Morning Forum: Raj Patel’s Speech

posted by brooklynfoodconference, on May 4, 2009

Scroll down to the bottom for Raj Patel’s bio, links to other speeches and related topics. More speeches to come soon.

I’m very briefly going to make really just one point. I want to suggest to y’all that the most dangerous (y’all-isn’t that good?) part of our bodies is our mouths. That’s an important thing for a conference around food to hear. But the danger doesn’t come in the way that you think. Me, I’m recently back from Mexico and uh, [coughs]. I see there are people in the back, if you want to come up here…

It was very true there that the most dangerous part of anyone’s body was their mouth and people were forced to wear masks. There were men with guns handing out masks insuring that you wore them. The reason obviously is because of the outbreak of swine flu. And the outbreak of swine flu is a symptom of what is wrong with our industrial food system. Swine flu, as far as we can tell at the moment, first broke out in Veracruz near an industrial pork-processing facility: CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation).

CAFO doesn’t really do justice to what was going on there. In this sort of feedlot and slaughterhouse, 950,000 swine a year are killed. 950,000. Of course, 950,000 pigs produce a ton of waste. And that waste was very poorly regulated, and the people in the city near this pork-processing facility fell ill. About 60% of them came down with mysterious flu-like symptoms about three weeks ago. The Mexican press covered it. Of course, the US press didn’t.

What was interesting is that that soon morphed into what we now know apparently as swine flu. What we’ve got to ask is who dies? Who is it who suffers the worst from this? Well, if you look at the people who have been dying in Mexico, it’s not the rich. It’s the people who are living in the barrios, the poor areas, mainly of Mexico City, but certainly throughout Mexico it is the poorest who die.

So we’ve got to ask, “Well, what was this Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation doing there?” Well, it turns out that this CAFO is owned by a US corporation. It’s owned by Smithfield. It started there because of a series of economic policies that were negotiated between the US and Mexico. Because of NAFTA, it became easier for US corporations to outsource their work to Mexico. NAFTA also made it easier for rich, large landowners to kick farmers off their land, to displace the very farmers who were responsible for producing the food that fed the majority of Mexico and to send them into the cities where they’d be left to their own devices to find work as best they could in the favellas.

NAFTA made it safe for Smithfield to have its large factory in Mexico. NAFTA displaced farmers into the cities, but NAFTA also made it safe for large corporations to come in and start marketing their processed food products very heavily to Mexicans. And that’s why today the world’s second most obese country is Mexico. And the closer you get to the US border, the fatter Mexican teenagers, for example, are likely to be. That is a consequence of NAFTA.

And it’s not just in Mexico where these trade policies are destroying farming systems, are creating these huge industrial nightmares where diseases stem from. In Asia, for example, bird flu started in a large industrial poultry-processing facility. And these economic policies are happening the world over, and are in part promoted by an organization for which I once used to work. This is the World Bank.

Some of you have heard this before, but many of you haven’t heard about the World Bank and about its pernicious impacts on food policy the world over. But for those of you who haven’t, I do want to share this small contribution to pedagogy that I’ve developed. If you don’t know about the World Bank, sometimes it can seem a little overwhelming, because the World Bank is in the business of providing loans, and they have “conditionalities” and “structural adjustment policies,” and a range of stuff. So it’s helpful to have a visual metaphor.

This visual metaphor comes from the Terry Gilliam film Time Bandits. How many of you are familiar with Time Bandits? It’s a Monty Python film. It’s about disgruntled former employees of God. The way it works is the universe was built in six days so it was a rush job. God had help, but he treats his workers very badly. So these workers run off with a map of the holes in the universe, and they use this to rob people. In one scene, they rob Napoleon and they jump through a hole in the universe, and they end up in Sherwood Forest where they are met by Robin Hood, who’s played by John Cleese as a sort of upper-class twit. And he introduces himself as Hood. He shakes people’s hand. He’s very excited to see all of Napoleon’s stuff. “This is tremendous. Thank you very much indeed. The poor will love this. Have you met the poor? They’re charming people. They don’t have two pennies to rub together but that’s because they’re poor.”

There’s a lovely scene where Hood gives Napoleon’s stuff to the poor. “Bring on the poor!” The poor are brought. He works his way down the line. “A gilded mirror for you. Yes, how long have you been poor? Jolly good. Rubies for you. Congratulations. Well done.”

Right next to Hood is this big bloke who takes whatever Hood has given and punches the person in the face.

So that’s how the World Bank works. [Now see the scene for yourself ]

A very accurate metaphor. I worked at the World Bank. I produced a book called Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? It was very much have-you-met-the-poor-we-had-lunch-with-them-yesterday-and-loved-it. But of course, it is in the name of fighting poverty that these economic policies are enforced on developing countries.

Look, for example, to Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, where two US presidents insisted on World Bank structural adjustment policies. The result was that Haitian rice farmers had to compete with US rice farmers. Haiti grew the majority of its own rice in the 1980s. They had the know-how, they had the farmers, they had everything. But because two US presidents, Reagan and Clinton, thought that—actually there was some indigenous organizers who wanted to control the government themselves—the poor shouldn’t be allowed to control their government. Well, as a result those two presidents insisted on economic policies that made Haitian rice farmers compete with US rice farmers. US rice farmers get a billion dollars a year in subsidies. Haitian rice farmers were not allowed to get anything.

And, of course, the results were predictable. Haitian rice farmers were kicked off the land, and Haiti produces none of its own rice now. Last year there were food riots where people were fighting over bags of rice that had the stars and stripes on them and the words “Gift of the people of the United States.”

Now the answer to this is clearly political. We need to take back our food system. We need to take back our politics. And we’ve done wonders by electing a man who rode in on a platform of change. And it is wonderful that we now have President Obama.

But what kind of change? And how will that change happen? I mean, in a sense we’re now sort of encouraged to let President Obama be the pizza delivery dude of change. People sit at home and hot fresh steaming change. That’s not change I can eat. In fact if you’re concerned about agriculture in a sense the president has been a disappointment. The Secretary of Agriculture [Tom Vilsack] is an agribusiness yes man. He’s a man who will lean to, when they solve the world hunger crisis, America exporting yet more food and by genetically modified crops, by biofuels and a range of lunatic ideas. Biofuels! What a mad idea! The idea that you would grow food not in order to eat it but to set it on fire. This is the policy.

I want to close with an idea concretely of what we can do, because when I was in Mexico I wasn’t there to see the swine flu. I was there to see the indigenous people who are in Chiapas, the Zapatistas . Now, the Zapatistas, they also wear masks. They wear ski masks. If you go to visit the juntas, the good government’s councils. But when you go there, the reason that they’re wearing masks is not to protect you from anything they might say but because actually what they have is a functioning democracy. They have people who rotate on and off the council every week. Being part of the community is being part of these democratic councils. The faces will change on the councils weekly. But the most important face when you go talk to the good government’s council is not theirs. It’s yours. When you go into Zapatista territory, there’s a sign that says “Welcome to Zapatista territory. Here the people lead and the government listens.”

That’s what we need to do here to take back our government. In Zapatista territory, they do have agro-ecology. They have figured out that the way to survive in an ecosystem is to work with it rather than working against it. But the way they’ve got to that is not by having some expert heliocoptered in to say “Agro ecology is the way for you.”

It’s through the actual process of struggling through something and the process of fighting and getting democracy back. That’s the lesson I learned from Mexico, and I think it is a beautiful lesson. It’s one I’ve said before in different ways. In order to take back our food system we need to realize that we aren’t consumers of democracy. We are proprietors. And that’s what the Zapatistas have to share. They realize that the most dangerous part of us when it comes to democracy is our mouths.

Raj’s Official Bio
Raj Patel is the author of Stuffed and Starved, The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, an exposé of the global food system and how activists are gaining ground against its corporate control. He is a researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies, a researcher with the Land Research Action Network, and a Fellow with Food First, a leading food think tank. He has written for the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian, and though he has worked for the World Bank, WTO, and the UN, he’s also been tear-gassed on four continents protesting them.  He recently completed a book on the financial crisis that will be coming out soon.

And More…

• Sara Franklin wrote a good think piece on the swine flu/food system connection for World Hunger Year. Another Warning or the Real Deal: Swine Flu. Sara is a farmer as well as a writer and activist. She was on the panel of young farmers at the conference. A transcript will appear here soon.
• Raj also spoke at the Food Rebellions workshop. Transcript coming soon.
• Also check out: Sneak Peak: Food Rebellions Workshop. A talk with Haitian agronomist/organizer Bazelais Jean-Baptiste.

—Compiled by Paige Churchman