A recent review of different agricultural options for the future was conducted by a panel of experts. The scientists posed the question: How are we going to feed the world when there are nine billion people on it, as there will be by 2050? And the answer they came up with was industrial agriculture won't work and genetic engineering won't work and the solution is going to be sustainable, and going to ecological kinds of farming that are based on local environmental conditions that work with local ecosystems available to develop a richer kind of farming technology.
Raj PatelThe food shortages and high prices have certainly sparked the world media's attention, particularly since they're coming in such diverse places, being everywhere from Haiti, to Senegal, to Bangladesh, to Egypt - a range of countries. That sort of caught the media off guard, and serves the media's prurient interests insofar as "it bleeds, and so it leads".
Raj PatelFor every $1 advertisers spend advertising something healthful like apples, they spend $500 advertising junk food.
Raj PatelIndia has the largest number of hungry people. Yet it's an outcome of precisely the same mechanism. It's the control of agriculture that drives down the price it paid for food that it buys from farmers, who are the poorest people. Then you're paying very little for food. You're underpaying the poorest people in any society. Then they're marketing to us the things that are most profitable to them. And those are the things that are packaged and processed and what-have-you. That means you have the simple thing of the explosion of obesity and hunger as a result of capitalism in our food system.
Raj Patel