What’s Wrong with Rights?

(Originally published in Satya Magazine, October 2005)

Let them eat words. That seemed to me to be the theme of the 2002 UN World Food Summit and parallel NGO Forum for Food Sovereignty. At the Summit, national delegations cut back-room deals to boost corporate agribusiness, all the while applauding themselves for recognizing food as a human right. At the Forum, activists spent so much time pontificating about the right to food that plans to take direct action against hunger fell by the wayside.

Sitting in a Roman auditorium as well-fed activists opined that what starving people need most is more rights, I felt more than a little mystified. It was as if these otherwise rational people believed that, in the words of food policy analyst Devinder Sharma, “the ‘right to food’ is a magical stick that makes the Supermen of the political hierarchy deliver food to the hungry.”

In fact, the “right to food” confers no such fantastic powers on its holders. That right is recognized by the constitutions of the majority of countries where people die daily of hunger and malnutrition. In 2001, India’s Supreme Court affirmed the constitutional right to food. Years later, children still starve as surplus food rots in government storehouses.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., men no longer have the right to beat their wives but battery remains the number one reason women seek emergency medical care. Worldwide, every person now has the legal right not to be enslaved, but more people are held in bondage than ever before.

Clearly, something’s wrong with “rights.”

Trickle-Down Environmentalism versus Ecosystemic Empathy

Trickle-Down Environmentalism versus Ecosystemic Empathy
A Meditation on the Occasion of the World Social Forum
28 & 29 January 2003
Porto Alegre, Brazil

pattrice jones

“No, the waters and the mountains do not belong to the mens. But how do we tell that to Bush and Blair?”

I’m at the Fórum Social Mundial and have no answer for the Brazilian musician who earnestly poses that question after admiring the Alice Walker quotation on my t-shirt. How indeed, I wonder, when even the people who are talking back to Bush and Blair do not understand that basic fact.

These days, most progressive environmentalists endorse what might be called the ‘trickle-down’ theory of environmental justice. Just as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have asserted that the self-interested choices of rich people ultimately help all of the other economic classes, today’s global justice advocates assert that the self-interested choices of “the people” will ultimately help all of the other species on earth. Both theories amount to little more than wishful thinking.