1NC OFF

I negate and value Just Governance.

Human rights are necessary institutional structures that both
respect the fundamental dignity of persons and secure basic
equality on social structure theyre a prerequisite to acting as just
agents. Forst in 11:
Rainier Forst, Professor of Political Theory at the Department for Social Sciences at Goethe-University,
Transnational Justice, Democracy and Human Rights, January 2011
Let me now locate human rights both normatively and institutionally within this framework I set out.

The normative

basis for a conception of human rights is the moral right of every

moral person to be respected as someone who has a right to
justification,

such that any action or norm that claims to be morally justified, as well as any social order or institution

that claims to be legitimate, has to be justifiable in an adequate way. This means that moral actions or norms have to be justifiable
with moral reasons in moral discourse (free from coercion or delusion) and that political or social structures or laws have to be based
on or (at least) to be compatible with moral norms applicable to them and must be justifiable within appropriate legal and political

The criteria of justification for moral norms are

those of reciprocity and generality in a strict sense, for, recursively
speaking, such norms claim to be strictly mutually and universally
binding. The criteria for legal norms are those of reciprocity and
generality within political structures of justification, thereby
presupposing the possibility of free and equal participation and
adherence to proper procedures of deliberation and decision
making. Hence, the notion of dignity that lies at the heart of the
conception of human rights I propose is not a metaphysical or ethical one, combined with a
doctrine about the good life. Rather, dignity means that a person is to be respected as
someone who is worthy of being given adequate reasons for actions
or norms that affect him or her in a relevant way. And this kind of
structures (and practices) of justification.

respect requires us to regard others as autonomous sources of

normative claims within a justificatory practice . Each person is an authority in the
space of reasons, so to speak.34 Dignity is thus a relational term; its concrete implications can be ascertained only by way of
discursive justification.35 With respect to human rights we need to distinguish between what I call moral constructivism and
political constructivism (using Rawlss terminology in a different way).36 Both are forms of discursive constructivism, in contrast to
the idea of deriving rights from the basic right to justification. Every content of human rights is to be justified discursively, yet one
needs to be aware of the twofold nature of human rights as general moral rights and as concrete legal rights. At the moral level, the
construction leads to a list of those basic rights that persons who respect one another as equals with rights to justification cannot
properly deny each other. That kind of list is to some extent general and subject to further elaboration, but it expresses basic
standards of respect that must be secured in the form of rights, given that this form has proven historically to be the appropriate

It is important to emphasize that the

basic right to justification is not only conducive to rights that secure
the political standing of persons as citizens in a narrow sense; it is
also the basis of rights to bodily security, personal liberties, and
secure equal social status. To put it in negative terms, human rights are those
one for safeguarding individual claims and entitlements.

rights which cannot be rejected with reciprocally and generally

valid reasons among free and equal persons , 37 and that requirement
opens up the normative space for claims that secure a persons

status as an agent with equal social standing. That implies rights against the violation of
physical or psychological integrity as well as rights against social discrimination. The right to justification is
not just a right to political justification; rather, it is a right to be
respected as an independent social agent who at the same time
codetermines the social structure of which he or she is a part. Using the
right to justification as an anchor does not involve any narrowing of focus of human rights, as one may fear, for there are two ways
to substantiate human rights on that basis, first by spelling out the requirements - and powers, so to speak - attached to the status
of a socially and politically recognized agent of justification, and, second, via a consideration of the aspects of human life to be
protected or enabled by basic rights that no person can morally deny to equal others with good reasons. At this point, claims about
the importance of certain goods and about basic social interests reappear, though not as ethical values or interests from which
certain rights claims can be derived, but as discursively justifiable claims to reciprocal respect between persons who recognize one
another as autonomous and, at the same time, vulnerable and needy social beings. Human rights materialize and protect that
status, and it is by way of procedures of reciprocal and general justification that claims based on human interests can be
transformed into rights claims. Hence, the political point of the right to justification is especially important, for there is a particular

They are moral rights of a specific

kind which are directed to a political-legal authority and have to be
secured in a legally binding form; hence they are an important part
of what I call fundamental justice. As I said, a fundamentally just basic political and legal
institutional implication of this moral argument for human rights.

structure is a basic structure of justification in which the members have the means to deliberate and decide in common about the
social institutions that apply to them, and about the interpretation and concrete realization of their rights.

Human

rights in that sense have a reflexive nature: they are basic rights to
be part of the processes in which the basic rights of citizens are
given concrete and legally binding shape. They are rights of a
higher order, namely rights not to be subjected to social institutions
or legal norms that cannot be properly justified towards those
affected, and rights to be equal participants in such procedures of
justification. Political constructivism thus has moral constructivism as its core, for there can be no legitimate

interpretation and institutionalization of basic human rights that violates their moral core as explained above, but it is also an
autonomous discursive practice of citizens who are engaged in establishing a legitimate social and political order. There are certain
core rights presupposed by that political construction, hence the idea of fundamental justice in a basic structure of justification,
but an essential point of the construction is to establish a contextualized structure of rights and institutions worthy of acceptance by
a political community.38 The ultimate aim, ideally speaking, is maximal justice, i.e. a fully justified basic structure. It must be
added that human rights are more wedded to fundamental than to maximal justice; the task of establishing a justified - and just basic structure is more comprehensive and complex than that of establishing an acceptable and legitimate structure of basic human
rights. Human rights are an essential part of the full picture of social and political justice, but they are only a part. As the realm of
moral rights is larger than that of moral human rights, so is the realm of political and social justice larger than that of legally
established human rights.39 It is important to stress in this connection that political constructivism is not simply a realization of
fixed moral human rights; rather, it is a discursive exercise within proper procedures of justification. Human rights, to sum up, are
those basic rights without which the status of a being with a right to justification is not socially secured. They entail the essential
personal, political, and social rights necessary to establish what I call a social structure of justification, and second, they entail those
substantive rights which no one within such a structure of justification can reasonably deny to others without violating the demands
of reciprocity and generality. Recursively speaking, and that is my central idea, the point of human rights is that persons have the
basic right to live in a society where they themselves are the social and political agents who determine which rights they can claim
and have to recognize. This is the autonomous agency highlighted by human rights, today as well as in earlier times.40 To put the
double, reflexive character of human rights in a nutshell: they are rights that protect against an array of social harms the infliction of
which no one can justify to others who are moral and social equals, thus presupposing the basic right to justification - but above
that, they protect against the harm of not being part of the political determination of what counts as such harms community.38

Thus, the standard is protecting human rights.

I contend that food security initiatives lead to increased rights
violations and violate the dignity of persons.
Food security policies encourage massive rights violations in the
global South local farmers have empirically had their land forcibly
taken and are exploited as forced laborers on their own land.
Schiffman in 13:
Richard Schiffman, environmental journalist whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, NPR,
the New York Times, Reuters, Hunger, Food Security, and the African Land Grab, Ethics and
International Affairs, September 13, 2013

To prevent the trouble that many see looming on the horizon,

several countries are buying up vast tracts in other states to feed
their own burgeoning populations. Both India and China which face
the prospect of severe water shortages in the years aheadare
purchasing prime agricultural land in already food-stressed areas in
Africa to ensure their own future food security.
Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Egypt, and Japan, as well as multinational

agribusinesses and investment banks, are also scrambling to increase their foreign land holdings. The Telegraph reports that the World Bank funded over $8 billion dollars of these land deals over the past decade. 20 Food companies
in the North have always purchased land in the global South to produce export crops. What is different today is the unprecedented scale of these purchases and the kinds of crops that are being grown. In the past, land was acquired
to grow specialty tropical products, such as cocoa, coffee, spices, bananas, oranges, and other exotic fruits. Now, agricultural land is increasingly sought for growing basic staples, such as rice, wheat, and soy, which many countries
fear they will soon be unable to produce enough of. No one is sure exactly how extensive the ongoing land transfers have been. The small nonprofit group GRAIN, which has been attempting to track these deals, estimates that on
average some 10 million hectares of land have been purchased by foreign companies every year since 2007, but this figure may actually be a conservative one, since a lot of these transactions have been completed with deliberate

Transferring agricultural capacity from desperately poor

countries to wealthier ones is an activity that few states,
understandably, are prepared to boast about.
secrecy.21

22 These deals are being negotiated across the globefrom Colombia to

Cambodia, from New Guinea to Brazilas well as in many states of the former Soviet Union. But the largest of these purchases are occurring in Africa, which has the greatest percentage of unused arable land, as well as bargain-

African countries also frequently have lax land tenure laws.

The agreements negotiated between African countries and
agribusinesses are reportedly often skewed in the latters favor.
basement prices.

According to

Jun Borras, a Fellow at the Transnational Institute, in many such contracts certain clauses are highly restrictive, meaning that states are locked in to particular agreements over long periods. New laws to protect the environment or
labour rights, for instance, cannot be implemented, as they may be subject to disputes and prohibitive compensation payments.23 In general, African governments have been highly solicitous of multinational agribusiness.
According to GRAIN, many countries have created a database of suitable land for investors, simplified procedures for investors to acquire lands, facilitated the resettlement of populations, and even established a one-window

While the land deals in Africa are being fasttracked, there are few legal mechanisms in place to protect
marginalized rural farmers and pastoralist herders from exploitation
by powerful commercial entities and national governments.
service for investors to cut through the red tape involved in acquiring land.24

Nevertheless, there have

been several attempts by international bodies to draft guidelines for such land purchases. The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a partnership formed last year between the G-8, a number of African governments, and
multinational agricultural companies like Cargill and Monsanto, has proposed a set of voluntary regulations to govern the land sales. More recently, the FAO launched a consultation process that aims to formulate Voluntary
Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Forest, and Fisheries in the Context of Food Security.25 The World Bank put forth its own proposal in 2009, The Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment
(PRAI), which has been endorsed by both the G-8 and the G-20. The FAO-hosted Committee on World Food Security, however, refused to sign off on PRAI, calling for legally binding regulations rather than the loose and voluntary
recommendations favored by agribusiness and many governments. The confusing web of voluntary programs has been challenged by local civil society organizations in Africa, such as Land Net Malawi, which allege that the record of

local residents are rarely consulted before

the contracts are drawn up, and that the terms of the deals are not
publicly disclosed, even to international agencies, which are
deliberately excluded from the process.
compliance for such voluntary programs has not been encouraging.26 They say that

27 The World Bank has complained that, in its effort to investigate the impact of the land deals in

Africa, access to information emerged as much more of a problem than anticipated. Even for data that should not be subject to any restrictions of confidentiality . . . , limited data sharing and gaps and inconsistencies in record

In other countries
such as those where the state retains formal ownership of the land,
as in much of Africathe farm is simply confiscated. There have also
been reports of widespread human rights violations
where
approximately 70,000 indigenous people are being forcibly removed
keeping implied an astonishing lack of awareness of what is happening on the ground.28 In some cases, peasants are paid small sums for their property.

in the Gambella region of Ethiopia,

in the so-called villagization program.29 The confiscated land is being leased to companies like the Indian firm Karuturi Global, which exports palm oil, sugar, rice, and cut flowers. The Ethiopian government claims that the
displaced never possessed formal titles to the land (for plots that they had lived on and used for generations), and has called the region uninhabited and underutilized.30 It has also pledged to provide facilities and job training
for the displaced, and has made assurances that their movement is voluntary.31 In a January 2012 report, Waiting Here for Death: Forced Displacement and Villagization in Ethiopias Gambella Region, Human Rights Watch

relocations by state security forces have been

marked by threats and assaults, and arbitrary arrest for those who
resist the move. People are being moved to areas that often lack
viable farmland, sufficient drinking water, adequate health and
paints a disturbingly different picture. It claims that

32

educational facilities, and even roads. The report also alleges that
the relocation program has already caused endemic hunger and
numerous cases of starvation.

Major foreign donors to Ethiopia include the United Kingdom, the United States, the World Bank, and the European Union. Their

aid is used to fund economic development projects, and also to pay government salaries throughout the countryincluding in regions where the new villages are being constructed, and where the main activity of local governments
is moving people off their land. Human Rights Watch has called on Western states to monitor the situation in order to ensure that they are not inadvertently providing support for Ethiopias forced displacement program. Over the
past decade Ethiopia has approved over 800 foreign-financed agricultural projects.33 The country plans to resettle 1.5 million additional people (nearly 2 percent of its total population) by the end of 2013.34 Land that has not been
sold outright to foreign companies is being leased to them for a yearly feeone as low as $1 a hectare.35 Similar deals are now being struck throughout Africa. China, for instance, has signed a contract with the Democratic Republic
of Congo to grow 2.8 million hectares of palm oil for biofuels.Similarly, the war-ravaged country of Liberia has reportedly sold off nearly a third of its sovereign territory in the last five years. 36 The ProSavana project in the Nacala
Corridor of northern Mozambiquearguably the most ambitious venture of allproposes to lease 14 million hectares (an area the size of Switzerland and Austria combined) to produce crops for export to Japan. 37 Millions have
already been forcibly evicted by the Mozambique authorities.38 While promoters claim that the huge project will take place entirely on abandoned land, others argue that this area is used seasonally by cattle herders and for charcoal
production and subsistence farming. It is also notable that, while the land will be used for massive food exports, nearly half of children under five in Mozambique suffer from chronic malnutrition. 39 Ivory Coast, a small West African
country, has also been pushed by the G-8s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition to offer multinational agribusinesses greater access to its land. In exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in Western financial assistance,
Ivory Coast has agreed to ease its land laws and to take other steps to facilitate private investment in agriculture. To date, some of the largest rice traders in the world, including Frances Groupe Mimran and Louis Dreyfus Group,
Algerias Cevital, Singapores Olam, and Switzerlands Novel Group have purchased an estimated 1 million hectares in Ivory Coast to grow rice for export.40 GRAIN predicts that tens of thousands of small stakeholders will be
displaced from their land in the coming years, and that the countrys thriving domestic market for locally grown rice may be destroyed. Environmentalists point out that when agribusinesses move in, sustainable local farming
practices are often replaced by vast monocultures that deplete local water supplies, foul the environment with agrochemicals, and exhaust soils with petroleum-based fertilizers that replace traditional organic methods for enriching
the land. Export-oriented industrial agriculture is designed to produce the maximum amount of food quickly. Unlike indigenous farmers, international agribusiness companies lack knowledge of local conditions and have little stake in
the long-term viability of the land. For instance, large-scale irrigation on newly acquired tracts may further imperil Africas water supply. A report issued jointly by the groups Polaris and the Oakland Institute entitled Land Grab
Leaves Africa Thirsty, warns that if all the 40 million hectares of land that were acquired on the continent in 2009 come under cultivation, a staggering volume of water would be required for irrigation . . . approximately twice the
volume of water that was used for agriculture in all of Africa in 2005.41 Large-scale irrigation of this sort could have a major effect on already stressed river basins, such as the Niger, Nile, and Omo, on which hundreds of millions of
people depend. Furthermore, water shortages may exacerbate preexisting regional tensions, such as those between Sudan and Egypt, both of which are downstream from arable land fed by the Blue and White Niles. Supporters of
such foreign agricultural projects assert that, in addition to increasing crop yields and the productivity of previously marginal areas, they bring technical know-how, improved infrastructure, tax revenues, and jobs to countries that
desperately need them. For instance, Suma Chakrabarti, President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and Jos Graziano da Silva, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization, have argued that
more foreign investment can fertilize . . . land with money . . . to make life easier for the worlds hungry.42 But this is contested by Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. De Schutter says that those
arguing for the land acquisitions often use humanitarian arguments that cloak their real motivation, which is to secure reliable supplies of food and reduce their own dependence on volatile international commodity markets.

They present humanitarian arguments that this develops marginal

land for the benefit of local communities
[This] shouldnt
surprise us. It has been a constant feature of colonial powers in the
past, and how they presented their civilizing mission in the
territories they occupied and exploited
it is
counterproductive to displace small farmers and make them
plantation laborers on what was once their own land.

, he writes.

.43 De Schutter and others say that

Studies show that peasant farming, which currently

produces at least half of the worlds food supply, canwhen it is done rightbe even more productive than industrial agriculture.44 NGOs such as GRAIN have argued that development aid should therefore be directed toward
improving local seed stocks and promoting sustainable practices, and not toward subsidizing international agribusiness.45 Consequently, Oxfam has pushed for a moratorium on land sales until firm international standards are put in
place that mandate that such deals are negotiated in a transparent manner and with the participation and consent of the affected landowners.46 Time, however, is running out to effectively regulate these lucrative deals. For the
foreseeable future, there seems little hope that the frenetic purchase of land in Africa and across the global South is going to slow down.

That outweighs the aff

1) Timeframe they ignore the long-term effects of their policies
even if there is an increase in security in the short-term, over
the long-term, individuals in developing countries lose their
basic dignity and their land, the basis of future growth.
2) Rights violations outweigh improvements to hunger they
reduce the exploited to a subhuman status and relegate them
to exclusion on a permanent basis, which justifies atrocities
worse than malnutrition.
There is no shortage of food in the world, yet the aff posits food
security policies as a solution to solve countless problems that
makes food crises and poverty inevitable. Angus in 08:
Ian Angus, Capitalism, Agribusiness and the Food Sovereignty Alternative, Center for Research on
Globalization, May 11, 2008
Nowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and
poverty on our planet. Fidel Castro, 1998 When food riots broke out in Haiti last month, the first country to respond was Venezuela. Within days, planes
were on their way from Caracas, carrying 364 tons of badly needed food. The people of Haiti are suffering from the attacks of the empires global
capitalism, Venezuelan president Hugo Chvez said. This calls for genuine and profound solidarity from all of us. It is the least we can do for Haiti.
Venezuelas action is in the finest tradition of human solidarity. When people are hungry, we should do our best to feed them. Venezuelas example should
be applauded and emulated. But aid, however necessary, is only a stopgap. To truly address the problem of world hunger, we must understand and then

The starting point for our analysis must be

this: there is no shortage of food in the world today . Contrary to the 18th century
warnings of Thomas Malthus and his modern followers, study after study shows that global food
production has consistently outstripped population growth, and that
there is more than enough food to feed everyone. According to the United Nations Food and
change the system that causes it. No shortage of food

Agriculture Organization, enough food is produced in the world to provide over 2800 calories a day to everyone substantially more than the minimum
required for good health, and about 18% more calories per person than in the 1960s, despite a significant increase in total population.[1] As the Food First
Institute points out,

abundance, not scarcity, best describes the supply of food

in the world today.[2] Despite that, the most commonly proposed

solution to world hunger is new technology to increase food
production . The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation,
aims to develop more productive and resilient varieties of Africas major food crops to enable Africas small-scale farmers to produce larger, more
diverse and reliable harvests.[3] Similarly, the Manila-based International Rice Research Institute has initiated a public-private partnership to increase
rice production across Asia via the accelerated development and introduction of hybrid rice technologies.[4] And the president of the World Bank

Scientific research is
vitally important to the development of agriculture, but initiatives
that assume in advance that new seeds and chemicals are needed
are neither credible nor truly scientific. The fact that there is
already enough food to feed the world shows that the food crisis is
not a technical problem it is a social and political problem. Rather than
promises to help developing countries gain access to technology and science to boost yields.[5]

asking how to increase production, our first question should be why, when so much food is available, are over 850 million people hungry and

Why do 18,000 children die of hunger every day? Why cant

the global food industry feed the hungry? The profit system The answer can be stated in one
sentence. The global food industry is not organized to feed the hungry; it
malnourished?

is organized to generate profits for corporate agribusiness. The agribusiness

giants are achieving that objective very well indeed. This year, agribusiness profits are soaring above
last years levels, while hungry people from Haiti to Egypt to
Senegal were taking to the streets to protest rising food prices. These
figures are for just three months at the beginning of 2008.[6] Grain Trading Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Gross profit: $1.15 billion, up 55% from last
year Cargill: Net earnings: $1.03 billion, up 86% Bunge. Consolidated gross profit: $867 million, up 189%. Seeds & herbicides Monsanto. Gross profit: $2.23
billion, up 54%. Dupont Agriculture and Nutrition. Pre-tax operating income: $786 million, up 21% Fertilizer Potash Corporation. Net income: $66 million,
up 185.9% Mosaic. Net earnings: $520.8 million, up more than 1,200% The companies listed above, plus a few more, are the monopoly or near-monopoly

Six companies control 85% of the world

trade in grain; three control 83% of cocoa; three control 80% of the
banana trade.[7] ADM, Cargill and Bunge effectively control the worlds corn, which means that they alone decide how much of each
years crop goes to make ethanol, sweeteners, animal feed or human food. As the editors of Hungry for Profit write, The enormous
power exerted by the largest agribusiness/food corporations allows
them essentially to control the cost of their raw materials purchased
from farmers while at the same time keeping prices of food to the
general public at high enough levels to ensure large profits.[8] Over the past
buyers and sellers of agricultural products around the world.

three decades, transnational agribusiness companies have engineered a massive restructuring of global agriculture. Directly through their own market
power and indirectly through governments and the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organization, they have changed the way food is grown and
distributed around the world.

The changes have had wonderful effects on their

profits, while simultaneously making global hunger worse and food

crises inevitable.

That also outweighs

1) Ruse of solvency they never address the true issues
underlying food security and choose to focus on the wrong
issues means they gloss over the problem and never solve
hunger.
2) They create issues for the impoverished in the long-term
because their policies only fuel the agenda of transnational
corporation and trap the poor in cycles of poverty the status
quo is always a better option.