Contested Loyalty: Human Rights, Human Needs, and the Global Food Politics, 1978-1980

Abstract

My study will explore how the notion of human rights as a global phenomenon developed and responded to international food politics in the context of the global Cold War. The research will show how the rise of human rights in global food problems resulted from a balance between the state and the market and from structural adjustments in the developing world. The transition of international politics occurred in the 1960s and 1970s—preferably called “the long 1970s”—when the individual and neo-liberal value policies replaced previous collective-oriented socioeconomic interests and prolonged welfare policies. Later, the transformation effectively established strong influence across the national boundaries for different people who might have respective imagination for issues on economic development, food supply, poverty, and resources. Human rights were powerful and, more importantly, pervasive when they had subsumed previously disregarded issues and transformed their ideas in the global society. I will present an analysis of the newly developed idea of human rights and its role in international food affairs, particularly related to the Carter administration’s Commission on World Hunger (1978–1980). This commission, which was led by Sol Linowitz and Terrence A. Rogers, revealed how the notions of social and economic rights in the 1970s developed in terms of “basic needs” or “human needs,” which emerged in the global development area as a counter narrative of the decolonization of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The concept of fulfilling minimum levels of nutrition, health, and education as rights of individuals substituted as a project of the welfare state, enormously changed the dialogue of development thinking, especially in terms of food and nutrition in developing countries. Within this context, the Commission issued its report with massive findings, showing an intention to integrate food and hunger issues with market ideology such as distribution systems and individual priorities. Through exploring the Commission on World Hunger and related actions in global food affairs, I will explain the role that human rights played in the overall political transformation during the 1970s and beyond.