2011 Dodge Lecture - Food Systems, Famines & Human Rights 9/27/2011 - Olivier De Schutter

De Schutter spoke at the Bloomberg School, hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. The talk was the Center's 11th Annual Dodge Lecture, titled "Food Systems, Famines and Human Rights." In his presentation, he reframed hunger by redefining the hungry and by identifying the roots of hunger, which are more often than not political, (as opposed to technical). Echoing economist and Nobelist Amartya Sen, De Schutter insisted that hunger—and famine—is not a crisis of productivity but a crisis of power. "We've produced hunger over the years by depriving peasants of their ability to produce," he said. "Our needs will not be met by increasing production."