Science, ethics, and food : papers and proceedings of a colloquium organized by the Smithsonian Institution

The proceedings, presented here, consist of four papers, followed by summaries of discussions by colloquium participants. The initial paper, an ethical reflection on the human right to food, stresses the communitarian context of individual rights and espouses the criteria enunciated by Bread for the World, a Washington-based advocacy group, for judging the acceptability of U.S. agricultural policies relative to protecting and promoting the right to food. The second paper stresses two prerequisites for developing a sustainable system of agricultural production in Africa - a revolution in health care, and the development of low-input, low-cost solutions that incorporate rather than abandon traditional practices and resources. The third paper probes the extent to which both chronic hunger and transient famines stem from declines in "food entitlements" (command over one"s food supply) caused by the dysfunctioning of the various links in the economic food chain (i.e., production, distribution, and utilization). The final paper envisions widespread hunger as not simply a technical or a political problem, but as an ethical failure to commit the resources needed to redistribute food from surplus countries to food-deficit countries. The strategic actions needed to reform this situation are outlined.