Author: Raj Patel
Half the world is malnourished, the other half obese—both symptoms of the corporate food monopoly. To show how a few powerful distributors control the health of the entire world, Raj Patel conducts a global investigation, traveling from the “green deserts” of Brazil and protester-packed streets of South Korea to bankrupt Ugandan coffee farms and barren fields of India. What he uncovers is shocking—the real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa, an epidemic of farmer suicides, and the false choices and conveniences in supermarkets. Yet he also finds hope—in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable, and joyful food system. From seed to store to plate, Stuffed and Starved explains the steps necessary to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of farmers and consumers, and re-balance global sustenance. Naomi Klein calls it “one of the most dazzling books I have read in a very long time. The product of a brilliant mind and a gift to a world hungering for justice.”
Review: The Guardian
Unless you are a corporate food executive, the food system isn't working for you. If you are one of the world's rural poor dependent on agriculture for your livelihood - and roughly half the global population of 6 billion fall into this category - you are likely to be one of the starved. If you are an urban consumer, whether an affluent metropolitan or slum-dwelling industrial labourer, you are likely to be one of the stuffed, suffering from obesity or other diet-related ills.
Raj Patel's fascinating first book examines this apparent paradox. His thesis is that the simultaneous existence of nearly 1 billion who are malnourished and nearly 1 billion who are overweight is in fact the inevitable corollary of a system in which a handful of corporations have been allowed to capture the value of the food chain. Moreover, government policies through history have been designed to control our food. Their aim has been to provide cheap food for the urban masses and so prevent dissent at home. The instruments of colonial command may have been replaced with newer mechanisms that give a greater role to the private sector, but control our food they still do with disastrous social consequences, despite all the neo-liberal rhetoric of free trade and choice.
Patel's range is impressive, taking us from the soaring suicide rates among Indian farmers faced with a 20% fall in rural income after liberalisation of agriculture and trade, to the emergence of social movements among the landless in Brazil and Africa, and the sophisticated manipulation of consumers in the rich north.
Patel uses the Mexican experience as one among several telling examples of what has gone wrong. The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) in 1994 was the first to unite the economies of two rich countries and a poor one. Some 60% of cultivated land in Mexico at the time was used to grow corn, the key staple of the population. One of the arguments for free trade is that by forcing producers to compete with each other, prices fall, helping the mass of urban poor. The price of corn on the Mexican market indeed collapsed as US imports flowed in. US corn farmers are heavily subsidised by their government, and small Mexican producers were never going to be able to compete. The livelihoods of 3 million farmers, 8% of the population, were decimated. But the urban poor didn't benefit. Most Mexicans eat their corn in the form of tortillas, made from corn flour. The price of tortillas didn't fall as free market logic would lead you to expect; instead it went up seven-fold. As part of liberalisation the Mexican government removed some of the supports that kept tortillas cheap in government stores. But just two processors control 97% of the Mexican industrial cornflour market; so it was they who captured the value of the fall in corn prices. Nafta is said to have forced 1.3 million Mexicans off their land, swelling the numbers of urban poor, leading to a fall in urban industrial wages, and an increased flow of illegal workers to the US. Poverty rates overall increased 50%. Meanwhile, Mexicans have become fat. A spike in obesity levels has followed the changes in diet that accompanied urbanisation. International retail has arrived too with Wal-Mart in its Mexican Wal-Mex incarnation taking three out of every 10 pesos spent on food in the country. It is a pattern repeated around the world and through history.
Britain as imperial power pioneered the grain trade, encouraging India and others to sell their wheat stocks, bringing famine back to Asia, but providing cheap food for its factory workers and keeping insurrection at home at bay. After the second world war the US used its agricultural surpluses as food aid to head off the communist threat.
More recently, international financial institutions and debt have been used to make countries cede decisions about their food production to their creditors. Patel used to work for the World Bank and is excellent on all this.
Now 40% of world trade in food is controlled by transnational agricultural corporations in strategic partnerships with biotech seed and pesticide companies such as Monsanto, and they pull the levers.
Fighting back against this is the movement to regain "food sovereignty" or the people's right to define their own agriculture and food policies. The idea originated with the global network of peasant farmer organisations, Via Campesina, and has been honed through the early 2000s. Patel sees it as the hope for the future and ends with an impassioned call to action. The "honey trap" of ethical consumerism will not do it, he says; we must organise and reclaim our control of the food system, just as the landless in Brazil and cooperatives in America and Europe have done. Some of this is familiar territory. Aid agencies such as Oxfam, ActionAid and Christian Aid have argued the case on free trade agreements. Sidney Mintz has described the relationship between patterns of consumption and patterns of trade between empire and slave colony in his brilliant history of sugar. But Patel puts all these threads together compellingly, and there is much that is original.
The debate on food sovereignty will become more clamorous, though questions remain. The models Patel holds up for a new sustainable food system are Cuba and the Landless Movement of Brazil. The former was forced to reinvent its agriculture after the collapse of Soviet Union deprived it of its oil and the US embargo prevented it buying stocks elsewhere, but it has depended on a totalitarian ability to impose on consumers and producers. The landless of Brazil, educated first in the ways of cooperative action in tough land occupations, find, as Patel says, that their children are drawn away to the material pleasures of the city. Will soaring commodity prices change the picture?
This is a book full of insight, that makes an important contribution to understanding that the politics of food is not a narrow matter of shopping, ethical or otherwise. It involves the urgent study of globalisation and social justice, and the politics of modern capitalism itself.
Article in SFGATE
When the price of rice spiked, Raj Patel himself became a valuable commodity.
The author of a timely new book, "Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System," and a visiting scholar at the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley, Patel is in demand for comment on the global food crisis.
The alarm sounded in earnest last month, when the executive director of the United Nations' World Food Program announced that soaring global food prices could unleash "a silent tsunami" that could plunge 100 million people into hunger and poverty.
Food riots had already erupted in many nations in response to price hikes and shortages that some experts call the unintended consequences of globalization.
Patel, 35, believes the crisis is the result of "simultaneous calamities." He lists them crisply: "Oil is high. There's an increased demand for meat. Biofuels are a problem. Climate change and bad harvests have something to do with it."
While Patel fields requests for interviews from CNN, Newsweek, BBC World and other news outlets, his publisher, Melville House, is readying a second printing of the book.
"It's quite by accident that the crisis should come to a head at the time of the book's release," he says. "Now there isn't a single day when I'm not doing at least two interviews and a speaking event."
The loftiest occurs Wednesday in Washington, D.C., where he has been asked to testify before the House Financial Services Committee. His testimony will be based on a recent report in which he critiqued the World Bank for "actively hampering the development of sustainable agriculture" and promoting food trade at the expense of small farmers.
"That report kind of looks prescient now," Patel says.
Critics of his point of view believe policies that protect small farmers cripple the free market, inhibiting its ability to correct itself.
"But without agricultural support policies," he counters, "there is no buffer between the price shocks and the bellies of the poorest people on earth."
Colonial legacy
Patel was born in 1972 in London. "I am a product of globalization," he says. His parents, who met in Britain, were both born in British colonial outposts, his mother in Kenya, his father in Fiji.
"In the swinging '60s, they had a convenience store," he says. "I spent my childhood growing up in a stockroom surrounded by bad food and cigarettes and magazines."
Like many immigrant families, he notes, his parents took education seriously. His brother, now a property developer in Britain, went to UCLA; he went to Oxford, where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy, politics and economics, going on to the London School of Economics for a master's degree and earning his doctorate from Cornell University's department of development sociology .
"At home, we had nutritious food, mostly Indian food," he says. But soon, long working hours and busy schedules made convenience foods appealing. "Sometimes we ate in the car," he admits.
"When I explain to people outside the U.S. that 20 percent of American fast-food meals are eaten in cars, they are absolutely gobsmacked," Patel says. "They ask me, 'Is it because Americans love their cars so much?'
"I explain that Americans are working so hard in order to access the things people in other industrialized nations take for granted - health care, education, a pension, a living wage," he says. "And increasingly, communities of working people can't afford to live where they work. They're holding down two jobs - we shouldn't be surprised that people are forced to eat fast food in their cars."
The Battle in Seattle opened his eyes, he says. In November 1999, he was among the estimated 40,000 protesters who filled that city's streets during a conference of the World Trade Organization. The demonstrations helped to launch the anti-globalization movement.
"One of the most inspiring groups I saw there was Via Campesina - landless people and poor farmers, marching against the WTO," he recalls. "I had been following them for several years and was inspired by the work they were doing to promote a different kind of globalization," that is, world food trade on a smaller, human scale.
World traveler
To research such alternatives, he joined the progressive Oakland think tank Food First/Institute for Food & Development Policy as a policy analyst. He learned that there were now more obese people than hungry people on earth.
"For the next four years, I visited a dozen countries to see what the connection was," he says. What he uncovered is the basis for "Stuffed & Starved." (He constantly updates his thinking in a blog on the book's Web site, www.stuffedandstarved.org.)
"Global hunger and obesity are symptoms of the same problem," he writes. "Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in 10 people on earth are hungry."
This surreal dichotomy is one result of corporate greed, Patel believes. High-priced, non-nutritious processed foods are shot full of salt, corn oil and sugar to appeal to basic human cravings.
"In every country, the contradictions of obesity, hunger, poverty and wealth are becoming more acute," he writes, citing India as an example.
"In 1992, in the same towns and villages where malnutrition had begun to grip the poorest families, the Indian government admitted foreign soft drinks manufacturers and food multinationals to its previously protected economy," he writes. "Within a decade, India has become home to the world's largest concentration of diabetics."
Meanwhile, he says, organizations such as the World Bank and WTO have encouraged farmers to sow their fields not with crops to feed their communities, but with cash-crops - "monocultures" - such as soy, flowers or corn, which can presumably go for high prices on the world market.
"Today, 70 percent of developing countries are importing more food than they produce," Patel says.
Such a strategy, which makes small farmers vulnerable to crop failures and global price fluctuations, has turned fatal in some parts of the world, including rural India, where suicide is a leading cause of death among farmers shamed after losing land that has been in their family for generations.
Future shocks
In his book, Patel also analyzes the impact of biofuel - crops grown for fuel, not food - on prices and shortages. And he addresses the possibility that prices are being affected by commodity speculators, a situation, he says, that is "just like the housing bubble."
Does he expect to see more food riots?
"Absolutely," Patel says. "People are asking not only for the right to access food but for a government to listen to them. Riots are what people have left when they have no other way of making their voices heard."
But do they work? Can they affect productive change?
"Look at history," Patel suggests. "In 1917, there were food riots throughout the U.S., led by women." When wartime inflation caused spikes in food prices, "women were unable to put food on the table for their families," he says.
"Women couldn't vote, but their protest was successful. By 1920, the 19th Amendment was passed."
