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| The overfed rich and the underfed poor |
| Latha Jishnu / New Delhi Sep 04, 2008, 00:48 IST |
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Five years ago, award-winning science writer Colin Tudge wrote a brilliant analysis of what is wrong with the way we grow our food and how it is sold and eaten. So Shall We Reap with a lumbering subtitle (How everyone who is liable to be born in the next ten thousand years could eat very well indeed; and why, in practice, our immediate descendants are likely to be in serious trouble) covering the entire dust jacket was a landmark book.
It explained how the relentless pursuit of maximum production at the lowest cost had undermined sensible agricultural practices and devastated rural communities across the world while a handful of companies that control the trade in food produce and seeds had misappropriated science to make enormous profits. Tudge did a great job of combining complex science, history and gastronomy to show that enlightened farming practices could, and should, be linked to good cuisine and sound nutrition. So Shall We Reap was followed by a series of more accessible titles that touched upon similar concerns such as Dale Allen Pfeiffer’s Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture and Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, And Fair.
Raj Patel’s Stuffed & Starved goes over much the same ground with arguments that would be familiar to anyone who has been following the globalisation debate. Its appeal lies in its timing. Coming in the wake of soaring prices of staple commodities and food riots in several parts of the world, Patel’s book has caught the popular imagination with its activist stance — winning him fulsome praise from Naomi Klein — and a fluid style that should be the envy of journalists.
Patel is a wordsmith with a marked literary bent who brings in Shakespeare, Samuel Butler, Steinbeck to spice up his formulations even if at times the quotes from the Bible, Catch 22 and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are not apposite. What does Patel’s examination of the global food system reveal? An almost predictable story of how corporatisation of the food chain has resulted in greed, power and monopoly at one end, and deprivation, suicides and ruin at the other. That is something the author should have learned during his stints at the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.
The true strength of his book lies in his narratives of farmers across continents although some tend to be simplistic as they are made to fit into overarching themes. For readers who are approaching the subject of the agrarian crisis for the first time the book will come as a shocking exposé of how far the world has allowed itself to be manipulated by the profit motive, of mostly American corporations. They would get excellent understanding of how farming practices at one end of the globe, such as those practised by Brazilian soya king Blairo Maggi, can ruin indigenous communities, ruin the environment and also dictate what the rest of the world eats — and the diseases they would be prone to in the process. In fact, the chapter titled Glycine Rex on soya cultivation is a superb rounding up of history, unsustainable agriculture subsidies, the nexus between corporations and government and predatory global trade regulations. Along with all this comes an absorbing account of the social movements that exploitative farming sometimes gives rise to.
Disappointingly, however, Patel’s portrayal of India’s agriculture is not so sharp, his understanding of policies being shaky and his reporting from the hinterland extremely superficial. His forays into villages outside Hyderabad throw up no insights and his accounts have all the gaucheness of a writer who has made an obligatory visit to the victims he so eloquently champions.
The trouble with Patel is his tendency to be all over the place, linking almost everything to his thesis and his activist agenda. A good example is the preface he has penned for the just released Indian edition of Stuffed & Starved and elsewhere when he talks of India. There are rants against intellectual property and IT companies, poverty alleviation schemes and the violence in Singur and Nandigram, however tenuous the connection. For all that, it’s a book that provides some wholesome fare in goodly bites.
STUFFED & STARVED
WHAT LIES BEHIND THE WORLD FOOD CRISIS
Raj Patel
Harper Litmus
Pages: 438; Rs 495
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