With his extensive academic and research credentials, Raj Patel is a prolific activist. Currently a visiting scholar in the Center for African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, a Fellow at the Institute of Food and Development Policy and a Research Associate at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, he evidently has 'a lot on his plate'. Having had been intensely involved with land struggles and land reform politics through his association with organisations like Food First and The Land Research Action Network, coupled with his previous work experience with imposing corporate institutes like The World Bank and The World Trade Organization, Patel is equipped with an almost holistic overview of the functioning of food systems. In his first novel Stuffed And Starved (HarperCollins-India), the author delves into the causes and implications of the glaring imbalances with regard to food distribution and consumption that exist globally. Outlining the role of corporate bodies, their machinations that govern food policies and the current state of the agricultural sector (particularly in the countries of South East Asia) Raj Patel discusses the various facets of the food crisis plaguing the world with BW Online's Alokita Datta.
What in your opinion will the ramifications of the collapse of the WTO trade talks entail for South Asian countries like India, for instance? Do you think this round could have helped redress the 'rot at the core of the modern food system', through tariff negotiations?
While the talks have collapsed, the Doha round is alive and well. Trade talks are diplomacy's zombies and, despite current appearances, they will be back from the dead soon enough. They will rise again after the Indian and US elections have passed. This longevity isn't, however, a good thing. The Indian government is looking for international trading gains for those involved in services and intellectual property, and the government seems very prepared to sacrifice those involved in agriculture to satisfy India's booming middle class. After the election year, the impediments of conscience that the ruling parties currently have will have been hurdled. And Indian farmers are having it good - at least their government gets consulted before selling them out. Other South Asian countries aren't even extended this courtesy. The usual protocol for trade negotiations for countries outside the EU, North America, Japan, Brazil, India, China, and Russia is that their representatives will be shown a text, and told to sign it or else. This, after all, is how trade negotiations have been conducted in the past. Why should it change?
What is the intended purpose behind releasing Stuffed and Starved?
The purpose of Stuffed and Starved was to join the dots between the way our food is grown and the way we eat today. The way it has grown hurts the world's poorest people - farmers - and the way we eat today, increasingly tipped by corporations into the wrong food choices, is creating an obesity epidemic, and hurting everyone. The way we grow food today is unsustainable, and things need to change if we're not to end up with some very grave consequences for all of humanity, beyond the nearly 1 billion people who are currently food insecure. The time does seem to have been right for this sort of analysis. Stuffed and Starved went into its second printing in the US within a month of coming out, and it has been a bestseller in Canada and Australia. And as India begins to embrace supermarkets and increasingly western diets, it's worth knowing how much the illusion of choice actually costs. India is the world's most stuffed and starved country and it seems that everything is being done to exacerbate, rather than combat, this vicious inequality.
In this book, and other analyses as well, you have elaborated the diametrical disparities that exist within developed and developing countries alike. How do socio-political factors contribute in effecting this divide in different contexts?
Hunger and, increasingly, obesity are both signs that people are unable to command a decent diet. It's easy to see how hunger is caused by poverty. In developed countries in particular, though, obesity has a class basis. In Spain, for instance, the poorest 10 per cent of the population are twice as likely to be obese than the richest 10 per cent. Working harder, longer, for fewer wages, it's not surprising that working class people are being forced into the cheapest, and poorest, food choices. In India, a key socio-economic factor is the rural-urban divide. While diabetes prevalence is around 3 per cent in rural areas, it's 12 per cent in most urban surveys, and the one survey I have seen taken in a slum puts the incidence at 10 per cent. India's urban food environments are poisoning rich and poor alike.
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While continual opposition to Genetically Modified foods/crops is maintained by a number of countries, the Indian government has sanctioned the cultivation of Bt cotton and golden rice, focusing on the merits of this process over the last few years. Do you feel though that the adversities with regard to the use of GMOs severely outweigh its advantages apart from the dependence on corporate companies for seeds?
Golden rice is a fine example about what's wrong with GM. It's desperately important to fight vitamin A blindness. Golden rice is a way of adding genetically adding vitamin A to white rice, making it golden. In the first generation of these crops, a child would need to eat 50 bowls to get their recommended daily allowance of vitamin A. But assuming that they've managed to pack in more vitamin A, GM fails to address the key issue. The reason that children go blind isn't because their rice lacks vitamin A - it's because all they can afford to eat is rice. Now, if you add this spectacular bit of misdirection to the other complaints about GM - specifically that in the long term they don't increase yield, and that they've been engineered principally by pesticide companies, and that there are proven farming technologies, such as agro ecology, that increase yields many times over conventional agriculture, and the case for GM collapses. But, like the trade talks, there are some very powerful interests keen to revivify GM.
The Guardian recently unearthed a 'secret' study conducted by the World Bank which claimed that the intensive use of biofuels has caused food prices to rise by 75 per cent. Your comments on the impact biofuels have in the near future?
'Biofuels' is the name given to the process of growing food not in order to eat it, but in order to set it on fire. It is, as one UN official put it, a crime against humanity. And while 75 per cent is a little high, the figure around which there is consensus, 25 per cent, is substantially higher than the Bush administration estimate of 3 per cent. The tide, happily, does seem to be turning against the substitution of food for fuel, but the US has locked in its biofuels policies for the next five years with the latest farm bill, and the short term consequences are unlikely to be good.
The most recent argument advocated in favour of biofuels by scientists and bureaucrats in India revolves around the minimal 'maintenance' required in growing biofuel plants like Jatropha, for instance. With reference to the cause of sustainable development, do you agree that biofuels are the way to make India 'self-sufficient' in energy resources?
Why does energy policy need to be pyromaniac? Why does an energy policy automatically mean having a stock of something to burn? I think the way to make India energy-independent is, first, to increase energy efficiency. Soon, like every other country on earth, India will need to become a zero-carbon economy. I don't know the carbon debt that jatropha growth will have, but I am concerned that delaying the harder choices involved in moving to a zero-carbon economy, choices that will upset India's billionaire industrialists most of all, will ultimately hurt India's energy independence ambitions.
What is the socio-economic viability of practising alternative methods of agricultural production with the aim of being 'agro ecological' in India? To what extent will government intervention determine initiatives like the formation of local food systems?
There are lakhs of hectares under agro ecological methods in India already. But just as the Green Revolution required government intervention, so will there need to be investment in the kinds of science and agricultural infrastructure that agro ecological methods need. If this sounds like some sort of eco-utopia (or eco-hell, depending on your view) bear in mind that an august panel of scientists, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, pondered the question of how we're going to feed the world in 2050, when there will be 9 billion of us. The answer isn't through green revolution or GM technology – it will be precisely through locally appropriate and environmentally informed farming. It's something India would do well to encourage sooner rather than later.
'alokita (dot) datta (at) gmail (dot) com'
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