Stuffed & Starved

Raj Patel is much sought after these days since the rise in the price of food worldwide. In his book he attempts to explain the world food system in the tradition of Frances Moore Lappe's Food First and Diet for a Small Planet. I already know quite a bit about the system so there wasn't too much that was new to me in his account. Some explanations stand out. The Hourglass Figure he describes, with accompanying charts, is a good visual image for how money is made in the food system at the point where it is processed by large scale mechanization owned by a few mega corporations like Nestles. These companies process flour for tortillas, beans for coffee, rice when its milled and soybean crushing, for example and cause bottlenecks that jack the price up because only a few players can process food on large scale to meet demand.

He also describes how, historically, the food system was developed to feed those working in the newly industrialized urban areas. The point was to keep this cheap labor from revolting by feeding them cheaply at the expense of the farmers. Our food system technologies came about because of the needs of war, he explains, in that food had to be preserved for transportation under adverse conditions, plus the surplus created by government subsidizing the war effort in food supplies was the beginning of surplus grain being used to manipulate world politics through AID. The whole sociopolitical impact of government policies, AID and trade all play a part in how destructive agribusiness is to life on earth basically. He shows to what lengths Monsanto and company are willing to go to get their way for GMO seeds.

On the other end of the spectrum he talks about how the supermarket was developed to exploit people's impulses to buy. And the inputs in our food that allow it to be transported without damage, but have a huge impact on how crops are used—lecithin for instance. In discussing the obesity epidemic he points out that this is rarely discussed as a symptom of the failures of our food system and poverty, but is blamed on the individual. Obesity patterns in US very similar that of South Africa.

He describes a couple of movements working to change the system including the Landless Rural Movement in Brazil which is a voluntary cooperative system that is democratically run and organized by the farmers trying to occupy land. The details he gives from having visited one of these settlements broadened my understanding of this movement which Noam Chomsky called the world's most important social movement.

He is a fan of the Slow Food movement and farmer's markets, but not organic food in that organic food production as applied to agribusiness is not much different from chemical agribusiness.

In his conclusion he lists 10 ways to change the system

1. Transform our tastes and get away from what commercial food production has taught us to want.
2. Eat locally and seasonally
3. Eat agroecologically meaning eat food produced in harmony with the local environment as developed in Cuba and embraced by Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution in Japan as well as the UN developed sustainable agriculture network.
4. Support locally owned business not supermarkets or big box stores. He points out the flaw in corporate responsibility because it hinges on profit being made.
5. All workers have the right to dignity through unions that are allowed to organize without persecution.
6. Profound and comprehensive rural change such as equitable land distribution, but also including education, healthcare and infrastructure.
7. Living wages for all so poor can access food.
8. Support for sustainable architecture of food. Local markets and CSAs.
9. Snapping the food system's bottleneck. Curb power of monopoles through anti-trust laws.
10. Owning and providing restitution for the injustices of the past and present. Forgive debt owed by the Global South to the Global North and start paying back for damage we have done.