Stuffed and Starved

Markets, Power and the Hidden battle for the World’s Food System

By Raj Patel

Pubs. Portobello Books

Hdbck. £16.99

Have you ever thought that there may be a direct connection between increasing obesity in the industrialised countries and poverty and starvation in the rest of the world? That both are the direct result of capitalism and transnational corporations is perhaps not such a surprise, but Raj Patel explains just how this relationship comes about.

Patel has an interesting background. He has degrees from three of the world’s top universities, and is at present a researcher at the University of Kwa Zulu in South Africa. He is also a gamekeeper turned poacher. After working for the World Bank and as a consultant to the UN, he swapped sides and is now an avid campaigner for the other side and been tear-gassed while demonstrating for the rights of small food producers.

Naomi Klein gives his book the accolade of ‘one of the most dazzling books I’ve read in a long time. The product of a brilliant mind, and a gift to a world hungering for justice’. She is absolutely right; it is a must-read for anyone keen to understand how the present system of food production and distribution grinds the poorest in the word while making the rich richer, and from a Marxist perspective.

He writes with an easy flowing, eloquency but also an urgency and commitment rare in an academic writer. He shows how the corporations not only sell us our food, but also determine what we eat or don’t eat. There are hundreds of apple varieties in the world, so why is it we only find four on the supermarket shelves? Because these varieties are pretty, keep well when waxed, are bland in taste and don’t bruise easily in transport. Whereas breakfast cereals – highly processed with large profit-margins– are offered more than a dozen varieties, all with high salt and sugar content and not good for us. In other words our choices are determined by their convenience to the big wholesalers and retailers.

The rich countries and multi-nationals are also determining what food is grown and sold in all countries of the world. Today, food eaten by India’s poorest is worse for the first time since independence in 1947. Thousands of Mexican farmers were forced off their land and into the over-crowded cities by the import dumping of cheap, state-subsidised US maize, under a bilateral trade agreement. And those Mexicans who live closer to the US border tend to be more obese than their compatriots.

Tens of thousands of small farmers slave on coffee and tea plantations for our pleasure; in Kenya they grow roses or beans for our supermarket shelves, while they themselves go hungry. Agriculture has become divorced from urban living and it needs to become re-embedded in society. Throughout the world farmer suicide rates have risen, but this hardly registers in our newspapers or in our consciousness.

In 2005 in the USA 35.1 million people didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, whereas there were more diet-related diseases like diabetes, and more food, in the US than ever before. On the other hand, 70% of antibiotics produced in the USA are used in the livestock industry; 60% of US grain is fed to animals. But poverty in the USA is often masked - the poor are often not skeletally thin, but actually over-weight, because they have been persuaded to eat ‘cheap’ junk food which gives energy but not nourishment.

Patel shows how the big food retailers have taken governments captive. The USA refused a visa to the French environmentalist, José Bové, after being leaned on by McDonalds, and they are not alone in using such measures to gag protest.

He argues convincingly, that to change ourselves we need to change the world and to change the world we need to change ourselves; both are necessary; both are difficult. He also argues the need for trade union input, as a vital factor in combating poverty wages and exploitation. We can’t expect supermarkets to act ethically, he says, when their loyalty is to their shareholders and profits are the determining factor. The Fair Trade movement is laudable but it is rather like throwing crumbs to the starving in terms of seriously addressing the problem.

One of the book’s guiding themes is that wherever and whenever the wounds of the current food order have been inflicted, people have organised and fought back. That is the positive message in a book that otherwise paints a daunting picture.

END

757 words

John Green

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Posted on 5 October, 2007 - 15:15