Raj Patel Examines Food in 'Stuffed and Starved' -- And the Battle To Control the World Food System

BuzzFlash: The food shortage is quite a topical issue. Why, within the last month or two, has the so-called world food crisis suddenly become a mainstream media issue?

Raj Patel: In part it's because the consequences of this are becoming more newsworthy, and that sort of is rather superficial, and yet, you know, the sensation-seeking way the mainstream media likes so much. And the food shortages and high prices have certainly sparked the world media's attention, particularly since they're coming in such diverse places, being everywhere from Haiti, to Senegal, to Bangladesh, to Egypt - a range of countries. That sort of caught the media off guard, and serves the media's prurient interests insofar as "it bleeds, and so it leads." Of course, the food crisis has been going on for much longer than that. It's just that it's become acute over the past few months that the media has finally paid some attention to it.

BuzzFlash: The issue of food crises has been with us since the beginning of time, and it's part of the basic premise of your book that in some areas, there are chronic food shortages. Why, now, are we suddenly saying that there is a crisis?

There's always been a food shortage in certain places. But why now? We know that corn prices are likely to soar because of flooding in the Midwest. They're also soaring because of ethanol and other factors, but there's a sudden sensitivity. Is it just sort of a fad of the media, that there's a food crisis?

Raj Patel: No, I think you nailed it with that word sensitivity. You're completely right that all of human history is about the going from sudden fat years to the sudden lean years. We've always had good times and bad, and we've had ways of managing the bad times. We have ways of insulating ourselves, making ourselves less sensitive for the bad times by having things like grain stores, for example.

Pretty much every civilization that's lasted for any reasonable length of time has some food management principles behind it. But what's been happening over the past thirty years is it's failed - the insurance policy.

That's called structural adjustment. Exporters monitor economic and political policies to the developing world, but the consequences of that have been to make developing countries far more sensitive to the constant fluctuations. Developing countries are not always allowed to support their farmers in the same way as the U.S. or Europe is. They're not allowed to have tariff barriers. They're not allowed to give payments to farmers. They're forced, more or less, to shrink their social programs. The very poorest people have fewer and fewer entitlements.

The consequence of this has been that there's been a chronic increase in the vulnerability of those economies to price shocks. When you have weird policy decisions in the United States that then ripple out throughout the world, the rest of the world really takes it on the chin. When the U.S. decides to set their corn on fire rather than to eat it, which is what the biofuels policy basically is - then that drives up the price of corn. It drives up the price of substitutes. And all of a sudden you have a sort of spiral of food prices. And other countries don't have the resources, because they're not allowed to, to weather the storm.

BuzzFlash: You travel all over the world in your book. When we go to grammar school, we learn that food is one of the three essentials in life - food, clothing and shelter. Food is the fuel that keeps us going as homo sapiens. It's necessary for our life and fundamental. But in Western civilization, we tend to forget this. Food becomes a part of an affluent lifestyle, so we go to certain restaurants that have certain atmospheres. We want the latest cuisine, perhaps. But in many parts of the world, it's a basic necessity.

A few years ago we saw a documentary - a wonderful film - about how the country of Jamaica became dependent on imported foods due to the World Bank.

Raj Patel: Life and Debt - that was an amazing film.

BuzzFlash: Yes, Life and Debt. Restrictions were put in place by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank where, in essence, the poultry industry, if I recall, and the dairy industry and many of the small farms in Jamaica, were wiped out because as conditions put on by the IMF. They had to bu, in some cases, rancid food from the United States. They were sold dairy powder from the United States which knocked out the dairy industry in Jamaica. So the indigenous food supply system, and people who depended on those jobs for their livelihood, were knocked out by becoming dependent on a larger food corporate network, in this case, in the United States. What sort of impact is that type of IMF policy having on third-world agrarian economies?

Raj Patel: I think it's a really rich question. The best way of understanding it really is by example. Haiti actually provides an interesting example because it is the place where three lives have been pretty spectacular of late. It's sort of the poster child for how the IMF has been almost directly responsible for the misery in the country. In 1984, and then as part of the restitution of Jean Baptiste Aristide in the 1990s, a series of conditions were imposed by the IMF with the implicit support of government, that there should be liberalization, particularly in the rice market. Now, in the 1980s, Haiti was able to produce the majority of its own rice domestically. But after "liberalization," Haitian farmers found themselves competing against U.S. farmers.

Haitian farmers were not allowed to be supported, and most Haitians live on less than $2 a day. But at the same time, the United States was subsidizing its rice farmers to the tune of a billion dollars a year. So Haitian rice farmers were wiped out. In the latest figures I've seen, Haiti produces none of the rice that's now consumed in Haiti. The rice is being brought over there in bags with stars and stripes on it - gift of the people of the United States. I think that's an indication of the kind of gift that the U.S. government and the International Monetary Fund have been giving for a little while.

I do want to go back, because I think your point about instinct is also well taken, and there's a battle over that, too. We kind of know that food is necessary to survive. But our ways of connecting with food have been, in many ways, taken over by capitalism - certainly taken over by the influence large corporations have on the way that we eat and the way that we think about food. That's why kids these days are more prepared to take nutritional advice from Ronald McDonald than they are from their parents or their teachers or from scientists. And particularly in urban areas, you'll see kids who honestly believe tomatoes come from the supermarket rather than from a plant. That's one of the strange things that I saw when I was traveling the world --  how similar kids growing up in urban areas are in terms of their attitudes to food. They've been hooked by the advertising giants. Their desires have been sculpted and shaped by millions of dollars of marketing. Certainly the United States is ground zero for the root of the epidemic, because so much money is being spent persuading us to consume so much here.

But the second most abused country on earth is Mexico. The marketing spills over the border, and people are persuaded to eat food that's bad for them, more in rich countries than in poor ones. As I say, I was traveling the world. What really struck me was the way we engage with food - how it's a global phenomenon - the world becoming more and more disconnected from it.

BuzzFlash: A sort of adjunct topic of interest to our readers is biogenetic engineering in food. What is happening with that? We've read of cases where the companies with patents on the food are suing farmers because, unbeknownst to the farmers, something is patented. The seeds have blown over to their farmland and grown. The farmers have actually been sued for nothing they had anything to do with. Is this another threat to indigenous farming? Is what we saw happening in Jamaica becoming even worse with the advent of biogenetic food?

Raj Patel: Yes. The current food crisis is also an opportunity for companies to engage in agriculture or biotechnology. In fact, Monsanto's stock has gone through the roof because of food prices, and they've positioned themselves in their advertising as the people who are going to feed the world. Interestingly, it's really an example of what Naomi Klein called disaster capitalism, and the current food crisis has been used very explicitly by the U.S. government, by the way.

At the recent World Food Summit, one of the U.S. delegations went there with only three policies they're allowed to endorse. One was more food aid. The second was a little bit more investment in agriculture. And the third was that biotech is the solution. So it is very explicitly being pushed by the U.S. government.

The third thing is that it's not only a threat to indigenous agriculture, but it's a threat to sustainability, as well. A recent review of different agricultural options for the future was conducted by a panel of experts -- 400 scientists led by the same guy who did the climate change studies -- the IPCC guy, Robert Watson. The scientists posed the question: How are we going to feed the world when there are nine billion people on it, as there will be by 2050? And the answer they came up with was industrial agriculture won't work and genetic engineering won't work and the solution is going to be sustainable, and going to ecological kinds of farming that are based on local environmental conditions that work with local ecosystems available to develop a richer kind of farming technology.

But what Monsanto and its friends are trying to do is hijack this particular crisis to push a privatized version of science and technology. The best available science suggests that what we need is a great deal of public investment. I certainly think there is hope that this current crisis can also incubate a slightly better kind of politics and certainly a better kind of science to enable us to feed the world in the future.

BuzzFlash: Well, you're awfully hopeful, but the IMF and the G8 and so forth, still seem to be going full speed ahead, as we're seeing with corporations in general, with the concept that corporate agricultural is the savior for these countries, and not indigenous production of food supply. If you look at Jamaica as an example, you need a complete reinvestment just to get local efforts off the ground again, because they've been decimated.

Raj Patel: I agree. I certainly don't think the solutions are going to be coming from the IMF or a bank. But I am seeing more and more countries backing away from the IMF and the World Bank, and that's very reassuring. More countries did not go to the IMF to replenish loans. And some countries are telling the IMF to go screw itself in terms of its advice. One of those countries is Malawi, which is now opposing a rich kind of pesticide -- a rich kind of agricultural investment strategy that runs counter to what the IMF has prescribed.

I certainly see the ways in which a new politics can come about, not through the IMF or the World Bank or through traditional channels, but actually through really important social movements like the food sovereignty movement, which by some estimates has over 150 million members in countries ranging from the United States to Brazil to India. There are many millions of people who are moving forward with a different kind of food politics.

And it's not easy. They are engaged in a struggle for a kind of food politics, and one that isn't necessarily about traditional or indigenous agriculture so much as democratic and rich and scientific and progressive. It's not about looking back, in the way that we would like to return to some rustic world past where there would be a million little houses on the prairie. That's not something that these movements are undertaking. They're undertaking things like women's rights, land reform, sustainable science and technology. But we do need to have them for our rural future if we're all going to survive.

BuzzFlash: Well, yes, but still someone's got to eat. Someone's got to do the farming. Someone's got to do the plowing. The trend in the United States has been that corporations have superseded sovereignty, particularly in all these trade agreements -- NAFTA, CAFTA, and so on -- that make countries, particularly developing countries, dependent on corporations. It's kind of like feeding a junkie. You get a developing country to a point where they can't live without you because you're supplying them with these goods, initially at a cheaper price. Then you jack up the price. Then they become indebted. Their indigenous food supply industry is wiped out. We've seen this with Mexico, to a certain degree.

Part of the immigration problem was NAFTA wiped out a lot of their smaller farming and so people are coming up here for work in order to be able to send home American dollars. People are here legally or illegally because farms have closed because because NAFTA has allowed U.S. agricultural products to come in at such a low price. The farmers can't sell their products anymore.

How does that cycle end? We're still debating, in this election season and certainly in the Democratic primary, about these trade agreements. But it seems that while both Clinton and Obama gave lip service to saying they were going to renegotiate NAFTA, the general consensus is that not a lot's going to happen. There's a good chance that a new Columbian trade agreement will probably go through Congress once the election is over. The corporatization of everything, including the food, supersedes sovereignty and is being incorporated into these trade agreements. The corporations seem so powerful that these trade agreements keep getting passed.

Raj Patel: I think that is certainly the case. If you look at the farm bill, for example. It's true that both sides of the House are fairly complicit in some egregious agricultural earmarks. How weird was it to have President Bush veto a bill because he didn't want to be signing a bill that wrote checks to millionaires, which is what he's been doing for eight years. Then the Democrats are saying: no, no, no -- that's fine. It's a small project but this is the best we can do. And of course, they can do a hell of a lot better than that.

The fact that agriculture does have both parties deep in hock to it is, I think, a source of worry. But I also see the explosion of farmers' markets, the local food policy councils, a range of steps like taking CocaCola out of the schools to, here in San Francisco, we're digging up the land outside of City Hall to plant a victory garden. So more and more alternatives to corporations are being created. When we ask corporations, could you make your food more nutritious? -- the result is crazy things like Diet Coke Plus. It's basically a can of Diet Coke with added vitamins. That is corporate America's response.

But it is important to have the long history here. In the book, I talk about how corporations and trade agreements have been used for centuries -- through colonialism and military conquests -- to subjugate large parts of the Third World so people in Europe and North America could eat cheaply. It has always been a weapon in the U.S. negotiating kit. Those words are the words of Earl Butz, who was Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture.

It's certainly the case that, for example, in the Cold War, India had its sovereignty very deeply undermined, not by corporations, but by the U.S. government through food, because the U.S. government was keen to shift its agricultural products to places that looked like they were going Communist. India was one of those places in the 1950s, so the food aid kept coming into India, which meant that local farmers couldn't compete. Local farmers can't compete with food that's being provided for free. So the local farmers were being driven out of business.

By the end of the 1960s, the United States owned more than half of the Indian rupee money supply, and that had been acquired through food aid. So I think it's very interesting to see the very long history of how sovereignty and food go together. When some countries remove another country's ability to feed itself, it is a very powerful tool. Imperialist countries, like the United Kingdom, like the United States, have used it for centuries.

BuzzFlash: One of the things suggested by the very title of your book, Stuffed and Starved -- is the sort of parallel food problems of the haves and have-nots. Obesity is a crisis in the U.S. On cable TV, we see all these ads for weight loss programs. Is there any reason to worry about a food shortage in the United States? Or are we just simply a country that's so over-marketed to buy all these delicious foods that we have an obesity problem, not a food problem?

Raj Patel: Well, I do think we have a food problem. In 2006, which is the year for which we have the latest data, 35.5 million Americans were food insecure. That means there are 35.5 million Americans who are so hard up at some point during the year that they didn't know where their next meal was coming from. That's a lot of Americans. They don't get reported very much because there's nothing spectacular about people skipping a meal because they're poor. The media tends to ignore that, just as it ignores the sort of chronic food shortages elsewhere in the world.

Yet, right now you're seeing more and more families reporting that they are skipping meals. They're having to give up meat. Mothers are foregoing food so their kids can have something. People are growing their own vegetables, not because they've gone organic, but because it's one of the few assured sources of food they have. For low-income Americans, for sure, food is costly right now. The price of food has been going up, and wages haven't. Unemployment has been going up as well. This puts working Americans in a real bind. The fact that the mainstream media hasn't reported it doesn't mean that it's not happening.

So I think we do need to worry about a food shortage here, but we also need to worry about the quality of the food. A lot of the stuff that's marketed to us tastes delicious because it fools our bodies. It fools our bodies into thinking that a particular mix of fat and salt and sugar is good for us. In fact, it isn't. That's why you're seeing in the United States life expectancies are declining, particularly in rural areas. You're seeing life expectancies falling in part because of diet.

So the problems are pretty serious. The thing that strikes me is that this isn't just a U.S. thing. There's increasing levels of obesity in Africa, for example. India has the largest number of hungry people. You also have the largest number of people who have type II diabetes, and now that's a wild contradiction. Yet it's an outcome of precisely the same mechanism. It's the control of agriculture that drives down the price it paid for food that it buys from farmers, who are the poorest people. Then you're paying very little for food. You're underpaying the poorest people in any society. Then they're marketing to us the things that are most profitable to them. And those are the things that are packaged and processed and what-have-you. That means you have the simple thing of the explosion of obesity and hunger as a result of capitalism in our food system.

BuzzFlash: There's a mass of dairy farms in Minnesota, and residents had to flee the area because of the malodorous smells emanating from the farm, which has been true of some of these massive hog farms. Now, executives in agriculture argue that they are eager to produce more at a cheaper price. Why do we need to think about things like slow food or buying organics locally, where there's less fuel being consumed, or buying hog meat from a local smaller producer? What's your argument back to that?

Raj Patel: Show me the data. It's increasingly the case that small sustainable farms produce more yield than these sort of concentrated animal-feeding operations, particularly when you take into account the huge environmental costs that are associated with the massive industrial agriculture and the animal industry, in particular. And the environmental difference is vast.

There isn't enough planet for everyone to eat as much meat as the United States does. The meat industry is responsible for a dead zone the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico every year because of the runoff through the Mississippi -- runoff from hog farms basically nukes the water. So you have the industrial agriculturalists who try and make an argument that big is beautiful. But if you do the math, and particularly if you factor in that the price of oil is going to go through the roof, and so the price of transportation is going to go through the roof -- making it abundantly clear that it's out of whack. The efficiency arguments are already crumbling, particularly if you actually include the cost of food pollution that these industries cause. They are tremendously unsustainable and tremendously inefficient.

In addition to that, we need to realize that these industrial methods of farming have gotten us used to cheap food. The corollary of cheap food is low wages. What we need to do in an era when the price of food is going up is pay better wages. A living wage is an absolutely integral part of a modern food system, because you can't expect people to eat properly and eat in a sustainable way if you pay them nothing. In fact, it's cheap food that subsidized the exploitation of American workers for a very long time, and that's always been an aim of cheap food. I talk about the origins of that in Britain, and how they became a colonial power in order to feed workers in developing countries, as in Britain. But the whole notion of cheap food is something that we're going to have to say goodbye to. But we also need, at the same time, to fight to say goodbye to the low wages that accompany it.

BuzzFlash: I think you're cutting to the crux of something that cuts against the whole American grain of kind of what makes America, which is to say, constantly finding bargains, the cheapest, the most cost-efficient. To say to people, well, for economic justice and for overall sustainability of the food system, you're going to have to pay more, is very hard for Americans to swallow. It's like trying to win a campaign politically by saying we're going to raise taxes.

Raj Patel: Right. Yet if you go to the supermarket and look at food that's produced through industrial agriculture, look at what's happened to the prices. Have they been going down? They've been going up and they will continue to go up. So the choice is either, do we hitch onto a system of agriculture that's doomed and will doom the planet with it, and go along the route of industrial agriculture, or do we want to shift to a kind of system that we know is going to be, in the long run, cheaper, because we'll have a planet left at the end of it? We need to factor that cost in.

At the same time, do we not also want to realize the implications in terms of justice for that kind of system? Do we not want to fight for higher wages? Certainly if we're looking for bargains, then agro-ecological and sustainable farming is a bargain, because, as I say, the deal at the end of the day is you've got a planet left.

In addition to that, there's something very American about collective action. And something very American about getting together and fighting for your rights. The one thing that everyone knows about America is people will say, I know my rights. One of those rights is the right to organize. When workers do get together and organize and drive up their wages, they are much, much better off. I think this is one integral part of food policy. We can't talk about increasing the price of food without figuring out how working Americans are going to pay for that.

I definitely think the price of food is going up. We need to figure out ways to manage that in a sustainable way. We have to figure out ways of increasing wages so people can afford it. That means redistribution, and rich people don't like to hear that. This administration simply won't hear of it. But without it, I fear even more Americans will be going hungry in the future.

BuzzFlash: Raj, thank you for the wonderful book. We encourage BuzzFlash readers to purchase and buy it. And thank you for your thoughts on the very serious decision facing all of us in terms of how we restructure our food production and distribution systems throughout the world, not only in the United States.

Raj Patel: Thank you, Mark.

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Resources

Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle For the World Food System (Paperback), by Raj Patel, available from BuzzFlash.

http://www.rajpatel.org/

Raj Patel Bio (Wikipedia)

Stephanie Black Shows How the IMF Makes Developing Countries Dependent on the G-8 Nations, in Her Film, "Life and Debt" a BuzzFlash Interview (7/25/2005)

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW