It would be a good idea to look up this information about what is being cited, rather than taking it at face value.

The Green Revolution, despite its drawbacks, still saved the lives of a Billion people. What we need is a Green Green Revolution.

First, not to dismiss Pollan and Patel, for they are doing fantastic work, but at least on the topics of Africa, the green revolution, and hunger there is a huge academic literature that has interrogated and critiqued the tropes that the US food-industrial complex has been pedaling over the last few decades. While I don’t want to suggest that somehow the academics are a better source I do think that it is important to recognize how widespread this critique is and how the findings which support much of what Pollan and Patel say has been subject to the rigors of peer review. Given the tactics that companies like Monsanto have been using, brilliantly deconstructed in Rob’s post COOL-ing Down Monsanto, it might be helpful to at least engage them on the terms of scientific rigor. Given that the standard portrayal of the sust. food and ag. movement is that we’re a bunch of ideological romantics playing around in fantasy land, it is helpful to be able to point to research which is a bit less explicitly polemic. There is plenty of it and I’d be happy to provide citations for anyone who is interested.

My second concern is with your conclusion, specifically the notion that solving the problem of hunger lies outside the capitalist machine. I object to this not because I support capitalism, but rather because I think it is a bit of an oversimplified portrayal which fails to recognize how much of the “food” movement has already been incorporated into the logics of capitalism. The industrialization of USDA organics and the close ties between the SOLE food movement and urban gentrification are only two pieces of evidence. The discussions about what is a fair price for farmers to charge at Farmers Markets is also pretty good evidence that buying local food is, if anything, MORE capitalist than the heavily subsidized industrial food model. There was an interesting article a few years back about why conservatives should love the local food movement that made many of these points. This may be a bit uncomfortable for some of us who wish that capitalism would go away, but I think that we need to realize that the choice about how to deal with food production in Africa is not about capitalism or some alternative. I would argue that even for those who consider themselves ardent free-market capitalists there are some pretty compelling reasons to stop putting Africa over the barrel so to speak. Failed states, pirates, terrorist training camps are all very bad for business. Billions of Africans whose brains aren’t being atrophied by malnutrition and who can participate in market economies because they aren’t being gouged by seed supply companies would actually be very beneficial to a whole range of other industries. Of course, I’m not saying that the solution to African hunger is greater exposure to the forces of capitalism, but the choice about how to address hunger is somewhat tangential to the debate about capitalism. We could also point out that based on the evidence of the Green Revolution continuing down that path is going to be to the detriment of everyone. Pest resistance will spread, zoonotic diseases will evolve at greater rates, and so on.

Again, I bring these points up not to counter the notion that biotech will increase hunger which, in the current form, I agree with 100%. Rather understanding the viability of political options does require attention to the underlying logics being deployed by participants in the debate. I’ll also fess up and confess to being a slightly overzealous graduate student with a love of obscure theory! However, I actually think that the space academia afford actually is useful in terms of picking apart these arguments. I only wish that academics were more active in using their skills to enhance activist efforts, but as the Lotter piece points out, the political economy of academic publishing is a whole other debate.

Unfortunately neoliberalism lives on. So long as the US pushes a policy away from public investment and towards a private sector economy for places like Africa it is hopeless.