NOTE: If you don't read anything else this week, do read this great review by Iain Boal, the social historian of science and technics at the University of California, Berkeley, of Raj Patel's important book.
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Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power, and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Portobello Books, London, 2007.
Reviewed in Seminar Magazine, New Delhi (issue on Agrarian Transition, March 2009).
The witty dust-jacket sets the tone. Its hessian look references those familiar post-consumer brown paper bags you find next to the bulk bins of wild rice and fig newtons in the food co-ops of London and San Francisco. The back matter dares you to forgo the promise of answers to these questions: "Why is there still global hunger? Why does everything contain soy? Is there an obesity epidemic? Who invented supermarkets? Who profits from the world's crops? How do all these questions connect?"
The packaging may be ironic, but the fare inside is the real thing, an eight-course feast if that's the word prepared by the organic intellectual of the food sovereignty movement. Stuffed and Starved delivers on its promise to connect the dots, from "field to fork". This is the book for anyone trying to get a handle on the global food system, its contours and complexities, how we arrived at the current crisis and why market-led solutions and biotech fixes can’t possibly get us out of it.
Patel approaches the question from an explicitly populist perspective, and the book's dedication - "For the everyday heroines and heroes" foreshadows the spirit of the enterprise. "The view that informs this book", Patel announces in the introduction, is "a common understanding of the international food system" shared by "a fistful of organizations not only fighting against this food system, and sometimes dying in protest, but building alternatives to it, and living in dignity." The small farmers, that is, of the global South from the KRRS in India to the landless peasants of the MST in South America and all the millions who belong to what must be the largest social movement on the planet, La Via Campesina.
Given this allegiance, it might seem surprising that Raj Patel, in the time since the book was first launched, has managed something that very few declared enemies of the present order have done. He is getting a hearing in the halls of power, in the opinion pages of the mainstream press, and on prime time TV and radio in Britain and the US. Only a few get past the gatekeepers of the tweedledum-tweedledee, if-you-hate-Pepsi-you'll-love-Coke, bipartisan consensus of the US political class and its licensed stenographers. Noam Chomsky, for instance, has not been heard on the US public broadcasting network in forty years. So what is it that accounts for the wide reception of a book that fundamentally challenges capitalist agriculture and calls for "a radically new food system"?
For a start, the book is blessed by its timing. That there is a systemic crisis in agriculture, linked in complex ways to the climatic and financial meltdowns, is now impossible to deny. The capitalists themselves insist on it, indeed are depending on it. The current reality is powerfully conveyed in the opening chapter entitled "A Rural Autopsy", where the author's skills an impressive combination of literary flair and analytic chops are on display. The plight of the world's rural poor in the age of neoliberalism is vividly presented through the symptomatic lens of farmer suicide. The awful statistics are made flesh in the poignant story of a widow from Andhra Pradesh who struggles on in the aftermath of her husband's death. She is among the myriads of poor women who are bearing the main load in this unfolding disaster. Burdened by drought and debt, her husband had poisoned himself with pesticide bought on borrowed money. It's an account that rips the mask off the mythos of "Shining India", but Patel at once disabuses those who imagine that farmers in the Northern heartland are somehow winners in this modern food system.
Stuffed and Starved reveals how the globalized market has meant that control of farming has passed almost completely out of the hands of farmers themselves, all over the planet. Moreover, the idea of the "market" itself is in large part a fiction. We would do well to recall Fernand Braudel's conclusion, after a lifetime of studying the history of exchange, that what we have been taught to call "the market" (how did the Chicago boys pull this off?) should in truth be named the "anti-market". Its essence is monopoly, monopsony and the cartel; it has almost nothing in common with the glories of the old agora and suk.
Patel goes on, rightly, to insist also on the violence at the heart of the business. He enlists Thomas Friedman, the New York Times pundit, who for once spoke accurately almost when he wrote: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist". Hidden fist? Maybe in Friedman's neighbourhood, but in the global South the fist of the hegemon and its proxies is mostly out in the open. The architects of the international food system would no doubt be reluctant to acknowledge the full reality about the actual foodscapes where what we eat is grown, processed and packaged for consumption at home, in the car, in the work cubicle. The rural idyll is long past its sell-by date; the reality has little bucolic about it. More Bosch than Blake.
By way of vivid cameos and short case studies, Raj Patel walks us the length of the food chain. Along the way we get illuminating lessons on the history of NAFTA and popular resistance to neoliberal trade agreements; on colonial policy, famine and food aid; on banana republics and high fructose corn syrup; on Green Revolutions old and new; on Monsanto, GMOs and the commodification of germplasm; on soybeans and slave labour; on Wal-Mart versus community supported agriculture (CSA); on hunger and obesity being two faces of the same coin; on the Black Panthers and the People's Grocery of Oakland.
Patel hitches his wagon to the programme of the Via Campesina, the landless of the Mato Grosso and the dispossessed in the favelas and jhuggies of the global South. He pitches their case the demand for the right to food, support for agro-ecological farming, fishing and pastoralism, recognition of the need to nurture soil fertility and encourage carbon sequestration, comprehensive agrarian reform to protect the various means of food production, and resistance to agrofuels to a Northern audience, whom he seeks to convince ultimately share a common interest in transforming the system. It is significant that he forbears from using the idiom of the Left, or what passes for the Left in the grim dawn of the new century, in favour of the humanitarian language of rights and opportunities. "I have cleaved", says Patel, "to ideas and principles in which people from across the political spectrum might believe; in terms of justice, fairness, and equality of opportunity".
Raj Patel has made this rhetorical wager, it seems, in an ambitious attempt at a practical intervention in global food policy. A tall order for a scholarship boy from Balliol College who, although he interned at the IMF, went to work for the World Bank and UNCTAD, then turned to bite the hands that fed him, if not others. He may just pull it off.
In some ways, recent developments, since the book was published, have helped him by further undermining the neoliberal agenda of IMF and the World Bank. On the other hand, the struggle now involves a fresh round of genetic enclosures to which Obama committed himself in his inaugural speech: "We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories." This is confirmed by his appointments of Lawrence "the Third World is grossly underpolluted" Summers, and Steven Chu, the atomic physicist, now Secretary of Energy, who helped to coordinate the half billion dollar greenwashing deal between British Petroleum and UC Berkeley to develop agrofuels. This is dispiriting to those who have kept up with recent research concerning the claims and consequences of biofuels; for example, the findings that agrofuel policy was responsible for up to a third of last year's price hikes, not to mention the food riots following the speculative bubble in maize, that biomass-based fuel will not in fact reduce the amount of CO2 emitted, and that agrofuels take more energy to grow and process that they release.
What the regressive Obama agriculture and energy appointments make clear is that only a serious increase in pressure from below has any chance of bringing about the essential changes so eloquently presented in Stuffed and Starved. In summary, sweeping land reform, a jubilee (cancellation of debts), reparations for historic injustices, the revoking of cash and carbon subsidies to agribusiness, and a broad implementation of the Via Campesina programme that would allow regional food systems to flourish without fetishizing the local or insisting "Everyone to their own watershed". One might add, the defunding of "synthetic biology" (biotech rebranded), a putative science based on the notion of "biobricks" and a reductionist view of life that may already have done wanton and irretrievable damage, though no one except a small crew of scientists associated with Genøk in the Norwegian Arctic has yet cared enough to measure the dispersal of agricultural transgenes in the biosphere.
And finally, if this reviewer had his way, a five-year moratorium on gastroporn in our local Bay Area newspapers, assuming they last that long.
Iain Boal
Berkeley
15. ii. 2009