I went to Brussels for just a few hours. The mission was banal: open a bank account for the new association that will lead the European Citizens’ Initiative on the Right to Food. Pure bureaucracy. Yet the scene in the bank stuck with me: a crowd of mostly elderly, mostly exhausted people, waving papers, arguing with clerks. They reminded me of my mother—people who had learned to cling to rules they never made, hoping for a small reprieve from wage slaves trapped behind glass (funny how the glass was removed, put back during COVID, and never taken down again). It was the circus of misery that capitalism calls daily life.
I grew up in that circus. It smells of despair disguised as hope: if only the manager signs this paper, maybe life will stop crushing me. But it doesn’t. It never does.
And here I was, opening an account for an initiative that promises the impossible: to make food a real right in Europe. A million signatures, and Brussels will legislate. Imagine: no one goes hungry without the ability to sue the state. Necessary. Beautiful. And almost certainly a lie.
Because the real question no one in those glass towers asks is simple: if the EU cannot stop famine in Gaza—a famine it openly recognizes, a famine broadcast live while European weapons fuel the siege—what is a “right to food” worth? If the Union won’t act when children die of starvation under bombardment, why would a million signatures turn law into bread?
This is not cynicism. It is structure. Law without power is theater. We live in a world where debt obligations are enforced with armies, but human rights are enforced with hashtags. Miss a payment, and the financial system will occupy your country. Miss a meal, and you get a press release.
This hypocrisy is ancient. Debt has always been a weapon of class domination. In Mesopotamia, in Rome, in Athens: hunger and bondage marched together. Fail to repay, and you lost your land, your freedom, your children. Debt-slavery built empires. Feudalism changed the form, not the substance: peasants chained to land, lords chained to bankers. Capitalism didn’t abolish the chain—it perfected it: mortgages, colonial credit, transatlantic slavery financed in London and Amsterdam. The “free worker” was only free to sell his labor and pawn his future.
The 20th century cracked this logic in one place: where states made food a political duty, not a market transaction. The USSR eliminated famine not because courts enforced rights, but because provisioning became a non-negotiable task of government. Yes, the Soviet Union knew famine—most notoriously in the 1930s, as brutal collectivization collided with drought and political violence. But after that abyss, it was precisely the shift to central provisioning that erased famine as a structural feature of society. From the 1940s onward, despite poverty, despite shortages, famine was politically impossible.
China followed the same arc. The Great Leap Forward famine killed tens of millions. It was catastrophic, a human-made disaster at the scale of history. But the political lesson was clear: famine was unacceptable. After 1962, the state reorganized agriculture and distribution to make sure mass hunger never returned. And it didn’t. From the 1960s to the present, in the most populous country on earth, famine has been absent—not because of rights-based litigation, but because food provisioning became a political obligation written into planning and budget.
Contrast that to Europe and the USA. Endless treaties, courts, declarations. Mountains of legal texts about rights. Yet when Gaza starves, Europe delivers speeches, not bread. When Yemen starved, the “international community” issued statements, not shipments. Which system feeds people? The one that organizes redistribution and planning, even at brutal cost—not the one that polishes human rights in the abstract.
China after 1949 abolished landlord debt, redistributed land, and built a system where hunger was politically eliminated. With market reforms, debt returned. Household debt went from 18% of GDP in 2008 to 62% in 2023. Housing speculation replaced collective security. Yet hunger remains eradicated—a success unmatched by any rights-based model. That matters. It proves hunger is not a natural disaster. It is a political choice.
So compare the five systems—USSR, China, EU, USA, Gaza—not by what they say, but by what they do. The EU and the USA speak loudly of rights, but enforce them only when compatible with markets. The USSR and China never made food a court-enforceable right, but made hunger politically intolerable. Gaza is the catastrophic inversion: maximal legal recognition under international law, zero enforcement, and famine in real time.
What will this ECI change? Three possibilities. First, the symbolic: Europe strengthens its own safety net, while exporting hunger through trade regimes and subsidies. Second, the radical: Europe makes food rights enforceable both at home and abroad, tying trade and investment to nutritional justice. Third, the necessary: food is lifted above market logic, made into a binding global duty. That last one is unlikely—unless this campaign becomes more than a petition and starts acting like a movement.
Because let’s be clear: if Brussels cannot stop a blockade in Rafah, how will it resist corporations invoking WTO rules against food sovereignty? If Europe enforces debt before dignity, the “right to food” will remain a signature in blue ink, not bread on a plate.
Gaza is the moral X-ray of our time. If law had power, famine would not exist. If Europe’s humanitarian language meant anything, Rafah would be open. The right to food, like all rights, is meaningless when it cannot stop starvation in real time. Yes, I will fight for this ECI. Yes, I will open that bank account. But I will not lie: rights without redistribution are garnish. Rights without enforcement are famine in italics.
The recipe for justice is not law. It is power, organized around the simple principle that no one should starve—not in Brussels, not in Rafah, not anywhere.