Filmmaker Raj Patel on food justice in the climate era | Oct. 20-26, 2021

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Food insecurity and hunger have long framed the work of Raj Patel, author, activist and academic. A professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, he follows food justice and resistance movements around the world.

Patel first wrote about the contradictions of one in nine people going to bed hungry on a planet that produces more food than ever before in his 2007 book, “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.” Fast forward 13 years later, and the climate crisis is further aggravating food insecurity and the challenges faced by those who grow our food, from small farms who practice agroecology to large industrial farms. Drought, floods and extreme weather have made growing food a risky business.

We caught up with Patel on the eve of last month’s UN Food Systems Summit, which was boycotted and criticized by social movements, farming groups and even scientists, despite its goal of laying the groundwork for a transformation of global food systems. 

 

Martha Baskin: What does the face of food insecurity look like in this 21st year of the 21st century? Can hunger in the U.S., where an estimated 36 million people are food insecure, be compared with hunger globally, which hovers above 2 billion?

Raj Patel: Ultimately the face of hunger is poverty, no matter where that happens. There are many more people outside the U.S. who are food insecure, and not just food insecure, malnourished because of policies that originate here. And one of the accompaniments of poverty is working in the food system. In America, 7 out of 10 of the worst-paid jobs are in the food system, from waiting tables, to washing dishes, to being a grocery store clerk. That’s one of the deepest ironies here and around the world. The hungriest people are often the people who are harvesting the food and serving it to us.

 

You spoke of the factors that keep people from affording and having access to nutritious food in “Stuffed and Starved,” including consolidation in the food industry and concentrated market share by companies like Archer Daniels Midland, as well as a host of government policies, from massive support for industrial agriculture to trade policies that favor corporate food interests. Can you explain, and what’s changed since “Stuffed and Starved” was published?

It’s true that corporations in the food system are the villains in this story. They have succeeded over centuries in getting society to pick up the tab for their private profits and they do that by working to exclude worker’s rights, to exploit workers. The origins of the food system lie in enslavement, and the wealth of the U.S. was built on an agricultural economy that was precisely about enslaved people and their transport across the Atlantic and their maintenance here in the U.S. And about the theft of land, of course, on which to grow the food in this country.

So, these corporations have been at the game of exploiting land and workers for centuries, and what we’ve noticed is the larger these corporations get, the better they are at finagling their way through government and making government supine to corporate desires. Unfortunately, since “Stuffed and Starved” was published, we’ve seen a rise not only in the number of people who are overweight and suffering from metabolic disease in the U.S., we’re seeing increased levels of corporate concentration and very little movement in terms of workers’ rights.

 

At the same time, there’s been a surge in global resistance movements taking control of food systems in order to eradicate hunger and exploitation: small farms and urban and rural food collectives. Perhaps the biggest movement of all is La Via Campesina, the global peasant movement, who coined the words “food sovereignty,” or the right of people to define their own food and agriculture systems. Could you talk about this movement? 

I think La Via Campesina is one of the big success stories of our 21st century. It started with a dozen or so countries. Now it has over 250 million farmers around the world who are part of a movement of peasants who are really at the bleeding edge of ending hunger and fighting climate change. They proudly use the word “peasants” to describe themselves. When we hear the word in English, we’re compelled to think of backward, straw-chewing folk who want to live in the 12th century. La Via Campesina is very clear that’s absolutely not what’s required. What we need are transformations in the way food systems work so that everyone gets to eat, and that’s not turning the clock back at all. That’s a food system we’ve never had and certainly never had under capitalism. 

 

La Via Campesina launched in 1993. Six years later, the World Trade Organization came to Seattle and people from all over the globe came together to say no to trade policies undermining food security, labor laws and environmental protections in a movement that became known as the “Battle of Seattle.” Some literally laid down in the streets to stop delegates from reaching the ministerial. What were the victories then and what hasn’t changed?

It was an important moment. You’ll remember, Martha, that towards the end of the 1990s we were in this moment of American triumphalism and the “end of history,” as Frances Fukuyama put it, where with the fall of the Soviet Union there was only one way and it was the neoliberal way, and the Washington Consensus was going to run everything. And Clinton was president and was overseeing what was going to be the rubber stamping of the American imperium in the global trade system. And so, to be able to say no to the WTO in 1999 was a huge victory, because all of a sudden inevitability of U.S. supremacy of the planet’s economy was interrupted by a group of people who forged alliances that endured, I think. You heard in the streets about Teamsters and Turtles, where labor movements teamed up with environmentalists, recognizing that both the planet and workers were going to suffer as a result of WTO policies. Unfortunately, the U.S. learned its lesson, and future trade talks happened outside the U.S. under armed guard.

And then came 9/11, which was essentially the death knell to protest movements because protest against exploitation was treated as a terrorist event. The same laws that we used to track terrorists and clamp down on Islam were also used to quash dissent around trade policies and global justice movements. And we were set back many years by that process. So unfortunately, while it was possible to say no to U.S. imperial economic policy, the U.S. fought back, and there’s always been this back and forth.

That’s the way history works. There’s never one decisive victory and everything is fine. We thought we beat the fascists after the second World War, and here they are back again. It’s always going to be a fight. One shouldn’t look for definitive victories. But you’re quite right, Martha, to ask what have we lost, and unfortunately since 1999 we’ve lost quite a lot.

 

Yet as the climate crisis has become more severe and widely recognized, there’s been a resurgence of global protest movements. How does the climate crisis intersect with food insecurity?

 The rule of thumb with the climate crisis is that if you have very little to do with it, you’ll experience its maximum impact. So, farmers in the global south, who have carbon footprints that are minuscule compared to ours in the global north, are already experiencing climate change and are suffering as a consequence. The fault lines of that experience are gendered and class based. So again, the poorest people, particularly women, are suffering the consequences of climate change right now.

And we’re seeing higher food prices globally in part because of profiteering by the food manufacturers and traders, but it’s also because climate change is making food more expensive and will continue to do that. But it isn’t that there’s a shortage of food. We have more food per person right now in 2021 than we’ve ever had in human history. Yet we also have over 2 billion people who are food insecure. So, when it comes to the intersection of the food crisis and the climate crisis, they obviously compound each other. And the injustices of both are weighed onto the shoulders of farmers in the global south, particularly women.

 

Which brings us to one of your most recent projects, the just-released documentary “The Ants & the Grasshopper.” The film features Anita Chitaya, a farmer from Malawi, Africa. In the film’s trailer, she explains that the Malawi-based Soils, Food and Healthy Communities project taught her that her crops were dying from lack of rain because of fossil fuel use and policies in countries like the U.S. How did Chitaya come to your attention? 

I’d followed the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities project for a while. I was lucky enough to go to graduate school with one of its co-founders, and so when I was living in South Africa and she was living in Malawi, we exchanged contacts and I began following the organization. In 2010 I had the opportunity to work on a documentary project about movements in the global south that were upending the stories that we were seeing on television around the food system; movies like “Food, Inc.,” that showed suffering people, usually the working class and people of color. Their arduous days and plight at the hands of the food system would be narrated by someone who sounded like me or some kind of posh academic, and then we would go back to the long-suffering people, and then there would be some white dude saying the way to solve this problem is for you to buy yogurt at Walmart. If you buy organic, we will be able to change the world, and there would be jangling guitar music and then fade out.

That kind of approach to film making and storytelling just didn’t work for me. I had the pleasure and privilege to meet Steve James, whose documentaries include “Hoop Dreams,” and together we returned to Malawi to get started. We looked around, saw the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities project had a meeting, and while that meeting was going on Chitaya and a few of her friends were at the back sassing everyone — sort of back chatting and sort of mocking the self-importance of me and everyone else in the room, and Steve said, that’s the woman we need to get. We interviewed Chitaya and her friends, and [Chitaya] was the one ready to talk to us and let her story be on the screen in ways that worked for everyone, and so for the next 10 years we followed her.

 

The fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper” describes how a hungry grasshopper begs for food from an ant when winter comes and is refused. But Chitaya’s story is quite different.

In Malawi, the story is actually just an observation that a single ant could never lift a grasshopper, but ants together can, and when you have enough ants you can lift huge things. And that’s another way of understanding this “ants and grasshopper.” It was Chitaya’s idea and it was her narration, and in the end it was the line in the film that seemed to stick best and describe best what this film was about.

So you arranged for Chitaya and a representative from the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities project to come to the U.S. They met with farmers in Iowa and Michigan. Some practiced industrial farming, which relies on intense, fossil fuel-based tilling of the soil and pesticides to control pests, and others who followed regenerative agriculture or agroecology, which relies on no-till farming and cover crops to nourish the soil. One of those farms was the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN). How did Chitaya’s meeting go there?

DBCFSN wanted to share their agroecological approach with her. The intent is to bring a kind of economic solidarity to Black people in Detroit and try and show farmers it’s possible to make a living out of farming in a way that is mindful of community and the planet; one that was not exploitative, that was giving food to the hungry and nutrition to the malnourished and life back to the soil. Malik Iakani from DBCFSN was very keen for us to understand that they were planting seeds in the soil and in people’s consciousness about the possibility of radical change. And that was certainly something that resonated with [Chitaya].

 

[Chitaya] also met climate skeptics on her U.S. trip, farmers who said climate change was a “political agenda.” How did that make her feel?

The talk that climate change is really a power grab confused and upset her because, as she said in the film, if that becomes an excuse for inaction it would mean that the U.S. was sort of casting her to her fate. And what she was in the U.S. to do was to present the circumstances as she saw them. One of the lines she uses is, “if you go to your neighbor with your problem, they can’t ignore you,” and it seemed to her that the idea that climate change was a “political agenda” was a way of ignoring her, and I think she was saddened by that. But through her work and through her patience, she was able to reach a few of those folks. But there’s still a long way to go, and her call to us is to recognize that we do need to lift the grasshopper, and there are not enough of us doing it right now.

 

Raj Patel gave the keynote address at this year’s Food Justice gala sponsored by the Community Alliance for Global Justice on Oct. 9. For more on agroecology, see Patel’s recent article in Scientific American titled “Agroecology Is the Solution to World Hunger.”

 

 

Read more of the Oct. 20-26, 2021 issue.

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