Food Chained

Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
By Raj Patel
Melville House Publishing
2007, 398 pages, $19.95

In an absurdist Monty Python skit, Graham Chapman asks to have “eggs, bacon, Spam, and sausage without the Spam.” To which Terry Jones replies, “You can’t have eggs, bacon, Spam, and sausage without the Spam … because it wouldn’t be eggs, bacon, Spam, and sausage, would it?”

This sketch brilliantly sums up the reality of food a generation ago when organic food was the province of Vermont hippies, when McDonald’s Fordist assembly line mandated flavorless pickles on every hamburger, whether or not you wanted them, and when choice meant Coke versus Pepsi.

Today, we are overwhelmed with choice. Many neighborhood supermarkets offer packaged sushi, frozen Indian entrees, and everything you need to make tamales from scratch; alternative food production systems have flourished, from organic and biodynamic to urban farming and community-supported agriculture; and, for the knowledgeable, exotic foodstuffs can be secured from all parts of the globe.

But choice is largely chimerical, argues Raj Patel in his highly insightful work, Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. He writes, “There are hidden and systemic constraints even when we feel we’re beyond the purview of Ronald McDonald.” Patel’s goal is to uncover these constraints and then pose alternatives up and down the food chain. Not surprisingly, he zeroes in on “the power of food corporations” and how they act as “bottlenecks” in the global food distribution system. While there are a huge number of farmers and consumers at either end, between them are often just a handful of global corporations that dominate the agrochemical, seed, processing, distribution, and retailing sectors.

The lack of choice constrains farmers, too, such as those in Uganda whose only “choice,” because of geography and climate, is to grow coffee or leave their land. But they receive just 14 cents per kilo of coffee, when they need more than twice that to sustain their families and land. The price rises to 27 cents a kilo by the time it’s moved through baggers, millers, and exporters in Uganda. At this point, where Nestlé’s takes over, the value-added profits pile up, rising from $1.64 a kilo at the gates of its Nescafé brand factory to $26.40 a kilo in the finished product, “or nearly 200 times the cost of a kilo in Uganda.”

The culprit is not just the food corporations, notes Patel. International financial institutions such as the World Trade Organization and World Bank act as the vanguard for corporations seeking to penetrate new markets. As a result, East African coffee farmers are battered from multiple sides. World Bank-financed coffee growing in Vietnam has depressed prices for other growers, while Starbucks is fighting farmers in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, who want a few pennies more per pound for their signature beans.

Likewise, for Mexicans, the North American Free Trade Agreement promised “cheaper goods for consumers.” While the price of corn plummeted, helping to push more than a million rural Mexicans off the land, the price of tortillas rose sevenfold within five years as two corporations gained control of 97 percent of the industrial corn flour market. The “choice,” then, for many rural Mexicans was to move to cities, which pushed down industrial wages, or migrate across the U.S. border to live in the shadows as part of an exploited workforce. Patel adds to this well-known story evidence that Mexican politicians were “motivated primarily by ideology” to push for liberalizing the nation’s economy and later mobilized big business interests in support of this policy.

Government is another component of the global food system, but its role has changed dramatically in recent times. Patel hopscotches across history and continents looking at food policies. During the 19th century, the British dismantled India’s system of grain stores for times of drought, so the grain could be “extracted and transported to England’s grain markets.” As a consequence, 31 serious famines were recorded in 120 years of British rule as opposed to 17 recorded in the previous 2,000 years.

Fast-forward to the 1990s, and it’s the Indian government that is dismantling the system of food aid to the poor. The rationale this time is trade liberalization, but the consequences are once again deadly. By 2001, after a decade of cuts to subsidized food, the availability of grains among Indians fell to a level not seen since the Great Depression.

But governments did not end subsidies, even if they cut aid to small farmers and the urban poor. India signed an agreement with the United States in 2005 establishing a “Knowledge Initiative” in agriculture with a board that included representatives of Monsanto, Wal-Mart, and Archer Daniels Midland. Patel quotes an Indian scientist who explains how the initiative allows the U.S. firms access to “our vast genetic wealth from any of its more than 200 research establishments,” which the firms can then patent and sell.

In the case of Brazil, the government’s push for soy has benefited giant agribusinesses like Cargill, ADM, and Bunge. Patel links Brazil’s rise as soy exporter to the government’s role in “funding land expansion, processing capacity and an export corridor, and providing state support for producer prices.”

The irony is that corporations mobilize support for their policies by appealing to the “national interest” but take public handouts across the globe, much as General Motors has recently received bailout money from Canada, the United States, and Germany.

Patel could have deepened the analysis of how the public subsidizes the food industry. He mentions how “Wal-Mart is as much a product of public policy as it is of consumer choice.” Patel includes Karl Polanyi’s seminal work, The Great Transformation, in the bibliography. But he doesn’t mention Polanyi’s insight that “laissez-faire was planned,” meaning the “free market” was pushed as an ideology, such as in Mexico, and it requires wholesale government regulation of finance, land, and labor markets.

Patel also discusses how India’s Green Revolution was a “technological solution” for a political problem that involved “spatial organization that would allow the poor to eat” without threatening the landholdings of the rich. And he mentions how soy served Brazil’s goal of “territorial expansion.” Patel could have brought in the work of David Harvey and Giovanni Arrighi (also cited in the bibliography) to discuss the notion of “spatial fix.” This helps illuminate how capitalism tries to resolve the crisis from having a surplus of capital with no profitable outlet by restructuring or expanding into new spaces. It explains why the agribusiness giants that expanded into Brazil, India, and other developing countries started to do so in the late 1960s, a time when profit rates began to decline in industrialized countries.

Stuffed & Starved could have been better organized, for example by examining the global food system as a commodity chain with inputs like land, labor, government and international subsidies and regulation, markets and finance, agribusinesses, consumers, and alternatives. As it is, the work is scattered at times. Solutions―India’s Karnataka State Farmers Association, the Indian state of Kerala’s achievements from land reform, Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, community-supported agriculture, and the slow food movement―are in five separate chapters. Similarly, a U.S. food aid program known as PL-480 is mentioned briefly in at least four different chapters. The effect is to diminish the impact of these aspects and almost completely leave out the role of others. Other aspects are given little attention, such as China’s enormous―and hazardous―food system or the role finance capital has played in the food industry and markets. Nonetheless, Patel’s work is excellent and well worth reading. It’s the one intelligent choice we all can make.