The Ethics of Trade and Aid US Food Policy, Foreign Competition, and the Social Contract

About this book

The traditional military-territorial model of the nation state defines international duties in terms of protecting citizens' property from foreign threats. In this 1992 book about the principles of the US agricultural policy and foreign aid, Professor Thompson replaces this model with the notion of the trading state that sees its role in terms of the establishment of international institutions that stabilize and facilitate cultural and intellectual, as well as commercial, exchanges between nations. The argument focuses on protectionist challenges to foreign aid and development assistance programs, and engages with the views of a variety of economists, commodity organizations, and philosophers on world hunger and development. What emerges is a new interpretation of social contract theory that can determine goals for international trade and development policy.

Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: of cabbages and kings

1. The food weapon and the strategic concept of food policy
2. The Bumpers Amendment
3. Does helping foreign industries violate a basic principle of government?
4. International agricultural assistance and the interests of US agriculture
5. The trading state and the social contract
6. Humanitarianism, hunger, and moral theory
7. Morality and the myth of scarcity
8. The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many thing

Notes
References
Index

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