Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Raj Patel

Now that may not sound like terribly much.  The rights to be able to make your own decisions about food policy sounds pretty vapid, it sound like it’s a right to have rights over your food system.  It doesn’t seem to contain any policy.  But in fact, it does.  The full definition of food sovereignty demands that there are things like women’s rights being respected and agrarian reforms so that there’s fair and equal land distribution.  But the actual deep idea in the idea of food sovereignty is that we need democracy in shaping our food system.  We need a way of actually everyone getting around the table and having a conversation about food and agriculture and the way that people around the world get to eat and the people around the world get to develop and realize their full potential.

Now, that turns out to be pretty radical because, as I say, the history of food policy, the history of agricultural policy in poor countries has been one where people from the outside will come in, teach people how to fish, or teach people how to grow food, or essentially destroy the sustainable agriculture that exists in developing countries and replacing it with an agriculture that, at the moment, is looking increasingly unsustainable.

And so having food sovereignty, having a democratic conversation about food is actually pretty new.  Most countries have never had a democratic conversation about food.  We haven’t in the United States, but pretty much no country has had a democratic process where people decide, how are we going to make sure that everyone at a national level gets to eat, and that we distribute food fairly, and that we have sustainable agricultural practices so that our kids will inherit a planet and an agricultural system that sustains them as much as it sustains us.

It’s that idea that forms his first book, 2008′s Stuffed And Starved: The Hidden Battle For The World Food System. He’s expanded on that idea to look critically at 21st-century capitalism itself in his 2010 book, The Value Of Nothing. His organizing and academic career has moved him to, among several places, South Africa (as a research associate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Development Studis and with Abahlali baseMjondolo and Landless People’s Movement) and the US (as a visiting scholar at University of California-Berkeley’s Center of African Studies and with the 1999 protest against the WTO conference held in Seattle).

So, what exactly did Patel say in Payback that enchanted me so in that when-you-talk-I-just-watch-your-mouth moment?

When we think about where the tomatoes from Immokolee end up, they’re everywhere. They’re everywhere from [sic] Wal-mart to McDonald’s. They appear cheap when they’re sold in supermarkets or when in hamburgers. And so, we don’t realize that we are in debt to workers who are paid far below minimum wage and held in degrading and inhuman conditions. Because that debt never features in our consciousness and, as consumers, we’re encouraged to never think about what it is that we owe. We’re never encouraged to think about the process of production of the goods and services we consume.

So hey, thanks, Ms. Atwood for bringing Dr. Patel into my world. I’m still not here for The Handmaid’s Tale, though.

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