Abstract :
Abstract — For the last 46 years, the countries of the world
have tried to reduce the number of chronically hungry
people. Despite all the efforts, the numbers have barely
budged from the over 850 million people who were
chronically hungry in 1974 until the 2007-2009 and 2010-
2011 food price crises, when the numbers jumped to well
over 1 billion. The blame for this situation has variously been
put on bad governance, the lack of adequate market reforms,
the market reforms that were imposed on developing nations,
and globalization. Food, like other products, is allocated
using the market system. One likely place to look for the
reason why international institutions have been unable to
eliminate hunger, while operating within the market system,
is the assumption of non-coerciveness. This assumption
asserts that the market transaction—in this case for food—is
freely entered into by both the buyer and the seller and that
either can refuse to enter into the transaction if it is not to
their advantage. After looking at the traditional
understanding of coerciveness in economics, this paper
examines the argument of Frank Knight and agrees that noncoerciveness
is an issue of ethics. Using the work of Michael
Keeley, this paper concludes that broadly accepted human
rights is the best possible criterion for determining whether
or not the aggregate food market is non-coercive. If the
human right to food is abridged, then it can be said that the
aggregate food market is coercive and the assumption of noncoerciveness
for the aggregate food market does not hold.
With 1.02 billion people chronically hungry, 1/6 of humanity,
it is clear that the right to food has been abridged and the
aggregate food market is coercive. This conclusion has
serious implications for economic and trade policy and the
current world hunger crisis.
