Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Raj Patel

Now, that kind of experience – I’m not trying to make myself out as anyone special, everyone has that moment.  One of the most – something you’re guaranteed to hear in any playground are howls of “that’s not fair.”  We all have that.  But for me, that moment never really left me.  I still carry that little girl around with me.

He earned his undergrad degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford University, a master’s degree from London School of Economics, and a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University. During his studies, he worked as a research assistant at the World Bank, which wound up souring him on the institution.

I was a graduate student at Cornell and one of the economics professors took me on as a research assistant. He recommended I work on a project at the World Bank reviewing their classified documents to see how they talk about poverty. I jumped at the opportunity. Unfortunately, the project ultimately amounted to writing a puff piece about how the poor love the World Bank.

Within the World Bank there is a culture of self-justification and an inability to comprehend that poor people might think for themselves and might have their own politics. It is an “anti-politics machine,” as James Ferguson suggests in his book The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Joining the World Bank’s mission makes you feel self-righteous about believing in the bright shining future you are a part of. And it prevents people from thinking about political alternatives. I resigned when the full weight of my research project became clear.

I’ve written about the World Bank ever since. Sometimes I apologize for having worked there, but – and I don’t know if this makes it better or worse – I did learn what it’s like. The World Bank is a bureaucracy filled with people doing bad things, with “good intentions.”

What led him to use food as the entry point of his activism is his searching for another way to understand the roots of poverty and understanding that poor people have constructed and and are constructing answers to it.

One of the things that I learned from groups around the world, particularly looking at issues of hunger, is that the root cause of hunger isn’t that there is a shortage of food.  There’s more than enough food on earth today to feed everyone 1 ½ times over.  We’ve go plenty of food on this planet.  But there reason people are going hungry is not because of a shortage of food, but because of poverty.  So, people are not sitting idly by waiting for food to fall into their laps.

What the aid complex and what modern development has done for developing countries is impose a vision of how fishing should happen.  And that vision is very unsustainable and it comes from outside.  It comes from Europe, it comes from North America.  A vision that markets and free markets and modern capitalism is going to make life much, much better.  And in the process, the ways that people have been fishing, the ways that the social organization has been managed, often very sustainably, is destroyed and swept away.

Now, one of the ways that people have been fighting back is through organizing and developing their own principles – their own ways of democratically organizing and sharing resources.  And I was privileged enough to come across a number of farmers and farmers’ organizations, and landless peoples organizations that have been organizing around the principle of how to feed themselves.  And the vision that they have is a vision called “food sovereignty.”  Now food sovereignty is – the definition is very long and if you’re interested go to Wikipedia and check out food sovereignty, it’s a great definition.  But in essence, the idea of food sovereignty is that people have the ability to be able to make their own decisions about food and agriculture policy.

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