Raj Patel, Land Reform

Post by Schumacher Center for a New Economics.

Raj Patel for Edible Education 103

Edible Education 103: The Green Revolution, by Raj Patel

Edible Schoolyard Project: Google Hangout with Raj Patel

Google Hangout with Raj Patel from The Edible Schoolyard Project on Vimeo.

The Edible Schoolyard Project

Chris Hayes at the Commonwealth Club

MSNBC's Chris Hayes: Meritocracy and America's Failing

The organization is now charging for access to their videos at Fora. It may make sense from their perspective, but is will they get many subscribers, when you can probably find sufficiently similar content through other providers? Maybe the older members, like the retirees, who have money to burn won't mind paying for this additional perk. (Some of their other videos are free.)

Information about the event

Audio file for the event.

I heard the first 10 minutes while driving back from the airport Sunday morning. His voice is indistinguishable from a lot of other Uhmerican men I've heard through podcasts and the like. He grew up in NYC - does that explain his quick speaking and pitch of voice?

More:






Random House
Up with Chris Hayes
Democracy Now - Part 1 and Part 2
Rolling Stone
The Alonya Show - Part 1 and Part 2
The Big Picture - Part 1 and Part 2

Related:
Rod Dreher, Journalism & Meritocracy

Also from the Commonwealth Club:
You can listen to audio of Raj Patel's talk for the Commonwealth Club here.

This might also be of interest: Julia Ross: Sugar Addiction -Recovery From The Greatest Dietary Crisis Of All Time (7/12/12) - event info

The Diet Cure - vid - LLVLC

More from the New School:
Political Disobedience vs. Revolution: Significance of the Occupy Movement
Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusions

Raj Patel to appear for the Commonwealth Club

In both SF (6/12) and Mt. View (6/14) next week.

From 2010. (CC is charging for access to the videos now.)










About Homo Economicus:


His website.

His feminism:


Club Orlov: Fragility and Collapse: Slowly at first, then all at once
The Archdruid Report: Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush
Paul Craig Roberts, The Economy Comes Unglued
The Automatic Earth: Welcome to the No-Growth Paradigm

From 2007:
Making Other Arrangements
A wake-up call to a citizenry in the shadow of oil scarcity
by James Howard Kunstler
photographs by David Maisel

Items of Interest, 15 September 2011

HL Mencken Club: 2011 Conference, November 4-5, 2011
Canon Wars: Rethinking the Conservative Canon

‘Fast and Furious’ Explodes: Brian Terry Cover-Up, White House Emails Revealed

Patrick Buchanan, Democracy Worshippers

Too Much Higher Education by Walter E. Williams

America and Oil: Declining together? by Michael Klare (EB)
Ralph Nader, How Not to Stop a Pipeline

KBOO: The End Of Growth - An Interview with Richard Heinberg (mp3)

The most recent issue of The Nation is on the food movement, and includes articles by Raj Patel, Eric Schlosser, and Michael Pollan.

Diet:
Robb Wolf, Framework Matters
Latst in Paleo: Ep 30 Gary Taubes (mp3)

Barefoot Running and Minimalist Footware:
Toe Shoes, Toe Strength, and the Power of Bare Feet

Music:
Béla Fleck to premiere Concerto for Banjo and Orchestra with Nashville Symphony

TV:
Karen L. Cox: You Don’t Know Dixie—And If You Do, You Should Be Paying Attention to Pop Culture


Blackhawk!

Raj Patel on how many people the world can feed

Raj Patel, Can The World Feed 10 Billion People?

The End of Oil and The End of Food

Paul Roberts, The End of Oil (Google Books)

Mother Jones interview
NPR

Mr. Roberts's most recent book, The End of Food. (Houghton Mifflin)



CBC News
On Point with Tom Ashbrook: The End of Food?
Word for Word
The New Yorker
Grist
Washington Post Book World Live

Fora.tv video of his lecture for the Commonwealth Club (2008).

Lecture given in 2009:



Related:
(Rob Hopkins reviews Food, Inc.--archived article at EB.)

Raj Patel Discusses Stuff and Starved

Food, Finance and Democracy in Crisis
by Raj Patel (edited and introduced by Ethan Genauer), Energy Bulletin

The 2009 29th annual Ecological Farming Conference kicked off on January 21 in beautiful, rainy Pacific Grove, CA with a provocative, pointed, timely, and at-times hilarious keynote address on "Food, Financial Stability and Democracy in Crisis" by Raj Patel, the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, a new critically acclaimed book about the causes and consequences of global food inequity.

Links: Raj Patel Website of writer, activist and academic, Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved, Slow Food Nation interview: Raj Patel

"Stuffed & Starved" by Raj Patel - a review
Amanda Kovattana, Flickr blog

via EB; more on Raj Patel here and here

Global Public Media--The Reality Report: Raj Patel

The Reality Report interviews Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.

The interview reviews the historical development of the global food system, from 15th century England to the WTO and today's multi-national corporations. The discussion includes countervailing social responses to today's food crisis, such as the landless movement in Brazil to the CSAs of North America.

mp3

A previous post on Mr. Patel.

Raj Patel, The troubles with food

via EB

The troubles with food
Raj Patel, Red Pepper

Raj Patel is the author of Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Portobello Books) www.stuffedandstarved.org. He is a researcher at the University of California, at Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, and at the University of KwaZulu-Natal

Raj Patel | Website of writer, activist and academic, Raj Patel

A Man-Made Famine + Stuffed & Starved: Interview with Raj Patel ...
Democracy Now! | Stuffed and Starved: As Food Riots Break Out ...
Democracy Now! | Stuffed and Starved: As Food Riots Break Out ...
LITTLE CITY FARM: Raj Patel
Raj Patel on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos on CBC
Raj Patel NWO intro - AOL Video
Free Forum with Raj Patel - Global Food Crisis : Indybay

Newsweek - National News, World News, Health, Technology ...
Stuffed and Starved, by Raj Patel - Reviews, Books - The Independent
Scoop: Raj Patel - 'Stuffed and Starved'

INDOlink - Diaspora - UC Berkeley’s Raj Patel Calls For ...

Patel’s 10 Guidelines for Environmental/Social Justice

Patel has his own blogsite where he delves into the murky world of food politics. In his: http://stuffedandstarved.org/ he lays out ten things that we all can do to promote justice and food sovereignty. “These aren’t by any means the only route to follow, or even a comprehensive checklist. They’re a point of departure, not a point of arrival, they’re very open to suggestion,” he says.

Here are his ten suggestions.

1.TRANSFORM OUR TASTES.

One of the best reasons to become sensuous, to enjoy more than the endless combinations of fat, salt, and sugar, is provided by James Baldwin. I’ve quoted him here, I know, but it’s such a wonderful quote that it deserves a second airing on this site. “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.” The challenge is to examine our own tastes, to see how they’re captive to a very narrow spectrum of food. Food is to be enjoyed, not processed.

So it’s time for us to enjoy complex flavors a little more, and processed ones a little less. It’s time to distrust our food instincts, because they’ve been so contaminated by the food industry. Although it might not come naturally, we ought to let the seasons and our environment be our guide to local, fresh and tasty food.

2. EAT LOCALLY AND SEASONALLY

You can find resources on eating locally and seasonally here - but the joy of it is that eating locally and seasonally happens most easily and healthily by growing the food oneself. Nothing tastes like a homegrown tomato. Why not google your local allotments and gardening centres to see what resources they can offer?

3. EAT AGRO-ECOLOGICALLY

One way of thinking about agro-ecology is to see it as the next step beyond organic.It’s a farming philosophy that farms with nature, developing and maintaining soil fertility, producing a wide range of crops, and matching the farming to the needs, climate, geography, biodiversity and aspirations of a particular place and community. It’s an approach that develops deep local expertise, and means that farmers aren’t disposable and substitutable resources, as they are under the reign of `industrial organic’. It promises to be able to feed the planet. And it is an approach that, above all, sees agriculture as embedded within society.

4. SUPPORT LOCALLY OWNED BUSINESS

Although supermarkets portray themselves as zones of choice and variety, the opposite is often the case. Supermarkets, while offering shelves of plenty, employ fewer people and charge more for less fresh food than local growers and businesses. The food in street markets is about a third cheaper than in supermarkets, and more often sourced locally. London’s Queens Market offers a haven of cheaper goods and more choice than supermarkets and is about 50 per cent cheaper than the local Wal-Mart/ Asda supermarket, while being more racially diverse and a lot less sterile. The food in street markets, because it’s less processed, also tends to be healthier. But markets such as these are struggling against the higher level of resources that supermarkets can deploy.

5. INSIST THAT THE WORKERS WHO GROW OUR FOOD HAVE THE RIGHT TO DIGNITY

Even the most locally owned, organic and agroecological businesses can still exploit their workers. To combat this is to insist on a suite of workers rights, from collective bargaining to a living wage.

6. ADVOCATE PROFOUND AND COMPREHENSIVE RURAL CHANGE

Rural areas have been transformed over the past two centuries, but rarely has that transformation been carried out with the knowledge or support of the poorest people living there. Alternatives abound, though, and the best of them are encompassed by the idea of “Food sovereignty”. It is the product of a democratic process within the international peasant federation, La Via Campesina . A central part of this change involves land reform.

7. DEMAND LIVING WAGES FOR ALL:

Without the means to eat well, we haven’t a chance of living healthily. Living wage campaigns are well worth supporting, and there’s bound to be one in your country. In Canada, for instance, a range of organizations are listed here, and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty is a mainstay of sensible thinking and action around poverty. In the US, the issue is outlined by the Economic Policy Institute, and made flesh by campaigns from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Kensington Welfare Rights Union. In the UK, the London Citizens Living Wage Campaign provides a locus of activity. One of the best ways to ensure living wages is when workers are in control of their employers - through cooperatives and participatory economics.

8. SUPPORT A SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE OF FOOD:

Not nearly enough work has been done linking the changing architecture of our homes and towns to health. Yet it’s clear after the most cursory reflection that commuting, trekking miles to the local hypermarket, and withering bicycle use are all factors behind the world’s ill health. This is the sort of thinking that prevents the diseases associated with today’s food system, and makes it possible for people to be Healthy at Any Size. Demanding local public spaces, parks, allotments to grow food, these are all local actions.

9. SNAP THE FOOD SYSTEM’S BOTTLENECK:

There is already, across the world, a network of regulation and `checks and balances’ intended to reign in the most egregious acts of corporate malfeasance. But the companies that benefit most from the food system’s inequities are also the companies that are most resistant to its fundamental transformation. They will fight hard to maintain their profits. The subsidies to agribusiness must, however, end. It doesn’t only mean an end to the hand-outs to corporations offered as part of the Farm Bill in the US and Common Agricultural Policy in Europe. It also means cutting off industrial farming from the subsidized carbon that it receives from fossil and (soon) biofuels. See Friends of the Earth, Food First and Grain for more on specifics about what you can do. These are actions that can only come through a powerful and informed citizenry taking on its government. But it’s a necessary step. We are, after all, not consumers of democracy - we’re its proprietors. Nothing can change about the food system unless we own our power over it, and complicity in it.

10. OWN AND PROVIDE RESTITUTION FOR THE INJUSTICES OF THE PAST AND PRESENT:

While Bono and his friends have, I’m sure, nothing but good intentions, their demands for aid and support are way off the mark. They propose tinkering with the level of aid given by rich countries. But what poor people of color have been demanding is not charity, but restitution. Whether for slavery in Africa and the New World, or simply for the innumerable coups and dictators installed to service the needs of consumers in the Global North, damages are due. Not charity, but compensation for incalculable harm done by representatives of `civilisation’.

Moreover, the full costs of the food system’s environmental and public health costs ought to be reflected in the price of its output. That means taxing processed food to a level where it reflects the harm it does us and the planet. Some districts and cities are as matters of public health, restricting the ambit of food system corporations. Whether it’s a case of removing their products from schools, or banning the harmful additives (as New York has done with transfats), people are succeeding in putting pressure on their governments to curb the power of the agribusiness giants.