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Raj Patel: Big Ag Can't Feed the World -- Here's Who Can
http://www.alternet.org/food/raj-patel-big-ag-cant-feed-world-heres-who-can
Raj Patel is no fan of messiahs and iconic leaders. “One bright shining light is dangerous,” says the writer, activist, and academic who was once mistaken as the savior of humankind by an obscure religious group. Still, there’s no denying that Patel – young, charming, and sharp as a tack – does, in fact, shine. With his critically acclaimed books on food systems and capitalism he has distinguished himself as one of the progressive world’s up and coming public intellectuals.
His quest to understand the global inequities caused by free market economics took the London-born Patel from the halls of Oxford to the London School of Economics, to the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. Along the way he wrote Stuffed and Starved (2008), a cutting critique of how the free market keeps millions of people hungry and millions more obese. His next book, the 2010 New York Times bestseller The Value of Nothing , drew on the Great Recession to expose the core cause of our current social, political, and environmental problems.
Patel isn’t just armchair pontificator, though. A self-proclaimed “anarchist sympathizer,” he often can be spotted in the midst of street demonstrations, lending body and voice to grassroots protests against the very organizations he once worked with. Patel is currently traveling the world collecting material for a documentary film, Generation Food , which will show how “people are doing amazing things to feed one another, across the table, across generations, and across the world.”
Maureen Nandini Mitra: What got you interested in social and food justice?
Raj Patel: When I was very young my parents took me to India. I was five or seven, and as most kids, I was impressionable. There was one incident where we were at a traffic light and there was a young girl on the outside, begging, and I couldn’t understand why we were inside the car and she was outside. We’d come from London, where we never had to worry about food, and here was as situation where this was a dire concern to the girl who was outside our window. It just made no sense to me. My parents mumbled their explanation and it wasn’t very satisfying. They passed some money outside the window and then we drove off. After coming back [to London] I started doing a lot of volunteering and researching and finding out why there was this global inequality.
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Raj Patel: I’m really blown away by organizations like a Canadian group called The Stop . They are a food bank that wants to put themselves out of business. That model of an NGO, whose mission is never to exist, where very explicitly you work for jobs and political empowerment and gardens and spaces where communities can grow their own food, so that ultimately you will never need a food bank because it’s an embarrassment to society that a society needs a food bank. That’s the kind of NGO I’m more interested in rather than an NGO that’s set up to exist in perpetuity.
