7 America as a Great Decision in 1981

Zerowork, 1977

In the last few years a growing number of radical social critics have been studying and writing on the world food crisis that emerged in 1972. They have pored over this period of grain deals and high prices in the West and of starvation in Africa and Asia, trying to understand how the food surpluses of the 1960's turned into the scarcity of the 1970's. Their aim has been to identify causes and locate responsibility so that political pressure can be brought to bear in the proper place to achieve lasting food security. Despite the fact that this work has produced much useful information and has dispelled a number of dangerous myths, it has reached an impasse in failing to identify adequately the sources of the crisis and consequently in pointing at times in directions of struggle that are now counterproductive. We can move beyond this impasse, but we must first clearly identify its source and isolate it from the concrete progress which has been achieved.

Penn State Journal of Law International Affairs, 2015

Issues of Self- …, 1991

Canadian Journal of History, 2018

East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 2016

ver the past two decades, important studies of the famines in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China have transformed our understanding of these events and laid the groundwork for the first attempts at comparative analysis. 1 Nevertheless, the great twentiethcentury famines caused by state policies remain relatively little studied. We still lack a systematic comparison of their features, at least in part because of the difficulty in conceptualizing the possibility of man-made famine in modern times and because a topic like "Communism and Hunger" may seem to be a contradiction in terms. Yet even a simple list of the past century's major famines suggests that the topic is badly in need of attention. In fact, with the exception of the 1943 Bengal famine with its approximately two million victims, all of the other major famines of the twentieth century are directly connected to socialist "experiments":

3 Penn. State Journal of Law and Int'L Affairs 56-83 (2015)

The article draws upon the insights of Yale philosopher Thomas Pogge to suggest a way that we might think about the structural inequities in the global economic order that produce food insecurity. The article argues that chronic undernourishment is not a function of food scarcity, bad weather, or simply bad luck. Rather, it is a function of international political and economic arrangements that systematically benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor. The article concludes with several legal and policy reforms that the United States and the European Union can adopt to reduce the burdens that our societies place on the world's most vulnerable populations.

Ab imperio, 2018

A large number of hungry people in a global economy based on industrialization, privatization, and free trade raises the question of the ethical dimensions of the worsening food crisis in the world in general and in developing countries in particular. Who bears the moral responsibility for the tragic situation in Africa and Asia where people are starving due to poverty? Who is morally responsible for their poverty - the hungry people themselves? the international community? any particular agency or institution? In the context of Article 3 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which states that "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security" (UNDHR, 1948), the ethical question of poverty and hunger becomes a major human concern that should be discussed publicly and resolved by whatever means available. But how can the poor and hungry realize their right to life and security if their very survival is at stake? This paper maintains that responsibility for global poverty at present lies in recent neo-liberal trends in the global economy and with those individuals and organizations who, though small in number, have acquired a disproportionate share of the world's assets and financial resources. That being the case, it is suggested that our monetary and financial policies are in need of drastic changes with regard to global responsibility towards the hungry and impoverished.