Food as a right--a cause celebe for an emerging global middle class?

India, according to this great NYT piece, is thinking about some radical changes to its hugely inefficient and unbelievably Byzantine food distribution system, which needs to be marketized in the extreme because it suffers so much from a plethora of bad infrastructure and greedy middlemen and tiny retail outlets.

Story starts with description of average tough time for named citizen when it comes to feeding the family. Then it switches to the growing debate:

For the governing Indian National Congress Party, which has staked its political fortunes on appealing to the poor, this persistent inability to make government work for people like Mr. Bhuria has set off an ideological debate over a question that once would have been unthinkable in India: Should the country begin to unshackle the poor from the inefficient, decades-old government food distribution system and try something radical, like simply giving out food coupons, or cash?

The rethinking is being prodded by a potentially sweeping proposal that has divided the Congress Party. Its president, Sonia Gandhi, is pushing to create a constitutional right to food and expand the existing entitlement so that every Indian family would qualify for a monthly 77-pound bag of grain, sugar and kerosene. Such entitlements have helped the Congress Party win votes, especially in rural areas.

To Ms. Gandhi and many left-leaning social allies, making a food a legal right would give people like Mr. Bhuria a tool to demand benefits that rightfully belong to them. Many economists and market advocates within the Congress Party agree that the poor need better tools to receive their benefits but believe existing delivering system needs to be dismantled, not expanded; they argue that handing out vouchers equivalent to the bag of grain would liberate the poor from an unwieldy government apparatus and let them buy what they please, where they please.

“The question is whether there is a role for the market in the delivery of social programs,” said Bharat Ramaswami, a rural economist at the Indian Statistical Institute. “This is a big issue: Can you harness the market?”

Can't get much more stark than that:  hand out food or scrap the currently inefficient system.  Naturally, I vote for the latter.

As for the current government food programs?

The food system has existed for more than half a century and has become riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Studies show that 70 percent of a roughly $12 billion budget is wasted, stolen or absorbed by bureaucratic and transportation costs. Ms. Gandhi’s proposal, still far from becoming law, has been scaled back, for now, so that universal eligibility would initially be introduced only in the country’s 200 poorest districts, including here in Jhabua, at the western edge of the state of Madhya Pradesh.

Scary to consider expanding such a system.  Imagine how much corruption and malnutrition you get then?

Still, I believe food-as-a-right will be a growing concept.  The question, of course, is whether it's used as an excuse for governments to step in or--better--step back and let the Wal-Marts of the world force the efficiencies.