The 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 PatelI definitely think the price of food is going up. We need to figure out ways to manage that in a sustainable way. We have to figure out ways of increasing wages so people can afford it. That means redistribution, and rich people don't like to hear that. This administration simply won't hear of it. But without it, I fear even more Americans will be going hungry in the future.
Raj PatelAgricultural sustainability doesn't depend on agritechnology. To believe it does is to put the emphasis on the wrong bit of 'agriculture.' What sustainability depends on isn't agri- so much as culture.
Raj PatelYet if you go to the supermarket and look at food that's produced through industrial agriculture, look at what's happened to the prices. Have they been going down? They've been going up and they will continue to go up. So the choice is either, do we hitch onto a system of agriculture that's doomed and will doom the planet with it, and go along the route of industrial agriculture, or do we want to shift to a kind of system that we know is going to be, in the long run, cheaper, because we'll have a planet left at the end of it? We need to factor that cost in.
Raj PatelThere are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood ...in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.
Raj Patel