Hunger and Food Charity in Rich Societies: What Hope for the Right to Food?

First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics (Riches, 1997a) offered the first cross-national study of the emergence and entrenchment of food aid and charitable food banking from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. It consists of five case studies from advanced industrial countries with developed ‘liberal’ welfare states: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. All of the countries were food exporters and food secure through national production and imports, suggesting that domestic hunger could not be caused by the failure to provide sufficient food and nutrition, but rather was a matter of distributional justice and human rights — that is a fundamentally political issue.