‘Stuffed and starved': A review

Book: Stuffed and Starved; the Hidden Battle for the World Food System
Author: Raj Patel
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
Place of Publication: Brooklyn, New York
Year: Fifth printing, 2009.

INTRODUCTION

Farming has, from time immemorial, been a battlefield. However, in recent decades the battle has escalated. Raj Patel - policy analyst, journalist, and former employee of the World Bank, WTO and the United Nations - carried out a comprehensive investigation of the global food system,documented in this book. The findings are shocking, and expose major players of the food system, their victims, the profit generated by the food industry, contradictions in the food system, and even outlines the alternative paradigm that can be pursued, to extricate the food system from the grip of global corporations. The book looks at the ways the food system is shaped by farming communities, corporations, governments, consumers, activists and movements. These are stories and facts about choices made in the fields, forced through by the choices made at our plates. The sum of these choices has left many stuffed and many starved, with people at either end of the food system obese and impoverished. In this review, I will highlight some of the major issues covered in the book, and situate the discussion in the current Tanzanian food system.

THE BOOK IN A NUTSHELL

The book has ten chapters. Chapter one is an introduction which provides a general overview of the book and the chapter framework. It highlights some of the contradictions created by the food system. For instance while the world has 800 million people affected by hunger, on the other hand 1 billion people are overweight. Obesity is no longer the result of individual choices, but the natural end product of the food system perpetrated by major food corporations. Farmers, both in the Global South and Global North, no longer have the freedom of choice in what to grow, how to grow, where to sell and what to eat. These decisions are all made by the market, which is itself controlled by food companies. Food Corporations, producers, workers, and consumers are not on a level playing ground. Corporations are so powerful that they decide on the rules of the game and tilt the playing ground in their own favour, with the support of governments through international trade agreements. The end result is that farmers and consumers, especially those in the Global South, suffer the most while corporations generate enormous profit.

Chapter two examines farmer suicides and the forces that are destroying rural communities across the globe. Cases of suicide from India, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, the US, and Thailand - to mention just a few - are well-documented in this chapter. The most well-known act of suicide took place on 10th September 2003, at the World Trade Organization Ministerial meeting in Cancun, where Lee Kyung Hae, a Korean farmer and peasant organizer, climbed a fence near barricades behind which the trade meetings were happening. He flipped open his red penknife, shouted “the WTO kills farmers”, and stabbed himself in the chest. He died within hours. Within days, from Bangladesh to Chile, and South Africa to Mexico, tens of thousands of peasants mourned and marched in solidarity with the chant “We Are Lee”. Patel goes into more detail on how international organizations and market forces are working in tandem, the result of which is farmer impoverishment.

Chapter three is acontinuation of the stories narrated in chapter two. However, the focus is more on rural-urban migration, which is a manifestation of the decline in rural farming. Trade agreements are shown to be the powerful instruments underlying such migration, as well as being historical links between food aid, development and insurrection. Chapter four discusses the evolution of the global food system in the aftermath of the Second World War. Of interest in this chapter is how the current global food system is linked to the international financial institutions and the United Nations, in the name of freedom and security. The work of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization has shaped the politics of the global food system through credits, insurance, and trade agreements. This chapter shines a light on the reality of the theoretical premises of political economy, such as Keynesianism, Monetarism, and Developmentalism. One will appreciate the factual and empirical data provided on how Structural Adjustment Programs have affected food systems in the Global South.

Chapter five scrutinizes the food system’s major winners, agribusiness corporations. Today, transnational agricultural corporations control 40 per cent of world trade in food, with twenty companies controlling the world coffee trade, six controlling 70 per cent of wheat trade, and just one controlling 98 per cent of packaged tea. One may not know the true extent of the monopoly of agribusiness corporations by only looking at the brands they use, because most of them use different brands in different regions. Their powers are not just in their dominance of food production value chains but also in national, regional and international policies and politics in agriculture. They have connections and influence with law-making bodies, and are able to ensure that country leaders, research institutions, and financial or agricultural ministers protects their interests. This is what students of political economy call “political rent”. The basis is to make sure that they remain the dominant players in the global food system.

Chapter six shows how the rise to power of agricultural corporations used the ideas of race, science and development to further their control over the very source of life - seed. This is perhaps the most powerful weapon of control, used by agricultural corporations to ensure that farmers have no choice and are forever dependent on them. The knowledge needed to make seeds and grains is protected throughout the globe by international laws. However, important seeds are grown under specif conditions, which are created by agriculturalcorporations through the use of patentedfertilizers and pesticides. All of this is done through the work of science, but advocated for in the name of development and food security. The irony is that the development and security are not in the interests of farmers, but in the interests of corporations that are making huge profits out of the business. Seeds, fertilizers and pesticides are not environmentally or ecologically friendly, and they make rural farming dependent on global corporations.

Chapter seven gives a concrete example of how all these forces have come together in the production of one of the planet’s most important crops : Soybeans. Chapter eight discusses the supermarket, the newest and now the most powerful agribusiness. Through their decisions, and through close supervision of each step in the product chain, supermarket buying desks can fire the poorest farm worker in South Africa, flip the fates of coffee growers in Guatemala and tweak the output of paddy terraces in Thailand. The history of supermarkets is well documented, including the attention paid to the design of these places. In a supermarket everything including the architecture of the shelves, product locations, colors and smells were designed purposely to lure consumers to buy more, and also to reach certain kinds of customers. They guard information on what consumers purchase, and the locations of customers in different areas of their shop, in order to know which products to bring tomarket.

Chapter nine investigates how our tastes are sculpted and how the food system constrains us not just as consumers, but as people living in the world. It shows how our choices are limited and how our foods find us, rather than us choosing what we really want to eat. The final chapter suggests ways we can reclaim food sovereignty. It gives examples of movements such as the Slow Food Movement and Via Campesina, which are dedicated to reclaiming food sovereignty. As a way of summing up, Raj Patel offers some advice on the way out of the mess created by the global food web. He says: transform our tastes, eat locally and seasonally, eat agroecologically, and support locally owned business. He goes on to say that all workers have the right to dignity, and argues for profound and comprehensive rural change, living wages for all, a sustainable architecture of food, snapping the food system’s bottleneck, and owning and providing restitution for the injustices of the past and present. The struggle for reclaiming food sovereignty, Raj says, requires collective efforts to succeed.

RELEVANCE OF THE BOOK IN AFRICA

The book is relevant to the current food system in Africa. I take the case of Tanzania. Many studies have documented how agriculture developed in the early days of independence, and how the then-government put more emphasis on reforming the agricultural sector. Agriculture was declared the backbone of the economy, and small scale farming the center of agricultural development. However, the introduction of Structural Adjustment Programs changed the politics of agriculture because the government was forced to withdraw from their support of farmers. Laws were drafted to promote foreign and domestic investment, and institutions that protect and regulate investments were put in place. The market was allowed to regulate trade and the State withdrew from control of the trade. Though agriculture is still the backbone of the economy, there is a shift in the policy setup from small scale farming to large scale farming.

In the last seven years, the government of Tanzania has introduced four major agricultural initiatives. In 2009, Kilimo Kwanza was launched; in 2010 it was the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor blue print; in 2012 , the G8 New Alliance supported by USAID was approved; and in 2014 the Big Result Now was launched. These initiatives intend to mechanize and transform agriculture through commercial farming, which is to be implemented in a third of the landmass in mainland Tanzania. Most of the major global agricultural corporations are behind these projects, and have been proudly acknowledged as partners in the project blueprints. A few of them, which I will state here, are Mosanto, Bunge, Unilever, Syngenta, Yara and Du Pont. Of course, the World Bank, as always all over the world, is providing financial support. The popular language of development, food security, and improving small-scale farming through hub and spoke farming models have oiled the campaigns for these major projects. In Tanzania, farmers have resisted these projects on the grounds that they were not consulted during project development, and that the projects affect their land rights and food sovereignty. Civil society organizations such as Haki Ardhi, MVIWATA, Tanzania Natural Resource Forum, Action Aid, Oxfam, JET, and LEAT have documented the social, environmental, and economic implications of such investments.

Supermarkets are newly introduced, but growing steadily in the country. In almost all major cities, such as Dar es Salaam, Arusha, and Mwanza to mention just a few, there is a growing number of supermarkets. Most of the food products sold in these supermarkets are not grown locally. It is no surprise to find an apple from South Africa in the supermarket. People with access to these supermarkets are those with a regular income, mostly wage earners.

There are some companies that dominate the food industry in Tanzania. Bakhresa Group is one such company. A day may not pass in which any urban dweller does not consume one or several of the products produced by Bakhresa Group. The company produces mineral water, soft drinks, ice creams, sweets, baking flour, food spices, bread, cooking flour, and readymade snacks - to mention just a few. However, Bakhresa Group has no obvious influence on rural farmers over what to grow and how to grow it. And yet, rural farmers are likely to grow some of the crops and fruit trees which have dominated Bakhresa Group.

In June 2015, the government of Tanzania allowed Genetically Modified Organisms to be used in some crops. GMOs were strictly prohibited in the country until recently. This is a new development which has to be put in the context of development in the agricultural sector. MVIWATA, a network of small scale farmer’s movements in Tanzania and a member of Via Campesina, cannot fight this alone. They need support from otherof civil society organizations and concerned citizens to reclaim food sovereignty in Tanzania. If the trend of the food system continues to go the way it is going now, we will soon witness many cases of farmer suicides in Tanzania.

Stuffed and Starved; the Hidden Battle for the World Food System is the must-read book for any person who cares about farmers and food. It is a book which must be read by all people who defend the rights of farmers and food sovereignty in Africa. Researchers and policy makers alike will benefit a lot from reading the book.

* Godfrey Eliseus Massay is a land rights lawyer who is based in Arusha Tanzania. He works as land programmes coordinator for Tanzania Natural Resource Forum, a premier natural resource civil society organisation in Tanzania. His research interests are, land tenure reforms, land based investments, agrarian issues, and gender.

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