In his latest book, The Value of Nothing, Raj Patel explores the failures of so-called free market capitalism, and highlights some of the ways people are changing the democratic system. One of the most exciting social movements for Patel is the food movement, where thousands of people are raising the bar for social justice by improving the health and environmental impacts of the food we produce, and the labor practices employed in how we bring food to the table, with the goal of providing a stable food supply for all people.

The title of his book comes from a quote by Oscar Wilde, “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I spoke to Patel this week to better understand where our market system went wrong, and how we can begin to reclaim the idea of value from the marketplace.

Civil Eats: You book centers around the idea that price is not a proper indicator of value. How are the costs left out of the price getting paid?

Raj Patel: Well, we pay $4 for a hamburger at our local burger joint, but Indian researchers looked at the environmental costs of producing a hamburger and came up with the figure that that burger should cost $200. That is just the environmental costs. But we [also] pay in terms of lost biodiversity, species that are lost through deforestation, [and] through increased climate change. There was a study a couple of years ago that did the math with the way that we over-consume today, and if you add up the excess debt, from the depletion of the ozone layer, to the migrations and mitigation costs of climate change, the costs in terms of emptying the seas, [and] increased desertification, then people in developing countries pay way more than we do. We owe them around 5 trillion dollars, with a very conservative calculation. [In addition] one in five health care dollars in the United States is spent on taking care of someone who has diabetes. Those are the costs that we pay not at the check out, but through our health insurance system. And thats why in the book I say that cheap food is cheat food. The way that food is made cheap in the United States involves all sorts of cut corners from the environmental costs we don’t pay to the labor costs we don’t pay… But we all end up paying for it in the end, just not the corporations.

CE: Stephen Colbert asked you [when you were on his show, the Colbert Report, last week] if we should just be paying $200 for a hamburger, but you argue for a different approach.

RP: That seems like where the argument would be heading, if the issue was that we should just pay the full costs of things, and let the market guide our consumption. Eventually we’d just end up paying a tax, and the increased costs would end up being a disproportionate tax on poor people. If we’re interested in a comprehensive public health care scheme, with things like the soda tax, then we need to look at the whole system. And the whole system involves people’s ability to afford food in the first place. When you have 1 in 3 kids born in 2000 who will develop diabetes, and 1 in 2 kids of color [of the same age] who will develop diabetes, its worth asking that deeper question. And when you get into that deeper question, you get immediately into the issue of poverty. So what I’m arguing for is certainly a move towards us paying the full costs of the goods that we produce, but we need to tackle poverty and we need to tackle the appalling state of low wages in the United States, but more than that, what I am arguing for is a more democratic way in which we live with the consequences of our economic actions.

CE: Throughout the book you refer to an economist, Karl Polanyi. Could you explain his philosophy?

RP: Karl Polanyi [had the idea that] there is no such thing as a market that is entirely self-regulating, because markets are instruments that people have made. But what Polanyi was also saying was that when this myth of the free market goes too far, and those markets collapse, society comes back in what is called a “double movement” in order to correct the worst excesses of the free market. He was writing about developments in 19th century Britain, but he was writing in the middle of the second world war when he’d seen full well how Germany, for example, had reacted to the market going crazy in the 1920s, when the reign of the free market was responded to by the rise of the far right in the 1930s and the collapse of markets, and the depression fomented a great deal of right wing organizing as well as left wing organizing. So one of the reasons I use Karl Polanyi is because he offers a way of thinking about how we can reclaim the balance between market and society, but also a warning for what happens if we allow other people to reclaim that balance for us.

CE: You spend a lot of time in the book talking about the ‘commons.’ Could you explain that concept?

RP: Its not straight forward, because the way that most of us come to the idea of the commons is through the sort of misguided idea that it is stuff that isn’t really owned by anyone and therefore gets destroyed because we are all selfish — the so-called “tragedy of the commons.” But the commons isn’t like that, the commons have always been a way that the community can value and manage resources together in a way that doesn’t rely on markets, but does rely on a more engaged kind of community democracy. The commons [also] offers a great way of internalizing externalities. If you live with the consequences of your actions, then your learn from your actions in the future and modify them to make your actions sustainable. At the moment our food system is entirely unsustainable, and we do need to be living within our means. And I think the food movement is kind of heading that way much faster than any other sector of the economy.

CE: How do you think we can reclaim the commons?

RP: Its important to remember that the commons is not just stuff, but that it about the ways of governing that stuff. In the book I talk about how it’s important for us to re-develop that side of ourselves, a side of us that is available to engage in community politics and engage in civic politics. Now that may sound fairly soft, but actually there are some tremendous examples of how we can together value things without surrendering them to a market. That involves things like participatory budgeting, where everyone in a city gets together and discusses how it is that city resources will be spent. This involves us abandoning the side of us that is a consumer…it is important for us to think for a minute about what kind of citizens we want to be, particularly in this economic downturn, when we are facing some pretty dark economic times. If we are serious about reclaiming the commons, I think getting involved in the way our food, for example, can be governed locally, things like food policy councils, [which] offer a way for people to start building the kinds of demographic community organization that we need in order to actually think about controlling resources, and sharing those resources democratically.

CE: Do you think the commons should be extended to include farmland? You’ve spoken in the past about land reform, what do you think that might look like?

RP: I certainly think that the scale of farms in the United States right now is a function both of history, but also of cheap oil. And as oil becomes increasingly less cheap, and as water becomes increasingly harder to find, and as the infrastructure that supports industrial agriculture becomes increasingly unsustainable, the full costs of that come home to roost. [As] we head towards 2050, and there are going to be 9 billion of us and there aren’t the fossil fuel resources and the water resources we take for granted, we know the kinds of policies we’re going to need to survive that: we’ll need a lot more peri-urban farming and urban farming. We need to figure out the ways and strategies now to put the infrastructure in to make sure that we are able to farm and survive in the future. Does that mean that [we’ll see] land democratically and through land reform that compensates [the owner] being brought into the public domain? I think so. I’d much rather that than a few people be able to hold onto tons of land while the rest of us starve.

CE: You’ve been critical about cap and trade as a solution to climate change. Why is price a poor form of regulation?

RP: In Europe, cap and trade systems have been up for awhile, and they’ve demonstrably been bad. I have a quote in the book from someone who is in the emissions trading business making a lot of money out of it, saying basically that the polluters have done well, coal and nuclear have done very, very well, and the people who have done best are bankers. And we shouldn’t be surprised that there are a lot of chops being licked on Wall Street at the prospect of a several trillion dollar market in derivatives that share in many ways the same kind of DNA of the derivatives that got us into the last financial crisis. There are ways in which we can effectively reduce our carbon emissions, and that’s by capping them. Historically, the way we’ve reduced pollutants is by legislating them out of business. So we absolutely need caps, its just the trade which is specious, as there are plenty of opportunities for people to cheat, plenty of opportunities for people to commit fraud…Internationally there is a great deal of fraud in terms of the kinds of projects that are qualified to sell carbon emissions. I write in the book about one of the places that was suspected of being the home of the swine flu outbreak, a huge pig [confined animal feeding operation] in Veracruz, [Mexico] and one of the ways it makes a great deal of money is by selling off-set credits, because of the way that it uses pig shit. Its not as if we don’t have other approaches, other ways of making markets work. We have plenty of things to do, but we need first to invest in alternative energy, we need massive transfers to developing countries, we need to cap the amount of carbon we produce here, and we can do all of that without giving large amounts of money to banks.

CE: A solution that is being proposed to climate change by Jeffrey Sachs, Stewart Brand and others is genetically modified climate change-ready plants. Some even argue that it is possible to combine the best of organic practices with GMOs. I was wondering how you respond to that.

RP: That’s criminally stupid. The reason that it is stupid is that no one who is a climatologist seriously believes that climate change is any one thing. Climate change is precisely change, it means variability in climate patterns and consequent variability in the kinds of pests, the time at which pests come, the timing of rainfall and what have you. There isn’t a gene that deals with that and that is because no who’s worth a damn thinks that there is one gene for one trait. This is [an idea] that has become massively outdated, so people who think that there’s such a thing as a climate change gene are smoking dope. We’ve seen the best kind of solutions to climate change aren’t about adding a single gene or stacking a bunch of genes into a crop and proceeding with the idea that a monoculture is a good thing. The way to fight climate change is to have a portfolio of crops that deal with the various increased risks.

CE: I was at the Society for Ethical Culture last week and it was really a great discussion, and at one point [the host] Amy Goodman made a comment about you bringing everything back to food. You also said that you thought that the movement for food sovereignty could be a way to reclaim the market. Could you talk a bit about why you think that is?

RP: Yeah, I do always bring it back to food. I was troubled by that because I didn’t have an easy answer. And yet for me food is about life. Food brings together everything that everyone should care about. It is about giving life, it is about what we need to survive on this planet, it is about our interaction with the planet, and about the way that we replenish or don’t replenish the earth that we live on. There is something both primal and industrial and very high-capitalist about food. And it is the area where, if we are interested in life, if we’re interested in the ways that we can live on this planet sustainably, then we really do need to start with questions about food. [The food movement] is to me the most vibrant area of social change certainly in the United States but also elsewhere. In the 90s, the food movement in the United States was a laughing stock and now its really cutting edge, and people look to the United States for information on how things should change. I think that’s tremendous. I think that what food sovereignty offers is both a democratic way for us to take very seriously issues around rights, particularly around gender, but also ways in which we can think about the environment, about distribution, and poverty in ways that are sustainable. It brings it all together in ways that, if we’re concerned with social justice, whether its education, the way our institutions behave, ecology, poverty, environment, whatever it is, you’ll find it in food, and you’ll find something very exciting in the organizing around food that gives me hope in ways that very few things do these days.

In the next sentences, she gives a clue about what “tools” she might be referring to by praising the Green Revolution — without noting the depleted water table, reduced soil fertility, massive farmer debts and increased rates of farmer suicides left in the wake of the failed experiment in India.

The Green Revolution was a product of a biotechnological approach to feeding people, the thinking being that we could create ways of tricking nature in a lab: ridding ourselves of pests and weeds, increasing yields and efficiency. Unfortunately pests and weeds have become more virulent in these systems, as they evolve to withstand higher and higher doses of chemicals. These “monocultures” — field plantings of a single crop, usually corn, cotton or soy — have relied heavily on oil and resource inputs the third world can’t afford. Furthermore, these systems have yet to actually improve yields. Efficiency has been the greatest achievement of biotechnology; however, as Michael Pollan and others point out, redundancy, though counter-intuitive, is the only way to ensure food safety. But biotechnology companies like Monsanto have a huge lobbying presence in Washington, and corporate shills like Nina Federoff have the ear of Secretary Clinton. So its no surprise that in the name of philanthropy, the US has begun to adopt the “feeding the world” mantra of Big Ag.

The focus has been mostly on Africa, where a third of the population is malnourished, and where groups like the Gates Foundation are among the newcomers trying to renew the idea of creating a “Green Revolution for Africa,” using many of the same methods that have been so bad for India.

Meanwhile, here in the US, 36 million people are food insecure, and yet we are one of the biggest agricultural producers in the world. Given the fact that these commodity crops cannot be eaten until processed, it turns out that what Big Ag is feeding us is not nourishing us. So it seems that hunger is not just a function of yield, but involves distribution, concentrations of power, and policy.

At the end of the day, do we actually seek to feed these hungry people, or to feed our bottom line? Because in this instance, we can’t do both.

Raj Patel put it succinctly in a recent email exchange:

Everyone agrees that African farmers need support. But this story is like the vacuum cleaner salesman who dumps dirt on your floor to show you how his product can pick some of it up. In Africa’s case, the dirt was dumped in the 1980s, when US-led economic policy from the World Bank actively prevented African governments from investing in their farmers. The results were, the Bank now admits, a disaster. Into this disaster now steps biotechnology, offering to fix the problem. Actually, it’s a bad metaphor. This makes it sound as if GE crops can actually increase yields. The problem of hunger in Africa today has very little to do with seed quality, and a great deal to do with poverty, chronic underinvestment in agriculture, and an active stamping-out of the agroecological alternatives that have proved so successful in fighting hunger. Why are these alternatives being suppressed in US government policy? Because they’re not profitable for the US biotech industry, and the US government has, since Vice President Dan Quayle shepherded legislation in the US to support the industry, been an aggressive supporter of genetic engineering.

Patel is co-author, with Eric Holt-Giménez, of the forthcoming book, Food Rebellions: Crisis and the Hunger for Justice, which outlines the conditions which led to the global food crisis of 2008, and some of the many steps we can take to solve hunger. The book ties the issue of hunger to a growing dependence on our imports:

The profits and concentration of market power in the industrial North mirror the import dependence, food deficits and the loss of control over food systems in the global South. Fifty years ago, developing countries had yearly agricultural trade surpluses of $1 billion. Today, after decades of development and the global expansion of the industrial agrifoods complex, the Southern food deficit has ballooned to U.S.$11 billion/year (FAO 2004). The cereal import bill for Low Income Food Deficit Countries reaching over U.S.$ 38 billion in 2007/2008 (De Schutter 2008). The FAO predicts it will grow to $50 billion by 2030.

Instead of teaching poor countries to fish, so to speak, we are selling them the fish with the hook still in its mouth.

That hook infers dependence, but there is also another catch: depleted resources. Biotechnology as it is used right now cannot be sustainable. It relies heavily on three things that are waning: surplus water, cheap oil and a stable climate. As much as biotech proponents claim their technologies could be used for sustainable aims, we don’t have decades to wait while the technology is perfected. And what if it is never perfected? In addition, in putting all of our eggs in one basket with biotech, the problem is misrepresented, and solutions that are already out there are being ignored.

It seems, therefore, that the only real solution to hunger is to transform the food system from the ground up. In Africa, 80% of the population is rural, and there are 33 million small farms (those farming less than 2 hectares), which produce 90% of the continent’s food (Patel and Giménez, 2009). Why don’t we, then, instead of promoting an intensive agriculture that is ruining our environment, our health and is lining the pockets of a few corporations, increase aid to agriculture? There is plenty of fertile land in Africa, much of which is being snatched up in massive land grabs by the Chinese and other countries foreseeing their own imminent food insecurity. Perhaps its time to invest in agriculture for Africans, before it’s too late.

This was the recommendation of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science, and Technology for Development, or IAASTD, which was a joint project of the World Bank, FAO and UNDP that determined in 2008 that a complete overhaul of the food system was necessary. 61 countries signed onto the findings of the panel. Patel and Gimenez sum up the IAASTD thusly:

IAASTD’s four-year analytical exercise started with a collective framing of the core problems of hunger and environmental destruction. Scientists then identified and evaluated the most appropriate actions and solutions to these problems, locally, nationally and internationally.

The IAASTD team found that the limiting factors to production, equitable distribution and environmental sustainability were overwhelmingly social, rather than technological in nature. Further, many proven agroecological practices for sustainable production increases were already widespread across the global South, but unable to scale up because they lacked a supportive trade, policy, and institutional environment. This is why IAASTD recommends improving the conditions for sustainable agriculture, rather than just coming up with technological fixes.

Somehow this gets swept under the rug of policy in the US. But if we are committed to actually helping, it would behoove Secretary Clinton, and others in this administration, to read the findings of the IAASTD and consider it before making policy.

Again, from Patel and Giménez:

Who improves African agriculture, how, under what agreements and by what means, will determine whether the efforts to end hunger in Africa succeed or fail. Lack of attention to these issues runs the risk that the long-overdue support to African agriculture will be used as prop for a flawed global food system when what is needed is a thorough transformation of agriculture.

Will Africans be a cog in our capitalist machine, or will we follow through with our promises to end hunger?

On Saturday, 3,000 people gathered at John Jay public high school for the Brooklyn Food Conference, a grassroots, volunteer-organized discussion around the state of our food system, featuring keynote talks by Dan Barber, Anna Lappé, Raj Patel, and LaDonna Redmond.  Along with these talks were 70 workshops throughout the classrooms of the school, on subjects as varied as growing your own food, starting a co-op and the value of breastfeeding.

According to the accompanying bright yellow guide, one of the goals of this event was to “bring Brooklynites together to demand — and participate in creating — a vital, healthy, and just food system available to everyone.” By my assessment, that is just what’s begun to happen.

Kicking off the day, Dan Barber gave a chef’s perspective on sustainability (speech text here) through a story about two fish he has served, each labeled ‘sustainable.’ He found out the first fish was receiving chicken in its feed, which the grower thought sustainable because they were taking advantage of the waste produced by the chicken industry. Grossed out, Barber began to use the second instead, which grew as a part of the recuperation of an entire ecosystem, “a farm that doesn’t feed its animals and measures its success by the health of its predators.” He warned, “We are on the verge of an ecological credit crisis, and it’s going to make this economic credit crisis a walk in the park.” In order to reverse this, he seemed to say, we have to rebuild farms and communities.

The next speaker was Raj Patel, (speech text here) who was not at all shy about talking about the possible relationship between Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and swine flu:

CAFO doesn’t really do justice to what was going on there. In this sort of feedlot and slaughterhouse, 950,000 swine a year are killed. 950,000. Of course, 950,000 pigs produce a ton of waste. And that waste was very poorly regulated, and the people in the city near this pork-processing facility fell ill. About 60% of them came down with mysterious flu-like symptoms about three weeks ago. The Mexican press covered it. Of course, the US press didn’t.

He laid some of the blame on NAFTA:

NAFTA made it safe for Smithfield to have its large factory in Mexico. NAFTA displaced farmers into the cities, but NAFTA also made it safe for large corporations to come in and start marketing their processed food products very heavily to Mexicans. And that’s why today the world’s second most obese country is Mexico. And the closer you get to the US border, the fatter Mexican teenagers, for example, are likely to be. That is a consequence of NAFTA.

Patel proposed that the answer to these problems is political — to take back our food system and in order to do this, to take back our politics. He accused many of us of thinking of our new president as “the pizza delivery dude of change” — as in, we are sitting at home waiting for a delivery of “hot, fresh, steaming change.” But as Patel is wont to do, he left us with something positive. He had just come from Mexico, where he was visiting a group of people who were wearing masks, but not because of swine flu. They were Zapitistas. He highlighted this group because of their good governance councils, where residents rotate on and off the council every week. They even have a sign when you enter their territory: “Welcome to Zapatista territory. Here the people lead and the government listens.”

Rounding out the morning, LaDonna Redmond came to the stage to remind us that our current unjust food system was built on the backs of individuals — through slavery and exploitation of Native Americans, African Americans and now Mexican immigrants. Furthermore, she said, we have never had a just food system. “Our unjust food system hides the faces of those it doesn’t want you to see,” she said, like the factory farm workers, the slaughterhouse workers, and those harvesting our food. She spoke about defining green jobs as those that pay a living wage, have a career ladder and protect the environment at the same time.  She also pushed us to redefine agriculture a green job before we demand that Van Jones allocate money for farming. (Later on she even read a poem about recovering from previous ways of thinking, which was beautiful and inspiring — is there anything this woman can’t do? I doubt it.)

Following these inspiring talks were the workshops. Unfortunately, I could only choose three workshops — and honestly, I would have enjoyed going to most of these sessions — but there was only so much time. I’d love to hear about your experiences and read your notes from workshops like Climate Change and the World’s Food Supply; Challenging Big Food: How Food Transnationals Harm Our Health and Environment and How to Fight Back; Food Sovereignty North and South: People’s Control Over Their Own Food; Food Rebellions; The Perils of a Globalized Food Supply: Trade Policy and How to Change It; Passing the Hoe: Our New Farmers Share Stories and Experiences — you get the idea, there were lots of great workshops to sit in on. The downside to so many great workshops besides choosing only three was almost missing lunch and totally missing the expos, which were filled with interesting people doing a variety of things to change the food system. Next time, my suggestion to BFC organizers is to have keynotes, lunch and expos fill conference day one, and to move the workshops to a separate day or convert them into weekly ‘salons’ to discuss all of these pressing topics.

The first workshop I attended focused on Organizing in the Obama Era, featuring Leslie Hatfield, editor of the Green Fork, as moderator, Winton Wedderburn, organizer of social media for the Brooklyn Food Conference, Naomi Starkman, editor here at Civil Eats and media maven for Consumers Union, and Natasha Chart, editor of Change.org’s Sustainable Food blog. The workshop operated like a crash course, discussing the tools helping to build this movement online, from action alerts to the power of blogs, Facebook and Twitter. We sort of take the internet for granted these days, but Hatfield reminded us that “the internet is the greatest hope for solving the problems we face”– in our food system, our environment and more, no other tool has the potential to organize so many so quickly into coalitions.

The second workshop I attended was titled Our Meat Industrial Complex: Hazardous to Our Health and Our Environment. Moderated by Kerry Trueman of Eating Liberally, the panel featured Brigid Sweeney, the farmer outreach coordinator for the Animal Welfare Approved program, Gowri Koneswaran, who works for the US Humane Society on animal agricultural impacts, farmer and physician Ken Jaffe of Slope Farms, and Alex Patton from Food & Water Watch.  This informative panel focused on all you need to know about CAFOs: the pollution they produce, the unavoidable mistreatment of animals in these unwieldy settings and how you can play a role in changing bad practices. The session was great whether you were new to these topics, as Koneswaran gave a spectacular overview with a powerpoint presentation and Sweeney filled in the blanks with an equally interesting powerpoint on labeling sustainble meat, or you were more advanced, Jaffe spoke in more detail about the science behind corn in a rumen stomach.

The third workshop I attended was Defending Against Genetically Engineered Food: Saving Seeds, featuring Ken Greene of the Hudson Valley Seed Library, writer and producer of the Bioneers conference, J.P. Harpignies, Howard Brandstein, co-founder of SOS Food and Executive Director of Sixth Street Community Center (Home to my CSA share!), and Bazelais Jean-Baptiste, and agronomist for Seeds for Haiti. In this talk, we got an overview from Harpignies of the issues behind the use of genetically modified seeds, notably a question of what belongs to everyone and what should be privatized — seeds having been a fundamental community right for centuries before big agriculture came along and patented them. The panel focused on what to do about the issue, with Brandstein focusing on a campaign to erradicate GMOs, and to have them labeled, Jean-Baptiste talking about Haiti’s plight trying to become once again food secure, and Greene discussing his seed library, where members take part in seed saving, which the Hudson Valley Seed Library also teaches. What was most inspiring for me was the fact that 40 people were crowded into the Old Stone House in Park Slope to talk about GMOs.  I think the tide is shifting, and as Monsanto and others have begun out of fear of losing their bottom line to try to expand their PR campaign to the comment sections of this and other blogs, we will continue to inform and dessiminate appropriate information about GMOs and the roles these companies play in tainting and controlling the world food supply.

Some of the other goals of this conference included: to “create an agenda and constituent base for legislating food democracy in Brooklyn; organize neighborhood meetings; influence public policy by educating officials and showing them the depth and diversity of public interest; create a useful, cross-referenced directory of attendees; help partner organizations grow their constituencies by offering attendees avenues for action.” Sadly, I missed all of the sessions with politicians, where consumers were given a chance to be heard — but this was an important way to make change on that same day.  The Brooklyn Food Conference ended Saturday night, but before parting coordinator Nancy Romer announced a series of “neighborhood meetings” in two weeks, which will be detailed on the Brooklyn Food Conference website by the end of this week, to form coalitions and to follow-up on the conference. I for one will be in attendance at one of these neighborhood meetings, and will keep you updated on how New York City is doing on its food system.

Closing the conference, a pregnant Anna Lappé asked, “where is the outrage,” referring to her pregnancy books outlining the diet an expectant mother should adhere to, including fish without mercury. She asked, “Why aren’t we asking, ‘Why is there mercury in our fish?’” I think by connecting us to each other, mobilizing our minds to focus on the variety of important topics we now face, bringing our representatives to hear about these issues, and by following up with neighborhood meetings, this community organized event should be a model for future events, and could be the beginning of a real change to our food system.

Seed and chemical giant Monsanto and friends have lately been conducting all-out re-branding campaigns, seeking to present themselves as the answer to world hunger and the actualization of sustainability.  As an extension of this tight message control, Oxfam is hosting a panel discussion at the Asia Society in New York tomorrow at 8:30 am called “The Global Food Crisis – Time for Another Green Revolution?“  But the discussion seems like it will be rather one-sided.

Taking part are Kevin L. Eblen, Vice President, Public Policy and “Sustainability Lead” at Monsanto, as well as Rajiv Shah, Director of Agricultural Development at the Gates Foundation and Dr. Robert Zeigler, Director General, International Rice Research Institute (The institute that conducted the research for the original Green Revolution).

Perhaps this group is convening to pat each other on the back for their role in bringing forth a similar Green Revolution to what we have seen before.  In any case it is clear there will not be a considered critique of the role genetically modified seeds have played in increased farmer debt, and by extension, farmer suicides worldwide; the increase dependence on international food aid due to a reliance on monocropping (growing one single, usually inedible-before-processed crop — or worse, growing something like BT Cotton, which is totally inedible); and not to mention, a stripping of the fertility of the land, contributing to desertification and climate change; and waning GM crop yields that have resulted in the face of proven increased productivity of organics over time.

Tom Philpott pointed out the lopsided nature of the panel on Comfood:

If Oxfam wants a real debate or even a robust discussion, where are the agro-ecologists, the organic ag folks on this panel? Has Oxfam never heard of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), which — under the aegis of the World Bank, of all institutions — took an extremely skeptical position viz. patented transgenics as a solution to climate change-related ag problems in the global south? Or the recent UN report finding vast potential for low-tech organic ag in Africa?

The debate is on for whether we actually need a new Green Revolution, and if so, what that should look like.  I spoke with Raj Patel a few months back for a piece about our perceptions of GM seed.  He spoke then about his discussion with panelist Rajiv Shah that was quoted in the New York Times Magazine, and he had this to say:

“I absolutely think we need a sustainable Green Revolution.  But it has to be with the kind of technology that Vandana [Shiva]‘s working with, or Via Campesina is working with.  An agroecological revolution is one that isn’t just about what chemicals and what genes to use in the fields, but changing our relationship with the earth. That’s not something that the Gates folk are ready to hear (we’ve tried). Moreover, though, there’s something very wrong about a private foundation doing something that should be government policy – and the only reason it isn’t government policy is because governments have been prevented in the past 30 years from doing this sort of agricultural work and research. I’d say if something is to be sustainable in Africa, shouldn’t Africans be involved, rather than the passive recipients for US largesse (which hasn’t worked out very well).”

Apparently, we are not the only ones scratching our heads about plans for the new Green Revolution.  Seemingly preemptive to the meeting at the Asia Society tomorrow, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released a study on Tuesday called the “Environmental Food Crisis: Environment’s Role in Averting Future Food Crises,” which suggests that we begin to think more ecologically about food waste and infrastructure.  UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner: “We need to deal with not only the way the world produces food but the way it is distributed, sold and consumed, and we need a revolution that can boost yields by working with rather than against nature.”

They suggest “managing and better harvesting extreme rainfall on continents such as Africa, alongside [giving] support to farmers for adopting more diversified and ecologically-friendly farming systems – ones that enhance the ‘nature-based’ inputs from pollinators such as bees as well as water supplies and genetic diversity.”  The report also speaks rationally about water scarcity, organic production capacity, re-organizing the food market structure and removing crop subsidies.  Check out this great article from Inter Press Service about the report for more perspective.

Needless to say, I will be present at the discussion in the morning, looking forward to (and a bit freaked out about) standing up for all of those voices who have no say in how their land is developed under the auspices of philanthropy, by those whose pockets have the potential to be lined by this little experiment.  Please join me at th Asia Society, I will be outside at 8:00am, somehow making myself known (Late twenties with an iPhone addiction, and I won’t be bothered if you approach me — unless you are a Monsanto exec), and will be livetweeting the event on my twitter feed, featured in the right-hand side panel on Civil Eats.

UPDATE: Doug Gurian-Sherman, a Senior Scientist of the Food & Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is speaking tomorrow at the Asia Society panel, instead of Rajiv Shah.

Image: Monsanto’s recent ad campaign

Join Slow Food Alameda October 8, as Raj Patel discusses his award-winning book Stuffed and Starved. Patel explains the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of farmers and consumers and rebalance global sustenance.

If you missed the opportunity to hear him speak on World Food Crisis panel at Slow Food Nation, this is an excellent opportunity to listen to this writer, activist and academic. All proceeds will go to Rachel Saunders, founder of Alameda’s Blue Chair Fruit Company and vendor at Slow Food Nation Marketplace and Taste Pavilions, for her trip to Slow Food International’s Terra Madre Conference as a U.S. delegate.

Held concurrently with Salone del Gusto in Torino, Terra Madre will bring together food communities, cooks, academics and youth delegates for four days to work towards increasing small-scale, traditional, and sustainable food production. It is made up of approximately 6,000 participants; almost one-fourth of them will be between the ages of 18 to 30, reflecting the Slow Food’s commitment to supporting, engaging, and cultivating the emerging youth food movement. Much of the Slow Food Nation staff will be boarding a plane to Torino to participate in this biennial international meeting. We will be blogging from Torino, so check back at the end of this month to learn more about Salone del Gusto and Terra Madre.

Saunders’ jams, jellies and marmalades can be found at various locations and farmers’ markets throughout the Bay Area. For a full list, please visit her website.

Tickets are $20 which includes the lecture, complimentary wine and desserts. Please RSVP at 510.522.2226.

Raj Patel is the author of the book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. He will be speaking on August 29th at Slow Food Nation’s Food for Thought. You can read more about his work on his website.

This is Part 2 of this interview. The first portion can be found here.

Paula: How did the advent of the supermarkets change the way people think about food?

Raj: It was a slow process. The reason supermarkets emerged was because in 1917 you were in a situation, much like the one we have today, where there were sudden food price rises, and retailers were looking for a way to shift food cheaply, and to reduce the price of selling food so they could pass those savings onto the consumer and get more of the market. The way that was most successful was precisely through the supermarket, a way of presenting food and goods to people without having an intermediary.

Paula: So this supermarket idea is what made cheap food the standard?

Raj: I think the idea of the supermarket was to bring Fordism to food production. And what that means is that if you standardize everything about a way a place looks, functions and the way that the components pass through it and in that process food becomes another component that gets trucked through a warehouse and processed. The fact is that most tomatoes are now picked green, because they can stand the rigor of the transportation when they are unripe, and then they’re ripened with ethylene gas. That’s a really unnatural way of eating. And it’s precisely that taste of the sort of watery supermarket tomato that makes us remember fondly the homegrown version. That process of the power of supermarkets shaping the food we then get to select from is a fine example of how this sort of modern life that is geared around convenience is geared around fast food, which has its origins in industrial capitalism and the application of industrial capitalism for food is destroying the quality of our food and is harming us.

Paula: And you say its paradoxically eliminating our ability to choose.

Raj: Well that’s it because we are taught that if you go to the supermarket, and you have hundreds of varieties of cereal or coffee for example, selecting between them is free choice. But it’s not. All it is offering is a broader palate of constrained choices, and thus a constrained outcome. The word choice is what we apply to that afterwards, but in fact we are being denatured [and] we are being made to forget that there are broader choices, that there are sort of strange local fruits and vegetables that require a little bit of hunting down and a little bit of familiarity with food and with cooking, but which are fresher, better for you, and cheaper. But those choices are not on offer in the supermarket because they are not profitable.

Paula: Does that mean that you don’t think that supermarkets could work as part of a sustainable food system?

Raj: Supermarkets work because they fit into a life that demands fast food, food that is convenient, and that is pre-cooked. The produce section in the supermarket is one of the least profitable; supermarkets are kind of in the business of making us buy other stuff. That’s why the milk section is always in the back, even in Whole Foods. That’s the very telling illustration of the fact that supermarkets are not in the business of being friendly. They’re in the business of shifting products. The kinds of social relations that are involved in a supermarket are not the kinds you need for a sustainable system, and by that I mean knowing your producer. If you look at the Slow Food founding documents, they are a declaration of independence from the fast-paced world of capitalism in which food is just another thing that you need to get through the day rather than a moment of sensuousness and pleasure. And the founding ideas behind Slow Food look fairly anti-capitalist, and I think perhaps that’s not a bad idea, because the reason we need supermarkets is because we are working so hard for such little money and for such little joy. We need to reorganize our social system in order that everyone can eat properly. Supermarkets become superfluous in that more sustainable system, because actually we do have time to engage with our food more, and we do have time to go to the farmer’s markets, and we do have income to do that.

Paula: You suggest that, “poor diets are a symptom of systematic lack of control over our spaces and our lives.” What do you mean?

Raj: Certainly in the U.S. and the UK and in Spain you have a situation where working class people are more likely to be overweight. Now that translates into a lot of scorn, particularly in the Unites States, being heaped onto people of color for being fat. I think that sort of prejudice masks the fact that for working Americans, [there is] very little choice about how to eat. Just as an experiment, I went around the East Bay looking for ways to spend a week’s worth of food stamps, about $21 per person, and the only way to make the food stamps stretch as far as they could was by buying crap. I then went to the farmer’s market in the Ferry Building here, and tried to see what I could get for $21. I got a loaf of bread, some cheese, half a dozen eggs and a few tomatoes. There’s no way you can live on that for a week. Too often poverty gets written out of the equation when we think of both obesity and hunger. But the reason people go hungry today is not because there’s not enough food, it’s because people are poor. And the reason that we have obesity is because the choices that are available to many working people are very poor food choices. And that means that those low cost foods have a very high cost in the long term. At the end of the day poverty means that you are unable to control your environment the way rich people can.

Paula: Are there ways that we can start to change how people feed themselves, the choices they have?

Raj: I think that we need some deeper political change around redistribution. There was a time where you could say redistribution and not be howled at as a communist. I think its important to reclaim the idea that redistribution is an integral part of a healthy food system. Because you can’t have such a food system when people can’t afford the food.

Paula: Specifically when you say redistribution what do you mean?

Raj: Redistribution is not just about cash in pocket, but creating other kinds of freedoms to be able to access food. Increasing social programs, reducing the tax burden on poor people, increasing it on rich people, and investing in broad social programs like healthcare. One of the reasons Americans are working so hard is that they need healthcare, and everywhere else in the civilized world kind of takes it for granted, and that’s why a healthcare system would reduce the need for things like supermarkets because people would be working less. Food is medicine. The Hippocratic idea, that food is a way of keeping our bodies healthy and at the moment we are poisoning ourselves, which is why life expectancy is declining in the United States for the poorest people, particularly women. The reason that governments in Europe are taking the obesity epidemic far more seriously than in the United States is because in Europe when the population becomes obese, it’s the government healthcare system that has to pick up the tab. And that’s why [the European] governments are very into preventative measures, which in the United States would be seen as unconstitutional. Things like banning advertising food to children would be seen here as an infringement on companies rights of free speech, where as in the UK the government has no problem with that. They say if we don’t do this, half of British kids will be obese by 2050 and we will have to pay the cost, so you don’t get to advertise near our schools.

Paula: You’ve said that we are not going to change the situation by shopping.

Raj: Don’t get me wrong, I buy fair trade if there is an option. Because do you want hostile trade? I don’t want that, no one wants that. But it is a very American delusion to think that we can together change the world by shopping. Here we are kind of encouraged to think that way because we’ve been so denatured as people that the only way we can think of ourselves is as consumers. But we’re not consumers, we are human beings. And being a human being is a much richer, and more engaged and fulfilling idea of what and who we are than merely people who shop. And I think part of the transformation is realizing that we are richer and bigger, and more beautiful and fantastic and more able to change our world than our supermarkets would like to make us believe. We can change it through engaging with other people, we can change it by growing our own food and sharing that food, there’s a range of things that we can do, but there’s so much that we can be doing that isn’t about shopping and that you can’t get off the shelf. And I think that’s all for the good.

Photo by lyzadanger

Raj Patel is the author of the book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. He will be speaking on August 29th at Slow Food Nation’s Food for Thought. You can read more about his work on his website.

Paula: Food prices are higher than ever, but farmers are struggling to survive, why don’t they see any of that money?

Raj: There are millions of farmers and billions of consumers, [and] there are really just a handful of corporations in the middle that have the power to shape the market. Some of these mega-farmers are seeing the benefit from these high prices, [but] it’s the middlemen, the corporations, that are trucking and bartering the goods. So while the consumers are paying more for food the people who benefit from this are not necessarily the people who grow it, but instead the people who distribute and invest in it.

Paula: Debt seems to be another issue keeping farmers impoverished. How do they get into debt?

Raj: It’s always a range of factors. But once they’re in that cycle of debt, they find it very hard indeed to get out. One of the stories I tell is about a farmer in India, he had a couple of acres, and he wanted to leave the land in a better condition for his kids. So he borrowed money from the local moneylender because that was the only person who would lend to him, and as a result the farmer found himself paying three-digit interest rates. And of course, he couldn’t afford to pay it back, particularly when his test for drilling irrigation failed, and he committed suicide. And in fact around the world, it’s a sort of silent epidemic of farmer suicides that began in the United States with the demise of family farms during the Reagan era. What this points to is that the state isn’t stepping in and supporting its farmers, its sort of cutting them off to the private sector. And the private sector is either these predatory lenders, or just regular banks like we see here in the United States, who are no less predatory for having shiny corporate headquarters. And as a result, more independent, sustainable family farms around the world are facing very similar circumstances with subsidies going to the mega-farms and unsustainable production being the sort of thing governments fund. Whereas good, healthy, clean food is almost being stamped out by government actions and inactions.

Paula: Subsidy programs had started originally as a form of credit. Do you think it is possible for the government to use programs like that to help these family farmers?

Raj: It has to happen. I think subsidies have a bad name, deservedly at the moment because, especially in the United States, we are being sold the idea that the Farm Bill is all about supporting the Little House on the Prarie. And that’s horseshit. If you look at who gets the subsidies, its millionaires. But there are plenty of reasons to think that a well-designed support program for food is a good idea. We fund things for the public good because society benefits from them, things like education, and elsewhere in the civilized world, healthcare. These are things that we recognize makes society better. So I think there is a role for government here, in fact government needs to be involved here, and at the moment the way government has been involved is to support of the wrong side of the sustainability equation.

Paula: The Green Revolution tried to make it technologically possible to eradicate hunger. Where do you think the Green Revolution failed, and what do you think we can do about it now?

Raj: It’s certainly true that there’s been a productivity bump as a result of the Green Revolution, but that’s come at a tremendous human, ecological and social cost. In terms of the environment, the Green Revolution is hugely carbon intensive and water intensive, because it takes a lot of energy to make the fertilizers that the Green Revolution needs. So that’s why you’re seeing in areas where the Green Revolution happened, particularly in Punjab in India for example, which is the grain basket of India, farmer suicide rates are through the roof. The second thing, its not really spoken about that much but one of the tacit reasons for the Green Revolution was to prevent redistribution of land. One of the best ways to increase productivity is through land reform, by giving land that belongs to large landowners to the workers that actually work that land. But the Green Revolution was designed to prevent that because that sort of redistribution looked pretty socialist, and the United States didn’t really approve. That deep inequality still persists to this day and is a human tragedy. Now we are at a stage where we do have these inequitable land holdings and we have technology that’s going nowhere that is actually dangerous to the environment and widely recognized as such. The IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development), that came out last year, headed by Robert Watson and a team of about 400 scientists [sought] to answer the question: how are we going to feed the world in 2050, when there are 9 billion of us? They looked at the options and they said Green Revolution technologies are not going to work. We don’t have enough water, we don’t have enough soil fertility to be able to support the Green Revolution. What they suggested was that we need to be moving to smaller scale, local, lower carbon footprint kinds of agriculture. Now this is very different from the monoculture that we have at the moment, growing one thing and destroying the ecosystem so that this one thing can flourish. And what they are pushing for is an agro-ecological approach where you use the ecosystem rather than destroy it, to be able to create great food in a way that builds soil fertility. I think [that it] holds a great deal of promise for the future. And that is the approach that is being tried, for example, at the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden.

Paula: In your book you talk about the American predicament a lot. Do you see the U.S. as setting the food agenda for the world?

Raj: I do, in that the Unites States enjoyed, from the beginning of the 1990s to about now, a position as an unrivaled superpower, the U.S. has been very much responsible for setting the agenda around food and food policy. And I think the United States is home to the biggest contradictions in food in the world today. There’s the fact that America is the most obese country on Earth and yet there are [at least] 35.5 million families going hungry every year. This is the richest country on Earth, it produces the most food on Earth, and yet there are people here that go hungry. That for me is a telling contradiction of the food system. And that’s why I turn to the United States a lot because it shows what can happen when markets go wild, but its also the case for what happens when people get together and organize. There are some really inspiring things happening in the United States, people are fighting back. And that’s why I live here, because it is possible to fight back in some really creative ways.

Paula: Conglomerates control most of the processing, packing, selling and also have a lot of capital to lobby in Washington. Do you think that anti-trust laws are not being enforced in America?

Raj: Absolutely. One of the things that’s happened in Europe is that the anti-trust authorities there have been aggressively following up with supermarkets to find out why the price of milk, eggs, etc are so high. Those kinds of investigations have not been carried out in the United States. And in fact if you look at the IRS prosecutions of fraud since 2000 you’ll find that they’ve halved. That is not an indication to me that the companies are twice as well behaved now than they were in 2000. I think precisely anti-trust and regulatory authorities are being beaten down by an administration that is being run by large corporations.

Paula: How do we begin to dismantle this? What do we have as citizens take on this large corporate-mindedness?

Raj: Change has never happened because someone gave it to us, change has always happened because we took it. And I think that organizing around food is a great way of taking change. What that means concretely is sort of a food policy council, we have two food policy councils here in the bay area and more on the way, and basically those are local government spaces in which people can democratically demand of their local government, for example, that food come from within 100-200 miles of where ever your municipality is. And demanding that there be space for farmer’s markets, and demanding that there be space for victory gardens, and demanding that there be adequate support for low income people to be able to eat. There is a lot of really exciting local organizing happening. As the current food system heads deeper and deeper into crisis, it is those islands of sanity that will offer us a way out, and allow us to make bigger and bigger changes.

This is Part 1 of two parts. The second part will be posted next week. Raj Patel’s talk at Food for Thought is sold out. Please stay tuned for updates on the series.

Map image courtesy of Ecological Footprint @ Phtbb!!