Raj Patel (Photo by Andrea Ismert)

By KATIE LOVETT
DavidsonNews.net

Award-winning writer and activist Raj Patel visited Davidson College last Wednesday to elaborate on the ideas set forth in his 2008 book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. His lecture addressed several difficult topics, including farmer suicide trends, the psychology and politics of supermarkets, and the underlying cause of famine in Africa and Asia. But he also highlighted the success of grassroots activism and encouraged this type of movement toward a more sustainable future for food.

“You will notice that I talk quickly and get carried away,” he began.

His pitch-perfect analogies, rapid-fire statistics, and laugh-out-loud anecdotes made it easy to see why he has been called “the rock star of social justice writing.” Mr. Patel also has published Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice (2009) and The Value of Nothing (2010).

His lecture Wednesday hinged on the fact that today 1.5 billion people are overweight, while another one billion remain undernourished. Hence the “stuffed and starved” title of his 2008 book.

Patel then narrowed his statistic to the most obese country – the United States – where only four out of 10 Americans have a normal body weight. If current trends hold fast, by 2030 half of us will be clinically obese, he said. However, there are also 49.2 million Americans without food security falling on the “starved” side of the equation.

Why is this? How did we end up in a world where ‘overweight’ is often another point on the poverty line?

Patel addressed these questions by breaking down the historical framework surrounding the current global food system.

“Back in the day,” he joked, “all the fairytales we heard were about the fat dude surrounded by gold.”

The rich-fat/poor-thin trend has since reversed, he said. Now, if you are overweight in a first world country, you are more likely to be poor.

“Imagine an hourglass,” Mr. Patel continued. “At the top are hundreds of millions of farmers. At the bottom are the seven billion people who need to eat every day. And in the middle are the corporations who control global trade.”

This system is designed to favor the corporations dominating the scene, he said. The monopolized global food industry can simultaneously underpay the poorest people and produce the foods that trigger obesity.

“The question is not why corporations are trying to make money or why so few are able to shape the market,” Mr. Patel said. “This is built into corporations’ ideologies and we shouldn’t be surprised that corporations push back against government and want to make lots of money.”

Rather, the fundamental question is, why do we have global food markets at all? he said.

According to Mr. Patel, these markets are very new historically, having originated about 130 years ago during British rule in India. When the British discovered cheap wheat for export, they introduced new markets that wreaked havoc on the feudal system and food distribution in India. This is the logic behind global food markets today, he said, where most borders are open to foreign companies to come in and market their products. In India, the neoliberal economic policies adopted in the 1980s have since raised farmer suicide rates, created unequal distribution of wealth, increased the level of Type II diabetes, and led to record levels of hunger as the government tightens welfare, he said.

Mr. Patel used the example of soft drinks to illustrate the disadvantages that come with this global approach to imported and exported food: Before 1990 India had never seen Coke or Pepsi, he said. However, once these sugary products swooped in with their powerful marketing campaigns, it was “like Alien versus Predator,” he said.” “No matter who wins, we lose.”

But things aren’t all bad. Mr. Patel ended his lecture with examples of food sovereignty at work. He spoke of a community of farmers in Malawi that has discovered new and sustainable farming techniques. Rather than relying on monoculture crops, they plant leguminous trees that replenish nitrogen levels in the soil and provide shade, causing harvest yields to increase by fifteen percent. This community also engages in “recipe days,” he said, where families come together to experiment with the new crops.

Mr. Patel believes that this sort of democratic conversation is critical to the successful renovation of our food system.

“We need to transform it so that everyone gets to eat,” he said emphatically. “We are not just consumers of democracy, we are its proprietors.”