Lost in The Food Chain

Raj Patel’s riveting new book lays bare the inequalities of the world food system, finds NITYANAND JAYARAMAN

STUFFED AND STARVED - Raj Patel Portobello Books; 448 pp; Rs 1076

IF YOU THINK you live in a democracy, time for a reality check. Nowadays, farmers resisting the Orissa government’s plans to give their land to Korean steel major POSCO are attacked by a mob allegedly led by their own MLA. Nandigram and Singur have come to symbolise the collusive take-over of agricultural lands by the state for private industry.

Beyond gobbling up agricultural land and evicting farmers from their homes, companies like POSCO or Tata seem to have nothing to do with agriculture. But academic and activist Raj Patel’s authoritative account of the hidden battle for the global food industry will tell you that food is never too far from the minds of the corporate execs. POSCO through its US joint venture USS-POSCO is the leading supplier of tinplate for the US canned food industry. Tata has entire companies — Tata Tea, Innovative Foods, TOMCO — devoted to food.

Patel’s book is as much about corporations as it is about the food system. “Unless you’re a corporate food executive, the food system is not working for you,” he writes. That is a sentiment that more than one lakh Indian farmers have endorsed with their lives. Patel shifts effortlessly from dissecting the historical processes leading to the spate of farmer suicides in India to the global epidemic of starvation and obesity that plagues roughly a billion people each. As the book’s title so aptly puts it, excess and scarcity are two faces of the same malaise that afflicts the global food system — where food producers are starved of income, and consumers of real choices.

Drawing on international examples Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Battle for the World Food System goes on to break down every myth of technology-led development, revealing it as a process controlled by the elites, for the elites. “The technology presents itself as a feel-good solution for politicians who’d rather not face the more profound, persistent and difficult questions of politics and distribution,” Patel writes. Consumers and producers are relegated to the status of essential ingredients not partners or beneficiaries in the formula for profits. And governments are seen as conduits for transferring public resources to private players, even while managing dissent.

The book’s all-too-familiar critique of corporate globalisation is not the rant of a conspiracy theorist. Patel’s painstaking research, manifest in the nearly 100 pages of endnotes, lays bare a worldview where all things great and beautiful flow out of the mere action of consolidating wealth.

As business models assessed for their ability to suck wealth even from the bottom of the pyramid, Patel offers a startling variety of perversely “successful” food system schemes and scams that inevitably involve technology, monoculture and the infusion of massive amounts of capital. Examples abound — from the dumping of cheap US monoculture corn in Mexico (the birthplace of corn), to triggering the soy monoculture boom in Brazil — to demonstrate that behind every ecological disaster and economic hardship faced by the poorest, there is at least one US corporation fattening its shareholders.

Ironically, “a good number of food system companies position themselves through a language of care for the world’s hungry,” Patel writes. Indeed, many Northern NGOs promote ethical consumption of the guilt-free, fatfree, toxin-free variety. Patel dismisses such nonprofit types. Ethical consumption, even over-consumption, has been perfected in these countries where activists spend millions convincing retail giants to source fair trade.

Patel’s otherwise bleak thesis is not without its hints at solutions. Not surprisingly, most of these experiments — in Cuba, Kerala, Brazil — are born out of adversity not plenty. But his prognosis for India is none too pretty. Even as farmers from the most prosperous farming regions of India dropped like flies, Manmohan Singh launched the Indo-US Knowledge Initiative thus: “We owe our Green Revolution to America. Now we can herald a second Green Revolution with American assistance.” A promise to some, and a threat to others.

One Tuticorin farmer resisting eviction to make way for Tata’s titanium mining project sums it up well: “We are being squeezed out from all sides. Tatas are squeezing us out of farming. To escape that we go to the cities to set up shops. There Reliance and Walmart are making life miserable for small traders.” Patel’s book is not merry reading, but dull it is not. It offers an insight into the belly of the beast, and a sense of the radicalism required to effect change.