second, poor smallholders are at an enormous disadvantage in global markets. Farmers in industrial countries can often achieve lower production costs, though this may not continue if fossil fuel costs rise. Even still, the scale of production in the industrialized world and the infrastructure for storage and transport assures that commodities produced in Europe, North America and few other key exporting nations will often be less expensive than locally produced commodities even within key urban markets of the developing world. Furthermore, the continuing influence of both direct subsidies paid to farmers and indirect subsidies in the form of publicly funded agricultural research or favorable tax policy will further increase the economic advantage that industrial farm producers have over poor smallholders in the developing world. While subsidy can distort incentives in any sector of the economy, the lower wages of workers in developing countries have overwhelmingly tipped competitive advantages in their favor for most sectors of the industrial economy. But not for agriculture. It is worth stressing that these two sources of vulnerability do not necessarily cause a collapse in that portion of a production-based entitlement that is consumed within the household. They may lead smallholding farmers to shift toward non-farming activity, to the extent that doing so is possible. So it is often those farmers who depend heavily on selling their crop (e.g. cotton growers) that are most adversely affected when they find themselves competing with food aid or subsidized commodities from the developed world. Poor farmers must decide whether to gamble on good prices, or take the safer bet of allocating time and resources to the food they will eat over the coming year. The safer bet generally means less total income, and less chance of eventually exiting the condition of extreme poverty. It also means less local farm production, a point that Schulz emphasized in arguing that food aid can cause a cycle of localized food shortages, requiring still more food aid even when the period of crisis has passed. Schulz, Op. cit. Note 3. The third vulnerability may be the most pernicious. Technical improvements in the productivity of farm production methods cause a treadmill phenomenon that adversely affects smallholders. When a new technology becomes available, early adopters have lower than average production costs. Since the market price reflects average production costs, they reap windfall profits, which they typically invest in even greater production. As the technology becomes widely adopted, average production cost falls, and market price falls with it. But late adopters then have higher than average production costs and must sell at a loss. Eventually they are bankrupted and their farms are abandoned. Where land markets are stable the land is purchased by early adopters with money from the windfall profits they earned before prices fell. When the new equilibrium is reached, all farmers find themselves running harder (that is producing more) to stay in the same place. They must produce and sell more of the crop to achieve the same level of economic well-being they had enjoyed before the new technology became available. The upshot of the treadmill phenomenon is that when production efficiencies are improving, there is a steady flow of farm failures and a trend toward fewer and larger farms. The losers may migrate to cities where they join throngs of people competing for unskilled labor. Since achieving production efficiencies is a key goal of economic development, in rural areas economic development has dramatic inegalitarian consequences, and can be a direct cause of harm to the poor. The effects of this pattern can be mitigated when the price of agricultural commodities is rising, but this typically occurs at the expense of the poorest people in cities, who must pay a larger share of their limited income for food. Thus either the treadmill causes reduced employment and loss of owner-operators in rural areas or rising food prices adversely affects the buying power of the poorest in cities. And that is the fundamental problem in food ethics. An Ethics Critique In the chapter “Morality and the Myth of Scarcity” from The Ethics of Aid and Trade I argue that both rights-based and utilitarian moral theories have framed problems in distributive ethics through a lens which presumes a natural scarcity of goods. There were two interrelated points to that analysis. First, the food insecurity that gives rise to hunger and deprivation is not the kind of moderate and ubiquitous scarcity that David Hume describes in recounting “the circumstances of justice.” Hume argues that we would not need to think about justice in a world where everything people want and need can be procured without effort, and that justice becomes impossible when scarcity is so extreme that people could not be blamed for the resort to violence in order to satisfy their needs. Those to whom food is unavailable are beyond the parameters in which Humean justice can operate, and the food riot has long been seen as a signal that the parameters of civility have been breached. Paul B. Thompson, The Ethics of Aid and Trade: US Food Policy, Foreign Competition and the Social Contract. New York: 1992, Cambridge University Press. But unlike many other consumable goods, food needs can also be satiated. While it seems that people cannot get enough clothes to wear or electronic gizmos, once you have enough to eat, well, that’s enough. This creates a ceiling on the marketability of food, and once that ceiling is reached farmers are simply unable to find buyers at any price. The statement that farmers are unable to find buyers at any price is a hyperbole that nonetheless communicates a larger economic truth. Markets for farm commodities grow when people make dietary shifts toward consuming meat and other animal products because the animals will consume several points of grain for every pound of meat, milk or eggs. Arguably, shifts toward consumption of simple sugars such as high fructose corn syrup have also broken through the ceiling, resulting in the dietary disaster discussed in Chapter 3. Farmers can also expand markets for farm produce by shifting to “luxury” foods like coffee and tea, or to non-food crops such as cotton or biofuels. But the larger point remains: Within a relatively market that is localized temporally and geographically, farmers can and do produce more than they can sell. When not forced to sell by their own poverty, farmers have generally learned to cope with this problem by withholding some of what they produce from the market. They literally plow it under for use as next year’s fertilizer. Indeed, Sen’s work shows that in recent times, hunger and famine are rarely associated with an absolute scarcity of consumable calories. Breakdowns in markets, property rights or macroeconomic forces (such as rapid inflation) have been at the core of people’s inability to have secure food entitlements, and the breakdowns can occur both when food cannot be bought and when it cannot be sold. Second, the rights-oriented and utilitarian moral philosophies of the modern era do a great deal to legitimate the system of property rights that give rise to the collapse of food entitlements on a local basis. Not only do farmers plow the crops they own into the ground while hungry people stand in food lines, they feel totally justified in doing so. Ibid. Indeed, some obvious extensions of these moral philosophies have proven to be quite insensitive to the vicissitudes faced by poor farmers. Utilitarians in particular have been tempted to deny that there is any particular problem at all. Something similar to the treadmill effect described above can be observed in many industries. As production or distribution methods evolve and achieve greater efficiencies, laggard firms go out business. Although there is certainly pain and loss associated with these bankruptcies, the benefits to consumers (in the form of lower prices) outweigh those losses. This result is a fairly straightforward potential Pareto improvement: The benefits to society as a whole are large enough to compensate for the harms that might be experienced by a few. This in turn is a plausible way to understand how the utilitarian maxim should be applied to food security. If we should do that thing that achieves the greatest good for the greatest number, we are at least moving in the right direction when benefits are sufficient to offset the costs. The ethical justifiability of Pareto better outcomes has been sharply debated. See, Ezra J. Mishan, "The futility of Pareto-efficient distributions." The American Economic Review (1972): 971-976; Mark Sagoff, "Values and preferences." Ethics (1986): 301-316.Daniel Hausman, and Michael McPherson. "Economics, rationality, and ethics." In The Philosophy of Economics: An Anthology 2nd Ed. D. Hausman, Ed. New York: 1994, Cambridge University Press, pp. 252-277; . Indeed, growth oriented economists such as Jeffery Sachs have explicitly made this argument in defending the path toward industrialization of agriculture in the developed world. They also clearly see this as the path that developing countries should take as well, with constant concentration of ownership among farm producers and a continuous flow of workers exiting from employment in agriculture. Jeffery Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. New York: 2006, Penguin Press. In the view of these growth oriented economists, agriculture is just another sector of the industrial economy. Like any sector, it should produce its goods as efficiently as possible. When the entire economy is organized according to this principle, we reach the utilitarian’s goal of maximal possible welfare. Sach’s view is discussed at greater length in my book The Agrarian Vision, where I called this the industrial philosophy of agriculture. The industrial philosophy should not be confused with what is often called “industrial agriculture.” Advocates of the industrial philosophy might well endorse smallholder production in developing countries so long as this form of social organization achieves the greatest possible cost efficiency. Similarly, they might endorse organic production methods if consumer demand for organic products warrants it. Paul B. Thompson, The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics. Lexington, KY: 2010, University Press of Kentucky. Advocates of efficient agriculture are quite able and willing to criticize production methods that cause soil loss or water pollution. In their view, such things often happen because the producers have not taken the cost of soil loss or water pollution into account. These negative impacts are, in the jargon of economics, externalities: costs that are external to the cost accounting that farmers do when they decide whether or not growing a crop will be profitable. Lots of firms in the industrial economy impose costs on others or on future generations. Chemical companies may pollute and energy companies may waste resources. In either case, they do so because they are not the ones who have to bear those costs. In a nutshell, modern industries should be efficient, because that is what allows them to sell their products for the lowest possible price (and selling them for a lower price allows more people to enjoy these products). But they are not being truly efficient if they achieve low prices by simply ducking some of the actual costs that their methods of production involve. It is only when all costs are internalized—included within the calculation—that efficiencies are truly socially beneficial. The notion that costs imposed on other parties or deferred to the future opens the field for a discussion of industrial agriculture’s impact on the environment. Production strategies that pollute groundwater, that defer the cost of declining fertility to future generations or that destroy habitat for non-humans can be fashioned as involving externalities. The move into environmental impact creates new philosophical questions and complicates the burden of proof. For example, does it make sense to regard the pain and suffering of non-human animals as an external cost? These questions are important, and they are taken up in other chapters. In the present context it is worth noticing how the criteria for efficient agriculture can be developed to accommodate a wide range of moral issues. What is most noteworthy is that this notion of efficiency is able to rationalize farm bankruptcy and exit from farming as a necessary condition for achieving the social benefits we experience when the price of food goes down. The suggestion that harms born by those who lose their farming businesses are offset by benefits to consumers brings this feature of the utilitarian philosophy to the forefront. One of the classic criticisms of utilitarianism takes up the question of whether costs born by one party can legitimately be offset by benefits to others. Moral philosophers of a Kantian persuasion argue that the assumption that they can appears to treat the harm suffered by losers as a kind of collateral damage. Harming those who lose is rationalized as a means to the achievement of a larger social good, and this violates Kant’s master principle of morality, the Categorical Imperative. On this view, the moral rationale for insisting that costs be internalized has less to do with achieving true efficiencies and more to do with a set of side constraints that specify the ground rules for all efficiency maximizing calculations. One must never act in a manner that treats other people solely as a means for achieving one’s end. One must respect them as autonomous agents, which means that one must not compromise their basic freedom to pursue life plans that are themselves consistent with a principle of equal liberty for all. This way of rationalizing the treadmill effects that farmers suffer from greater production efficiencies by the off-setting improvements in food security for those who must purchase what they eat thus exemplifies the great philosophical debate between outcome-oriented consequentialists and rights theorists. It also creates an opening into rich and ongoing philosophical debates about the nature of property rights and economic risk taking. The summary just given here is at best the first move in a philosophical debate between utilitarians and Kantians, who might continue to challenge one another on more finely tuned questions. For example, one might question whether extending the Categorical Imperative to cover economic losses is always justified even from a Kantian perspective. My point is that viewing this problem simply as an instance of a deep philosophical quandary misses the way that facts on the ground matter morally. The fact that it is agricultural production and food consumption that are at stake really matters, as does the fact that half of the poorest people in the world currently achieve their food capabilities through a direct-production entitlement. Things might well stand differently for many other tensions between producers and consumers that arise in an industrial economy. Indeed, one can find support for the idea that the case at hand is not like that of other exchange relations among authors who have written on food entitlements from a Kantian perspective. Henry Shue’s work on basic rights, for example, provides an argument for regarding food entitlements as having priority over many other political liberties and social entitlements. Shue argues that it would never be appropriate to expend social resources to secure even such liberties as freedom of speech or assembly until the right to food had been secured for all. Shue, Op. cit. Chapter OneHis reasoning relies on the idea that a right to free speech is not meaningful to someone who does not have enough to eat, so subsistence rights take priority over a great deal of other rights that are discussed in political theory. A number of similar arguments can be adduced for supporting a general right to food as recognized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But this rights-oriented pattern of thinking provides far more support for the moral significance of a food consumer’s side of the tension between the rural and urban poor than for producers. Smallholder’s who lose farms to bankruptcy are entitled to eat, but it is difficult to see how the right to food also entitles them to a price that allows them to recoup the costs of food production and continue to subsist as farmers. To put it another way, an argument for the right to food protects the rights of smallholders as persons, but it does nothing to suggest that they have any moral standing at all as farmers. Why Farmers Matter Morally One could, with logical consistency, end the matter here by concluding that smallholders qua farmers deserve no special consideration, though qua poor or hungry, they do. One can start the process of building an alternative analysis by noting that this is at least an ironic position. People who have the means to feed themselves and others are deprived of any opportunity to deploy those means because the economic return on farming is insufficient to lift them from poverty. We then accept they can be placed in total receivership, dependent on gifts and grants in order to eat food that they might well have produced themselves, and we consider this to be a morally just result! As noted already, the traditional utilitarian position has been able to embrace this irony by emphasizing the compensating social benefits of more efficient agricultural production. A more sensitive ethics of poverty and hunger could begin by recognizing two key points. First, less than half of the poor and hungry are visible in the streets, rioting and clamoring when global food prices rise. The majority are in the countryside where cameras seldom reach them, and depending on how they are situated with respect to complex markets for cotton, wool, coffee and tea, may actually be enjoying a modest boost to the security of their capabilities and well-being. Poverty is not a homogenous phenomenon. I am not suggesting that we should be deaf to the cries of the urban poor. I am only saying that they are at best half of the problem. Like many economists who have addressed hunger on the ground, Sen’s work is quite sensitive to the different ways that capabilities manifest themselves, and also conflict. Yet overgeneralizing the capabilities approach occludes our understanding of poverty, rather than enlightening it. Second, the suggestion that hunger is “not a matter of production, but of distribution” can easily convey a result that is very damaging to the rural poor. The worst case occurs when well-meaning people in the industrial world presume that “distribution problem” means simply that they should redistribute some of their own food surplus. Although there are a few occasions on which this is exactly what they should do, it is more typical for such efforts to harm the rural poor. The more complicated case involves the nature of development itself. Do we want a global agriculture that looks like that of the United States, where less than 2% of the population are farmers? Even if we do conclude in favor of growing the entire world out of this problem by ending smallholder production, it is ethically crucial to ask what means are justifiable in trying to reach that objective. At present some 80% of the population of many African nations is involved in agriculture. While the percentage of farmers is lower in Asia and Latin America, it does not begin to approach single digit proportions of Europe and North America. Bankruptcy, abandonment of farming and migration to urban areas will cause untold suffering among those affected, but there are additional moral costs that may be even more important. To undertake a pattern of growth that replaces smallholder production with industrial farming over the course of even two or three generations will annihilate much of the capability for agency that these people currently have. While food security is one capability noted in Sen’s approach, agency is another. It refers broadly to a person’s ability to have some direction and control over their life. Agency is not an abstract thing, but a real capability to take some measure of control for one’s own fate. Relative to wage workers who depend on someone else to provide opportunities for employment, farming represents a form of agency that is currently within reach for many of the world’s poorest people. See David Crocker and Ingrid Robeyns, “Capability and Agency,” In Amartya Sen, C. Morris, Ed. New York: 2010, Cambridge University Press, pp. 60-90. To recognize agency as a capability that articulates the moral imperatives of development requires that we understand poor people as more than poor. It requires acknowledgement that even as extremely poor, many people have skills that allow them to achieve a significant measure of self-help and self-reliance on day to day basis. It means that we recognize them, in short, as farmers. A process of development that undercuts the capabilities of present day rural people cannot be ethically justified by the long-term result, nor would it satisfy to come along after their lives and livelihoods have been thrown into turmoil by programs of agricultural intensification and then offer to secure their right to food by giving them a dollar or a loaf of bread. A more nuanced approach to global poverty would be more sensitive to that portion of the global poor whose capabilities are currently grounded in the production of basic humans needs. Although one should never underestimate the extent of their poverty, it is exceedingly misleading to portray them as utterly abject. Marcel Mazoyer and Lawrence Roudart provide a detailed 500 page argument for the conclusion that globally, poor smallholders need two things. First, they need to increase the basic biological productivity of their farming operations. The way they might do this will vary enormously from place to place. In some cases, fairly modest improvements in tools and infrastructure would make enormous differences, while in other places extensive reforms in land tenure or basic infrastructure would be needed before anything else. Technical improvements to agriculture in regions where smallholders lack effective tenure only increase the value of formerly marginal land. And this, in turn, is an invitation for interlopers to displace politically weak smallholders. There are also many “in between” cases where significant improvements in cropping systems, plant varieties and animal breeds, or composting and water management can be abetted with appropriate agricultural research and extension. Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart. A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to The Current Crisis. J. Membrez, Tr. London: 2006, Earthscan,. Second, Mazoyer and Roudart argue that there needs to be a gradual rise in the prices that farmers receive for what they produce, relative to their cost of production. This will be the case even for smallholders who currently consume a fair amount of their own production. It matters that this rise be steady and gradual. The fluctuations in world food prices that are exhibited in the data of the last decade create a boom and bust cycle that favors very-well capitalized producers who can weather the busts in order to enjoy windfalls during the boom periods. Boom and bust is also fine for developed world producers who will receive government assistance when prices fall. The smallholding farmers that are my focus do not produce enough in boom times to tide them over the busts, and the subsidies to developed world producers mean that they benefit the least, even when times are good. This second tenet of Mazoyer and Roudart’s argument is often misunderstood by observers of globalization who have not grasped the fundamental problem of food ethics. Agricultural economists who focus on agricultural trade have railed against developed world subsidies for decades. Peter Timmer’s book Getting Prices Right made a somewhat more sophisticated version of the general argument I have been making here in 1986. C. Peter Timmer, Getting Prices Right: The Scope and Limits of Agricultural Price Policy. Ithaca, NY: 1986, Cornell University Press. Unfortunately, “getting prices right” became a mantra of the free-trading mania that undergirded the so-called “Washington consensus” on trade and globalization. The belief that government was evil and markets saintly led to World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies that had devastating effects throughout the developing world. The more nuanced argument for liberalizing agricultural trade was never intended to imply that poor farmers would be rich if it weren’t for government interference, nor was it a unilateral argument for trade liberalization. As the first tenet of Mazoyer and Roudart’s argument makes clear, there is a crucial role for non-profit and public sector involvement in agricultural development. But the point of the second tenet is that these technical improvements come to naught when smallholding farmers’ efforts are undercut by the effect of subsidy to their already-wealthier competitors. The argument is thus not just a recapitulation of free-trade arguments that have proven to be singularly ill-advised in other quarters. The point that is most pertinent to food ethics is this: A gradual rise in the return that farmers receive for their efforts most likely translates into a gradual rise in the price that consumers pay for food. For poor people who rely on income and the opportunity to purchase meals or raw commodities in markets or grocery stores, this translates into a weakening of their food entitlement and a potential decline in their overall quality of life. And for reasons that have already been rehearsed above, this is at least an unfortunate turn of events and most probably represents a morally unacceptable result. Thus the prescription Mazoyer and Roudart advocate is no solution to the fundamental problem of food ethics. In fact, I see no way to adjudicate the tension between the capabilities of rural smallholders and poor urban food purchasers on strictly philosophical grounds. There is no getting out of this problem through the machinations of moral theory. The only morally acceptable results reside in the domain of both/and, and such results require a policy response that undoes the either/or. This may be all that a philosopher can say about this problem. Perhaps it is time to call in the economists and bid them continue to experiment with combinations of subsidy and food grants to ensure that smallholders and the urban poor alike achieve their capabilities in the domain of food. My sense is that this is a problem that will require eternal vigilance. A trend that seems to be benefiting poor farmers may be accompanied by disproportional increases in the price of food for urban consumers. If there is no adjustment either in markets or grants that ensure their buying power, people who depend upon an exchange entitlement to meet their food needs will be suffering mightily. And as food economists are painfully aware, farmers who sell at harvest may well be buyers during the fallow season, and that is exactly when the prices are likely to be up. Effective responses—whether through charity or through public policy—will demand close monitoring of facts on the ground. But before handing the ethical tensions between the production and consumption of food over to practitioners of the dismal science entirely, it may be worthwhile to say a few more words on behalf of poor farmers.