| This one's a must-read folks. It's a work of freakin' brilliance. Patel's bio says that he "has worked for the World Bank and WTO and been tear-gassed on four continents protesting against them." Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System asks why we live in a world with one billion people who are hungry and another billion who are overweight.
He describes the global food system using a diagram shaped like an hourglass. At the top are the very many farm operators (3 million in the U.S. as of 2007). The diagram narrows as he names off the number of farm proprietors (just over 2 million), and farm product raw wholesale (7563). Then the diagram widens again with food manufacturers (27,915), grocery and related products wholesale (35,650), food and beverage stores (148,804), and consumers (300 million). He shows a similar diagram for several European countries, with an even skinnier middle of the hourglass. The point here is that food wholesalers and manufacturers create a bottle-neck in between the many farmers and consumers, and they hold all of the power. Patel says that it's no accident that many of the poorest and hungriest people in the world happen to be farmers and farmworkers.
Now, this much you could get from just listening to one speech by Patel (which I highly recommend doing), but the book goes on to elaborate with chapters telling about the decimation of rural communities, the role of free trade on Mexican farmers, how U.S. food aid has often done more harm than good, corporate consolidation, the Green Revolution, and more.
I am writing this review now, on the brink of my trip to Bolivia, for a reason. First of all, so much of this book is so overwhelmingly relevant in Bolivia, a country that has been a recipient of enormous amount of U.S. food and agricultural aid and yet still faces staggering poverty. In the coming weeks, you'll read the micro account of how these concepts play out in one specific country - Bolivia - on this blog. But don't forget the global context that that needs to be put in, and for that, I highly recommend checking out Stuffed and Starved.
Much more specifically, my favorite chapter in Patel's book was on the Brazilian soybean industry, and it turns out that Bolivia has a large and equally tragic soybean industry. In brief, the industry involves growing soybean as a monoculture on land that was once (recently) Amazon rainforest. Imagine how many environmentalists in the U.S. rail about saving the rainforest as they drink their soymilk (although, better that than eating burgers made from cows fed soy grown on destroyed rainforest land). This will be a part of Bolivia that I won't see, as it takes place in the eastern lowlands of the country, far from where I am visiting. But it's a part of the overall story in a big way. Patel does a brilliant job shedding light on the growth of the soy industry in Brazil. (He also tells about the MST, the Landless Rural Workers Movement, in Brazil, which he calls "the world's most important social movement".)
There's a quote out there of Sen. Chuck Grassley ranting that there's no way what he grows on his farm in Iowa will impact what a farmer grows in South America. And that's sadly mistaken. As more American land is devoted to corn when world corn prices go up due to American demand for ethanol, then the U.S. grows fewer soybeans, and soybean prices tend to go up too. This gives a greater incentive for a South American farmer to plow up more rainforest and grow more soybeans.
There have been movements in the past to get companies to shun beef fed with soybeans grown in the rainforest. But you'd have to mobilize a worldwide boycott of Amazonian soy to have any effect. If McDonald's only buys meat from cows fed U.S.-grown soy, then guess what? Someone else will buy the Brazilian stuff. It's one big global market.
All in all, this book is truly a masterpiece, and it should be mandatory reading. Especially the soybean chapter. |
