Uttara Choudhury

New York: The San Francisco Chronicle observed that when the price of rice spiked, Raj Patel himself became a valuable commodity.

There is truth here. Patel, 35, the outspoken academic and author of timely new book, Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, is fast becoming a go-to person for the media and Congress grappling with decoding surging food prices that have sparked riots in some countries.

Ironically, Patel’s book which was turned down by pretty much every major US publisher has now resulted in testimony in front of the US House Financial Services Committee. Publisher Melville House which finally got behind Patel’s book is now reprinting the surprise bestseller a month after it was launched here in the US.

“A dozen documentary companies are interested in turning it into a documentary and, frankly, I’m a little overwhelmed,” Patel told the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) forum.

Patel has blasted the World Bank for “actively hampering the development of sustainable agriculture” and promoting free trade at the expense of small farmers. He blames the Bank for nudging farmers to grow cash crops like soy, flowers and corn at the cost of staple foods like rice and wheat to feed their own people. He warns that 70 percent of developing countries are now importing more food than they grow.

He says cheap US rice which flooded the Haitian economy finally destroyed its rice farmers. His book drives home the point that behind every economic disaster faced by the poor there is at least one US conglomerate booking fat profits.

“The export subsidies in the US Farm Bill, coupled with US and EU government insistence that developing countries are not allowed to subsidise their own domestic agricultural production, mean that the US Farm Bill is directly responsible for wiping out small-scale developing country farmers,” said Patel.

India and Brazil have longargued that farm subsidies in the US and EU must be cut in order to protect farmers who can’t be subjected to the vagaries of subsidised imports.

Patel effortlessly connects the dots from dissecting the historical processes leading to the spate of farmer suicides in India to the global epidemic of starvation and obesity.

“Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in 10 people on earth are hungry,” writes Patel.

“In every country, the contradictions of obesity, hunger, poverty and wealth are becoming more acute,” he adds, citing India as an example.

“In 1992, in the same towns and villages where malnutrition had begun to grip the poorest families, the Indian government admitted foreign soft drinks manufacturers and food multinationals to its previously protected economy,” he writes.

“Within a decade, India has become home to the world’s largest concentration of diabetics.”

Patel told SAJA some of the US reporting on the food crisis was xenophobic; “The description of Asian demand for meat and dairy sometimes feels like a way of blaming the brown and yellow masses for a problem that is at its worst here in the US.”

The Indian media were, understandably, up in arms at Bush’s suggestion that it was the Indian middle class that was responsible for the food crisis because they ‘demanded things’. The Indian media found the data showing that US consumption levels and growth rates dwarfed Asian levels of demand.”

Patel is a visiting scholar at the Centre for African Studies at UC Berkeley and has been educated at Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University.

Source : DNA