Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says the following: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
In my opinion, the prominent challenge that lies before leaders as we move into the future will be ensuring the access to this right in particular. Though people often assume that resources are the only factors needed to safeguard this right—and they truly are the essential component—the policies supported by leaders might also dramatically affect people’s ability to gain this security. If nothing more, the quality of supported policies clearly determine the amount of resources needed to sustain this right.
One aspect of this very broad right is food security. If people are unable to eat, then their “right to a standard of living adequate for health and wellbeing” is impeded upon. Though leaders can clearly not prevent a famine caused by drought, they can assuage the effects of the inevitable. This is of course done through the agricultural policies that leaders support and proselytize to developing world governments (countries where food shortages lead to starvation). Policies are not innocuous creatures, their impact can be so massive in scope that hundreds of thousands of lives can be saved or ruined as a result of them. For instance, the recommended policies for food production have changed dramatically since the 1980’s, when the IDF and the World Bank recommended to the developing world to reduce regulation and allow the market to play a greater role in shaping agricultural policy.
This recommendation led to the governments in the developing world to sell off food reserves and eliminate their investments and subsidies in agriculture. The result has been primarily positive until recently. Agriculture has been more efficient in the last thirty years, but we are finding that this increase in efficiency might be at the great cost of security. With governments no longer subsidizing their own farmers or keeping food reserves, certain regions have taken on the global burden of production for specific products like rice. When global food prices spiked last spring, chaos and suffering resulted in the developing world due to massive shortages of the exports people relied upon so heavily. And now, further instability—this time in the form of the food prices decreasing—has caused additional problems and fears in West Africa.
Of course, the reason for the increased food prices was unforeseeable at the time—the demand for bio-fuels massively increased demand for corn and other staple products—but should the existence of a crisis ever be unforeseeable? Though we will hopefully learn from our past blunders, there will always come to exist a future one. Whether it be man-made or nature made, we will again run into problems with a system so dependent on the good of so few. And when these problems again resurface, we will wonder again if our efficient system was worth the suffering of so many.
For futher readings on this topic in the news, please refer to the following links:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/11/24/081124ta_talk_surowiecki
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2008/12/22/081222mama_mail1
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/world/africa/26senegal.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=west%20africa&st=cse
