Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
ment of an Oice of Commissioners harged with monitoring India's compliance
with the right to food. Then, at the 2009 national election, the ruling Congress Party
announced an intention to legislate for the right to food, thereby supplementing the
PDS with a legally-binding right for citizens to be provisioned with a determined
minimum level of food staples. At the time of writing, the final form of this legis-
lation is yet to be determined. However, whatever shape it eventually takes, it will
mark a significant shift in Indian food policy.
To summarize this section, in post-1990s international forums, the prevailing
view of food security is centred on the concepts of entitlements and rights. The enti-
tlement approah, lowing from the work of Amartya Sen, has augmented traditional
supply-side (production and stoks) perspectives on food security by foregrounding
the political structures that shape food access. Greater formal recognition of indi-
viduals' rights to food within international and national law has complemented this
focus.
Disconnections between food security and the multilateral
regulation of international trade
As noted in the introduction to this hapter, there is an ongoing failure of the global
community to generate a framework whih ensures the complementarity of interna-
tional trade and food security policies. The two previous sections have set out the
basic reasons for this disconnection. The review of the WTO revealed it as adminis-
tering a flawed set of global trade rules for food (the Agreement on Agriculture), and
also possessing an agenda to replace this Agreement with one that further liberalizes
world food trade. From the WTO's perspective, these activities intersect with food
security debates in terms of supply-side processes. State-imposed distortions to in-
ternational food markets (via tariffs, subsidies and so on) are perceived as efficiency-
impairing, and so their removal would assist food production at lower resource costs
and, therefore, would potentially lower the price of food to consumers. At the same
time, the section above - reviewing food security - highlighted the recent shift in
focus among international organizations in this ield from supply-side approahes to
entitlements-based and rights-based approahes.
The appropriate metaphor here might be the 'cone of silence'. What seems to be
occurring at the international level is a consideration of the relationship between
food security and trade in separate discussions, premised on separate sets of assump-
tions, with all-too-infrequent arenas for cross-fertilization. We assess this issue by
