Sorry but state direction of the food system won't reduce waste...

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On the face of it seeking to reduce the amount of food we throw away unused is a good thing. It certainly makes sense and I'd be up for encouraging people to try and reduce the amount of grub we trash.

However, the food fascists don't quite see it this way:

For starters, food loss and wastage needs to be seen as a cross-cutting policy issue, rather than a lifestyle choice to be left in the hands of individual consumers and their consciences.

You are not to be allowed. Throwing stuff away will be banned. Action will be taken.

Now, if the article from which that quote came was from George Monbiot or some other slightly batty green obsessive then we could shove it to one side, smile and move on. But the authors are the Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of the UN Environment Program. These are big panjandrums of the international boondoggle circuit, blokes whose words are hung upon by lesser mortals, people who can effect change.

And the change they want is to say to those managing bits of the food system - farmers, truckers, supermarket managers, market stall holders and, of course, us consumers - that the government knows better. Taxes will be raised and "invested" in preventing waste (as if those producers and distributors aren't already pretty bothered about reducing waste as it represents lost income or extra cost), conferences will be held and grand food strategies replete with ideas of 'security', 'climate change' and 'fairness' that corrupt the very idea of liberty and choice.

In the end, if I want to chuck half the food I buy away that's my loss. And frankly nothing at all to do with the UN or indeed any bit of government beyond the part that runs the bin wagons. State direction of the food system won't reduce waste, will almost certainly make food more expensive and will problem make matters worse - more starvation, more tonnes of food heading for landfill and a new army of fussbuckets sticking their unwanted fingers into a system that works pretty well.
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For starters, food loss and wastage needs to be seen as a cross-cutting policy issue, rather than a lifestyle choice to be left in the hands of individual consumers and their consciences.
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/on-the-massive-costs-of-food-wastage-and-loss-by-jose-graziano-da-silva-and-achim-steiner#DKFRGYPi5AwpPVUj.99

How the UN works...

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In this case to undermine free speech:

When, in March 2008, I attempted to challenge this falsehood in the Council by pointing out the incompatibility of the Cairo Declaration with the UDHR, I was silenced on a point of order by the Pakistani delegate who said: ‘it is insulting to our faith to discuss the Sharia in this Council’. Sadly the president agreed, banning from that point on any ‘judgmental statements regarding any system of law’. In June 2008, the Egypt delegate brought Council proceedings to a halt for almost an hour when he insisted that no reference could be made to Islam, Sharia law or fatwas. Faced with a vote that could have overturned his decision to let the speaker continue, the president backed down, and when the meeting resumed he told the Council that ‘we do not need to discuss religion in this Council, nor shall we’. Islam had won a free pass and is now officially absolved of any responsibility for any human rights abuse carried out in its name.

Why do we tolerate this corrupting and shocking organaisation?

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Human rights and the curse of laws

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The debate over the Human Rights Act and its parents - the European Court of Human Rights and the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" - is a strange one. Not because the matter of 'rights' is unimportant or even that these laws are without value but because the presumption in all of this is that rights exist only because of our masters' benevolence. The debate seems to treat 'rights' in a way little changed from the rights granted by feudal lords to their most loyal servants - somehow our rights will disappear, melt like snow in Summer, were the Human Rights Acts to be scrapped.

The state constrains rights and then allows, in its benevolence, some of those rights to be freed. The state is not the source of rights but exists - or should exist - to protect those rights. The debate shouldn't be about the existence or otherwise of rights but about the best way to ensure those rights are guarded.

Let it be known that the British liberties are not the grants of princes of parliaments, but original rights, conditions of original contracts, coequal with prerogative, and coeval with government. That many of our rights are inherent and essential, agreed on as maxims and established as preliminaries even before a parliament existed.

It does not matter at all whether we have signed some declaration, taken part in some international court or passed laws within parliament. All that matters is that our rights are protected, that we can have confidence that authorities charged with upholping those rights will do so and that this will be done without fear or favour.

This is not the case. Take Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that document that we cherish:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Does this say anything about being arrested for being rude about a diver? Or stopped from photographing a police station or an airport? Or the entire edifice now being built around 'hate crime' and 'equalities' - an edifice designed to bully people into accepting the left's newspeak rather than to deal with hate?

Perhaps there is a case for declaring some beliefs so dreadful and to merit their expression a crime - but where do we stop with defining those dreadful beliefs? And if it is right to prevent racism by making its expression a crime despite this being contrary to Article 19, surely it is also right to allow the deportation of criminals who constitute a threat to wider society despite their claim of a "right to a private and family life" under Article 8 of the UK's Human Rights Act?

In all the discussion around 'rights', there is an assumption that the Human Rights Act is intended to protect rights and not to contain fundamental rights within a body of law - to bring those rights back under the definition and purview of the state. So free speech is qualified - to such an extent that any protection of our 'right' to speak is nullified by the tools available to agents of government. The protection of "health or morals" seems so broad as to allow almost any statement ot be proscribed. And if this is not enough the Act allows the limiting of free speech to protect 'national security' and to prevent 'disorder'.

The Human Rights Act isn't a universal, sacrosanct declaration but, as with all laws, a flawed, controlling interpretation of the idea of 'rights'. The idea that changing it - even scrapping it - represents a backward step and that somehow our rights would vanish is nonsense. The most important rights - speech, movement, assembly, protest, exchange - these rights are more honoured in the breech by the Human Rights Act. The state is granted so many controls and the 'rights' are so curtailed that it's hard to see that the loss of the Act would make much difference.

In discussing 'rights' we should be talking first about what are the things that make us free and then what are the justifications for limiting somebodies freedom. Instead we indulge in an ever more occult discussion - guarded closely by lawyers - where the parsing of particular sentences and the dissecting of judges' opinions casts a thick mist over any understanding of 'rights'.

Finally, just as 'equalities' rules run the risk of being used to secure advantage, so it the case with the Human Rights Act. And because our judges care more about words than intention - such in the curse of laws - the result is decision-making that does not promote rights but that brings the protection of rights into question. To the ordinary man such inconsistencies, such egregious interpretation of 'rights' means that we run the risk of destroying protection on the altar of lawyerly pedantry.

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