Author and former academic Raj Patel speaks to Jocelyn Newmarch about the impact of food middlemen on the world’s nations, the disparity between the obese and the starving in South Africa and the benefits of GM crops.
Food processing companies generate more profit than the GDP of Canada, about $1,25trillion a year. When it comes to feeding the world, neither farmers nor consumers hold real power. Their choices are determined for them by the middlemen, says Raj Patel, a former academic at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the author of Stuffed & Starved: Money, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Now based in San Francisco, Patel worked for the World Bank, interned at the World Trade Organisation and consulted for the United Nations. He was tear-gassed while protesting against his former employers on four continents.
How does South Africa reproduce the systems you describe?
South Africa is the poster child for a country both stuffed and starved. The obesity rate in South Africa is the same as in the United States, with 57% of women and 29% of men either obese or overweight (with a much higher rate among black women than white, with Indian and coloured somewhere in between). Yet, in 2004, nearly 3% of deaths in South Africa were attributed to malnutrition.
South Africa also embodies another key contradiction, that of profoundly unequal land distribution. A few large farms lie in the hands of a minority, while the majority of people in rural areas have limited or no access to land. It is these people who, more than any other group in South Africa, risk dying of hunger.
And yet South Africa is home to Shoprite, Africa’s largest retailer. Shoprite has moved across the continent and even to India with surprising ferocity. And not everyone is happy with its arrival in the countries where it sets up shop. Farmers in Zambia were so incensed at Shoprite’s arrival and its refusal to buy crops from them that they threatened to burn down the company.
Herein lies the central contradiction. While a few people get extremely rich, those most likely to go hungry are the rural poor and those most likely to be obese are the urban poor. They go hungry because they’re either too poor to afford food at all or can afford only the cheapest and most unhealthy food.
Does food ever make you feel guilty?
For me the appropriate response to the way our food comes to us shouldn’t be guilt. It should be anger. Anger is a far more potent fuel for change than guilt and anger is likely to address the underlying issues; far more likely to spur progressive change than guilt ever could.
Ever eaten a Big Mac?
Yep, and I used to be a McNugget addict when I was a kid. I’m sympathetic to people who can’t kick the McHabit. When you see what they put in the food in fast food restaurants to make us crave it, you understand that we face some steep odds. I’m also not one to bash people for eating fast food. For most of us it’s the only way to get a hot meal in a hurry.
But that’s why the Slow Food movement is so interesting. With their roots in Italian socialism, the founders of Slow Food had a strong egalitarian streak. They asked: ‘Why is it that only rich people get to enjoy food? Why can’t everyone have pleasure when they eat?” They realised that to really enjoy food, you need two things: time and money. So they campaigned for a living wage for workers and a two-hour lunch break. It’s this kind of practical imagination that will shift us away from Big Macs and towards healthier (and tastier) fare.
I like the idea of organic, but it seems difficult to feed entire populations on organic produce. I think one solution could be GM crops, despite the unsavoury business model.
Opponents to GM crops aren’t opposing science. They’re keen to deploy the best science possible in service of the majority of people. Bear in mind that GM crops today come in two main varieties, one that is resistant to a powerful weedkiller and another that exudes pesticide from its pores. These seeds are owned and sold by the pesticide industry and the seed for more than 88% of GM crop cover worldwide is sold by just one pesticide company: Monsanto.
GM crops are the most lucrative (for a handful of people) solution to the perceived problem of hunger, but not necessarily the best for the majority of farmers and consumers, society or the environment. Public science offers a better way forward than the monopoly we live with.
The call to eat local appears to punish the mostly agriculture-based economies of the south, which export to wealthy northern countries. The trend to eat locally and seasonally endangers jobs in poor communities.
The reason the developing world looks the way it does is because of the history of colonialism that is hitched to food (and brilliantly demonstrated by Mike Davis in his Late Victorian Holocausts). Until forced to export their food to Europe, Brazil and India had high shares of global GDP.
As Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, noted, it was through colonialism that ‘India’s share of world income collapsed from 22,6% in 1700, almost equal to Europe’s share of 23,3% at that time, to as low as 3,8% in 1952.”
By contrast, Europe and the US became industrial and agricultural powerhouses precisely because they assiduously protected their economies, using measures that are now deemed illegal by the World Trade Organisation. It’s not unreasonable to demand that the European Union and US stop dumping their subsidised agricultural produce in the Third World — farmers in Europe and the US are subsidised to the tune of billions of dollars a year and, with this boost, they can certainly whale on farmers in developing countries.
The playing field isn’t just tilted against the poor at an international level — it’s skewed domestically, too. The majority of exports in the developing world are generated through a handful of large farms. The majority of small farmers and farm workers in the developing world have access to little if any land at all.
Adopting export agriculture as a strategy to help the poor is pointless if they can’t even get into the game. In this South Africa has done spectacularly badly. By generous estimates, 6% of land has been transferred from white hands to black. There’s a need to act on land reform in a far more serious and comprehensive way than the department of land affairs has managed so far.
It is only through a comprehensive package of reforms — including land reform, increased public funding for agricultural research and extension services, credit for farmers and a favourable economic environment — that agriculture anywhere in the world has enabled the poorest to thrive.