Food supply: Q&A with Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved

If we don't change the way we live and eat, then more than a billion people could soon go hungry every year.

That may sound like an exaggeration, but according to Raj Patel, 850 million people went hungry in 2006, meaning they didn't know where their next meal was coming from at least once during the year. And that number keeps growing.

While it may seem like an alarming statistic, Patel — the author of Stuffed and Starved — says he's no prophet of apocalypse. But he adds that if we care about our health and the health of the planet, we must change.

"The way we eat today is kind of disconnected from the way food is grown and it can sometimes feel like what's happening in the field has very little to do with the choices that we make in supermarkets," Patel says.

He says those supermarkets are stocked with "an abundance of cheap calories," products of agribusiness that have contributed "to record levels of diet-related disease, harming us today and planting a time-bomb in the bodies of children around the world."

For example, Patel says, "today, Mexicans drink more Coca-Cola than milk." The consequence is that nearly one in 10 Mexicans lives with diabetes. And the cost to Mexico to treat that disease is about $15 billion US a year.

Transnational agricultural corporations

The food system Patel talks about in his book includes "transnational agricultural corporations" that control 40 per cent of world trade in food. For example, he says, 20 companies control the world coffee trade, six control 70 per cent of the wheat trade and one controls 98 per cent of packaged tea.

In a compelling account of what's wrong with the world's food system, Patel, who worked as a consultant for the World Bank, takes aim at that institution as well as the World Trade Organization for policies that have led to death and destruction across the world.

"The food system is a battlefield, though few realize quite how many casualties there have been," he says.

The stories are staggering.

From hundreds of farmer suicides in India to violent peasant protests in South Korea, from thousands of dispossessed farmers in South and Central America to the rampant loss of the family farm in North America, Patel tells a tale that compels one to think before eating.

Taking action

Many assume there is no hope against the economic clout of the food industry giants.

Wrong, says Patel. In Stuffed and Starved, he lists 10 changes we must make to make a difference in the world.

1. Transform our tastes - don't eat processed food, eat slowly, prepare your own food, and savour it. 
2. Eat locally and seasonally.
3. Eat agroecologically — try to eat food grown in harmony with its local environment, learn about your local environment and grow your own food. 
4. Support locally owned business.
5. All workers have the right to dignity — freedom to organize and work without persecution. 
6. Profound and comprehensive rural change — build rural areas with economic opportunities and a quality of life that attracts families.
7. Living wages for all.
8.  Support for a sustainable architecture of food — rethink open space and sprawl as we develop.
9. Snapping the food system's bottleneck — among other things, end subsidies to agribusiness, aggressively police their monopolies and tax processed food to a level where it reflects the harm it does. 
10. Owning and providing restitution for the injustices of the past and present — that rich countries of the Global North such as Britain forgive debts and pay reparations to countries exploited in the Global South.

One thing we can do right away to bring about change, Patel says, is simply not go into supermarkets.

"At the moment they're the sort of ground zero of the modern industrial food system. And breaking free of that involves some sort of creativity, but the rewards are well worth it," he says.

The way we eat now, he adds, "demands unsustainable levels of water and energy use. It contributes to global warming and provides fertile ground for disease," such as mad cow disease and avian influenza that Patel says is "overwhelmingly, a poultry disease."

He adds "the alternative would be then to connect with your local producers, with your local markets, with your local community-supported agriculture initiative, and that's a very good way of getting on to a track for not just a sustainable food system, but also for making yourself healthier and getting involved with your community."

If we do that, Patel says, we'll enjoy food more, savour it and connect better with it. And in so doing, he believes we'll break free of some of the questionable choices that are being made for us by the food system.

"The only way that corporations have ever been reined in, that limits have ever been put on their power, is through substantial organized and democratic movements of people getting together and making a hell of a lot of noise, and reminding governments that although their bills and expenses may be paid by the corporations, at the end of the day, they [politicians] have to be voted for."

If you think that's tilting at windmills, Patel disagrees.

"Look at the way Americans are tilting now," he says. "If someone had said to you four years ago, 'Yeah, you know the next president of the U.S. will likely be African American,' you would have said that's batshit crazy. And yet it's looking increasingly likely that it will be."

Grassroots movement

Patel says changes in the food system could be spurred by the recent rise in oil prices that are drastically affecting food prices. He points to places such as Cuba and Mali where, he says, rising transportation costs were combated by turning to small, local sources of sustainable agriculture.

To illustrate what's right and wrong with the world's food system, he goes to the people most intimately involved in food production - peasants. Patel looks at La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way), which he says is arguably the world's largest independent social movement. It includes groups from across that world, with a membership of nearly 150 million people.

Via Campesina's goals mesh well with what more and more consumers want today, he says. "Everyone wants to be able to eat well, and few want it to happen at the expense of the poor. Via Campesina, turning around the language of the WTO, says: 'Access to markets? Yes we want access to our own markets.'"

Patel highlights Brazil's Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra — the Landless Rural Workers Movement or MST — for showing a different way. MST is part of Via Campesina.

Since its inception in the 1970s, it has resettled over a million people and provided them with livelihoods, health care and education, and developed farms.