Law School Graduates Examine Global Hunger Issues in New Book

Media Contact: Public Affairs, 212-854-2650 or [email protected]

 

New York, Dec. 7, 2011—Several recent Columbia Law School graduates have published papers in a new book analyzing the impact of globalization on hunger and the right to food throughout the world. The graduates originally wrote the papers when they were students in a 2008 Law School seminar on globalization and human rights, taught by Olivier De Schutter, the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law and the U.N.’s special rapporteur on right to food.      

 

De Schutter selected papers written by students in his 2008 seminar Globalization and Human Rights for inclusion in Accounting for Hunger: The Right to Food in the Era of Globalisation (Hart Publishing, Oxford: 2011). De Schutter co-edited the book with Kaitlin Y. Cordes ’08, a former student who participated in the seminar. Cordes now works as a human rights lawyer, and the former researcher with Human Rights Watch in Africa is currently writing a book about labor in the global food system.

 

De Schutter, who assumed his U.N. post in 2008 and has traveled widely in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America advocating for access to adequate food as a fundamental human right, said he was pleased that the students agreed to put in the effort required to improve and update for publication the papers they penned three years ago. “This is a rather unique experience which illustrates how seminars can sometimes be an opportunity for students to move towards their first publication,” he said.

 

The authors highlight difficulties plaguing the global food system while assessing possible solutions to these problems that national governments and international organizations could consider. Hunger, De Schutter and Cordes note in the book’s introduction, is not a natural disaster. “It is a legacy of choices made in the past,” they write. “It stems from a series of decisions that, in retrospect, appear shortsighted, and were based on a wrong diagnosis of the causes of hunger, leading to incorrect prescriptions to remedy it.”

 

In part one of the book, the authors address the underlying causes of the imbalance in global food systems that have left nearly 1 billion people hungry in 2011—an increase of almost 70 million compared with 2008, according to U.N. data. Cordes examines how agribusiness transnational corporations have impacted the right to food, including the enormous influence some companies have on water-allocation and land-use policies, as well as their ability to dictate which foods are cultivated in specific geographic locations.

 

Cordes’ chapter is followed by that of Margaret Cowan Schmidt ’08, an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in Washington, D.C., analyzing how global retailers have marginalized small farmers. Part one of the book concludes with a chapter by Ann Sofie Cloots ’08 LL.M., who works as an associate with Cleary Gottlieb in Brussels, Belgium. Her essay addresses the competition for arable land between the biofuel and food industries.

 

In part two of the book, the authors explore how international trade and aid have exacerbated global hunger through misguided and counterproductive policies. De Schutter examines the role of international trade in agriculture. Jennifer L. Mersing ’08, an associate at White & Case in Washington, D.C., considers how market-distorting agricultural subsidies in wealthy countries could be eliminated without aggravating hunger in developing countries. These subsidies, she argues, allow developing countries to buy cheap food imports but can ultimately hinder domestic agriculture by undercutting local farmers. In subsequent chapters, Boyan Konstantinov ’08 LL.M. looks at the viability of invoking the right to food in WTO dispute settlement matters, while Loreto Ferrer Moreu, a Columbia graduate who participated in the seminar, analyzes how food aid programs are implemented and the problems that can emerge with these aid programs in their various manifestations.

 

“[Each of the chapters] share[s] a common conviction that the current organisation of the food system is unsustainable, and that it is in urgent need of repair,” De Schutter and Cordes write in the book’s introduction. “Their effort is a contribution towards that goal.”

 

# # #

Columbia Law School, founded in 1858, stands at the forefront of legal education and of the law in a global society. Columbia Law School combines traditional strengths in corporate law and financial regulation, international and comparative law, property, contracts, constitutional law, and administrative law with pioneering work in intellectual property, digital technology, tax law and policy, national security, sexuality and gender, and environmental law.

Visit us: www.law.columbia.edu/

Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/columbialaw