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Press Reviews
Food Rebellions!
In this very timely book, two of the world's most prominent critics of the global food system, Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel, dissect the causes of hunger and the food price crisis, locating them in a political economy of capitalist industrial production dominated by corporations and driven by the search for profits for the few instead of the welfare of the many. The picture that emerges is a political economy of global production that is failing badly in terms of feeding the world and is itself contributing to the spread of inequalities that promote hunger.
- Walden Bello, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition and professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines
Food Rebellions!
According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, the number of malnourished people exceeded one billion for the first time in 2009. What’s more, it’s clear this isn’t just as a result of a growing world population as the figure represents an 11 per cent increase in just a year. It’s a direct effect of the food crisis that pushed up food prices so dramatically in early 2008 and so far has kept them relatively high.
There has been much debate about the causes of this crisis; the volatile price of oil, the agrofuels boom, impacts of climate change, increased demand for meat and financial speculation on grain all clearly played a part. But what both of these books argue is that these are just proximate causes. Determining the ultimate causes involves tracing the fate of agriculture in the global South during the past 50 years and shining a light on what amounts to a corporate takeover of the world’s food systems.
The 1960s and 1970s saw the 'green revolution’ unleashed on the South, a system of industrialising agriculture particularly through the use of pesticides. Although this increased yields in the short term, particularly in Asia, it left a legacy of debt and environmental pollution that nevertheless benefited seed and pesticide companies enormously and also saw agriculture concentrated into fewer hands.
Although encouraged by the World Bank, the green revolution was a state-led process. As neoliberalism took hold in the 1980s, the state fell out of favour and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund used the power they had as a result of the debt crisis to force developing countries to junk state marketing boards, agricultural subsidies, grain reserves and other ‘market distortions’. Agriculture was reorientated towards cash crops for export.
More recent free-trade agreements with the North have dealt the final blow, undermining local production through a flood of subsidised food products from the US and Europe. Thus the scene was set for the current crisis.
Walden Bello's The Food Wars explains this process very well, taking the Philippines, Africa, Mexico and China for a chapter each, as well as examining the role of agrofuels in the current crisis. A final chapter looks at the alternatives, in particular profiling the international peasant movement, La Via Campesina, and its proposal for democratic control of the food system via ‘food sovereignty’.
Patel and Holt-Giménez, meanwhile, take a very similar approach (their book even has a foreword by Bello). Yet while The Food Wars concentrates on the economic history of the crisis, and probably beats them on clarity here, where Food Rebellions! really comes into its own is in the substantial space which it devotes to solutions.
Their book is full of evidence that smallholder agriculture based on ‘agroecology’, basically organic or near-organic farming, can actually be more productive than large-scale industrial monocultures. Scientific research into improving such forms of agriculture struggles to receive funding, while patentable technologies like GM get vast sums. Nevertheless, adaptations of traditional peasant knowledge have led to the development of more efficient sustainable farming in recent years – techniques which have then been spread through initiatives such as the ‘Campesino a Campesino’ movement in Latin America.
The call for a local, sustainable approach to farming from the environmental movement has become familiar in the UK, but it isn’t just agriculture’s contribution to climate change that means this approach matters. The resilience of agriculture in the face of climate change, especially in the South, depends on the diverse cropping of agroecological farms, which can be highly adaptive in the face of climate change impacts. Yet the biotech firms and their allies, who include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are pushing GM crops as a part of a new ‘Green Revolution for Africa’. Both these books are useful in making the argument that we don’t need GM to ‘feed the world’ as Hilary Benn has recently suggested.
Agricultural globalisation has been a disaster for the climate, for biodiversity, and for the small producers of the global South, many of whom have been forced to abandon farming and try to scrape a living in the mega-slums around major cities. Yet peasants are now organising against this immiseration, and insisting that they and not the North’s official development experts have the solutions to the food crisis. As in so many areas of our lives, while these solutions may have technical and cultural sides to them, in the end they come down to winning the battle of democracy against the power of capital.
- James O'Nions, Red Pepper
Food Rebellions!
The small-scale farming systems spread widely across Africa are a social and ecological asset. As Food Rebellions! demonstrates, planting indigenous trees and using traditional farming methods enhances environmental conservation and preserves local biodiversity. At a time of economic crisis, sustainable agriculture and the economic empowerment it can generate will be key to the survival of the many African families headed by women.
- Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of The Challenge for Africa (Heinemann, 2009).
Food Rebellions!
Food Rebellions! situates with accuracy and precision the true meaning, causes and dynamics of what is commonly referred to as the "global food crisis". It shows how skewed and dysfunctional the global food system is, and how the concentration of market power by a handful of transnational corporations translates into power over land, water, food and, indeed, life itself. In Part One, the authors trace with startling clarity the history of hunger and poverty to North–South politics of domination and gender and class inequalities. They compel us to confront the questions: Who is hungry, and why? But all is not gloom and doom. In Part Two, the authors inspire us with examples of creative and constructive resistance by food producers and workers against the capitalist driven food system and propose strategies for transforming the food system – strategies that are practical and well within the reach of anyone concerned with social and political justice. If Food Rebellions! does not make food rights activist of its readers, I don't know what will. This is a truly remarkable book.
- Shalmali Guttal, senior associate of Focus on the Global South, Bangkok, Thailand
Experts
PAMBAZUKA NEWS: How did Food Rebellions! come about? And why now?
RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: The book was driven by Eric's vision for a text that could interpret and contextualise the wave of protest around the world that the media had referred to as 'food riots’, but which were the confluence of factors far more complex and urgent than most journalists could acknowledge. Although the academic publishing industry is now cranking out waves of anthology about the crisis, there isn’t an accessible text that brings together both a wide-ranging diagnosis of the causes of these rebellions, and also an understanding of the politics of resistance that they bear witness to. Also, a number of organisations in the food movement wanted a text that could inform a people’s campaign for solving the food crisis – we also wrote the book with them in mind. This is a working book, for real social change.
PAMBAZUKA NEWS: What were the primary materials and experiences informing your work?
RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: At Food First, we’ve been following the food crisis for over 30 years, during which time many many people from the social movements have taught us where the true roots hunger and environmental destruction lie. We have included their insights and their testimonies, inspiration and vision for food justice and food sovereignty in this book.
More frivolously, one of the experiences that mattered most in the writing of this book was Eric’s back injury – he couldn’t lie down or stand up for a month, and over Christmas he spent the entire time reclined in a chair writing, turning a good manuscript into a great one.
PAMBAZUKA NEWS: How would you define the term 'food sovereignty'?
RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: Food sovereignty seems to mean all things to all people, and that’s no accident. The widely accepted definition speaks of ‘people’s right to control their food and agriculture policy’. What it calls for is a democratisation of the food system. This turns out to be revolutionary: What, after all, is real democracy? It’s a situation of radical equality in which every person, regardless of income, race, gender, class or, ultimately indeed citizenship, can shape the politics and policy of the food system.
PAMBAZUKA NEWS: A major theme of your book is the need to genuinely democratise both food systems and the decisions taken around them. You discuss the tension between calls for a 'green revolution' from international organisations like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and those of the continent's grassroots movements for African agroecological alternatives. How would you describe these competing views on developing agriculture?
RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa starts from the unimpeachable observation that African agriculture needs investment. But from that point, it rather rapidly goes off the rails, developing a model of agriculture that is driven not by the needs and successes of the world’s poorest farmers, but by the world’s richest foundations. The rise of ‘Philanthropy capitalism’ is necessarily at odds with democracy – in the latter, people decide their own fates. In the former, the fates of the world’s poorest people are shaped by the richest men. For instance, the ‘We Are the Solution’ campaign seeks to address the food perspective from a genuinely African perspective (not merely parroting policy written in Seattle, relying on foreign dollars). The farmer federations and women’s organisations launching this campaign see the solutions to hunger in Africa as addressing both the structural causes of hunger as well as advancing African agroecological practices to production.
PAMBAZUKA NEWS: As a challenge to the often-assumed superiority of top-down and executive knowledge around agriculture, what will be the key means of promoting grassroots voices and ensuring the centrality of local expertise in the future of the global food system?
RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: AGRA, like the original Green Revolution, is a campaign for the corporate colonisation of African food systems. African farmers and civil society are mounting a counter-campaign, based on food sovereignty and agroecological solutions to hunger, rather than genetic engineering. One of the misconceptions around food sovereignty is that it is in some way anti-science, that it mistrusts expertise. On the contrary, if we are to overcome the ecological disasters that industrial agriculture has wrought, we’ll need a great deal of science, research and expertise. Ensuring that this expertise is democratically controlled isn’t some political pipe dream – it’s already happening. Eric’s work on the Campesino a Campesino movement in Central America is a study of a living example of this democratic exchange of expertise, but it’s happening in Africa too, from Mali to Malawi.
PAMBAZUKA NEWS: Your chapter on Africa touches on the need to 'cultivate farmers' enthusiasm' in the effort to mobilise the continent's agricultural majority and ensure that smallholders themselves develop their own sustainable methods.
RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: Enthusiasm is that quality which can’t be bought, but without which there is no social change. All [Bill] Gates has is money, but what he can’t buy is enthusiasm. We need to amplify the voices of the farmers’ federations and the women’s organisations who are enthusiastically advancing genuinely democratic solutions to the food crisis.
With the dominant role of international NGOs and the imposition of external knowledge over the last 30 years or so however, the experience for many African people has been a sustained loss of confidence in their own knowledge and capacity for solutions. If people are accustomed to looking outside for help, how can they be encouraged to trust in local knowledge and look first to themselves?
We need to be careful about a reactionary impulse to head to ‘100 per cent African’. Capital can hide its power behind local faces – take AGRA, for example, in which ‘African owned’ might mean ‘owning the Africans’! Luckily, there are so many examples of both successful traditional and agroecological approaches to food production in Africa that people don’t have to look any farther than the continent to find the solutions to their problems. Of course, international solidarity matters, but the terms of that solidarity need to be mutual, not unilateral. What we try to do is tell the stories of agroecological success more broadly, in the face of outside intervention in African agriculture. We’re not opposed to exchange, but we’re concerned to broaden the number of people who set the terms of that exchange.
RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: What would you say are the changes required in the immediate future to tackle the food crisis and move towards a sustainable end to world hunger?
The immediate concern is local and sustainable purchasing of food aid (which the US doggedly resists, and which the EU dances around), but the shift toward sustainability requires changes both in the international agricultural trade environment – specifically, agriculture needs to be removed from the WTO so that countries can develop their own policies around how to feed themselves – and in the relationship between science and the public. At the moment, agricultural science is increasingly privatised, and for solutions to be sustainable, they need to be socially and democratically owned.
PAMBAZUKA NEWS: What do you see as the connection between the arguments laid out in Food Rebellions! and Raj Patel’s now famous book Stuffed and Starved?
RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: We see them as very complementary. Stuffed and Starved was finished at the beginning of 2007, and it was aimed at people who might not have thought about food and the food system before. It’s very much an introductory book. What Food Rebellions does is take the ideas in Stuffed and Starved to the next level, with more theoretical rigour and more up-to-date information from struggles around the world.
PAMBAZUKA NEWS: And where to from here? What are your plans for moving this campaign forward? Does the new Obama administration offer hope?
RAJ PATEL/ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ: Food First is working to look behind the myths of a green revolution in Africa. Bending the Obama administration to a sensible agriculture position is going to take a lot of work, though. They’re very much in the thrall of conventional agricultural interests. Obama was, after all, the Senator from Illinois, an agribusiness hub – he writes about his regret at having to stop flying in the Archer Daniels Midland jet (though he did get to meet ‘the people’ when he flew commercial first class).
We’re working on another book that will invite representatives from social movements around the world to think strategically about how we implement the promising and sustainable solutions which are currently on the margins of international food policy, so that they can become the mainstream. This book talks about the root problems and solutions, and in the next book people will discuss how exactly we’re going to get there.
-Raj Patel and Eric Holt-Giménez , Sep 17, 2009
Quotations
The 20th century was the century of technological revolutions. This century is that of the knowledge revolution, and Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel are in its vanguard. At long last, a book which confronts the real issues: How do we reform our food systems to avoid environmental disaster? How do we recapture the production and distribution of food from the tyranny of unchecked markets? This book is vital reading for all concerned with the right to food.
-Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
Hunger is a global scandal. I would call it a global structure of sin! Claiming to solve world hunger with the industrial age's solutions the corporations of the world really only structure the world for more hunger, poverty and misery. Food Rebellions! provides an analysis that is clear, documented and searing in its challenge to the powers that be. It provides solutions appropriate to our ecological age and to a new era of food democracy and food sovereignty. It reflects the vision of those most affected by the food crisis. I strongly endorse this book and I hope that it gets a wide readership. More importantly though, I hope that it gets the support of the nations of the world suffering from hunger and poverty. It provides insights from those directly suffering from hunger and poverty, who have a right to be heard.
-Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, president of the 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations
Food Rebellions! demonstrates the imperative to protect and enhance the multifaceted knowledges, practices and lands of sustainable farmers. Contrary to some views, sustainable food systems are most helpful to the poor, especially the rural poor, who suffer the most from the dire social and ecological effects of industrial agriculture. Absent perverse subsidies to agrifood industries, what is good for farmers is also good for eaters and citizens. Holt-Giménez and Patel contribute to an urgent awakening – supported by practical experiments and expert reports – to the necessity and possibility for transforming food systems. "Like cracks in the asphalt," solutions to global food crisis can restore resilient food systems across the world.
-Harriet Friedmann, professor of sociology, University of Toronto
'Food Rebellions is a tour de force! Not only does it describe the corporate assault on the human right to food in all of its political, economic, cultural and environmental dimensions, it also documents the many ways rural and urban people are actively building alternative food systems to defend their land, water, seeds and livelihoods. These social movements and this inspiring book could not have come at a better time. In the face of multiple global crises, the growing local and international trends toward food sovereignty provide us with the hope we need to build a just and sustainable future.'
-Paul Nicholson, Ehne (Basque Farmers' Union) and Via Campesina
The high and mighty proponents of free trade speak for the interests of multinational corporations when they try to stifle the economic policies that empower peasants, family farmers and farm workers to grow healthy supplies of food while protecting Mother Earth. Rather than continue down the path that led to today's economic, environmental and social catastrophe, Food Rebellions! calls on us to raise our voices in rebellion, join together, and place sustainable production and rural economic opportunity at the base of our recovery efforts.
-George Naylor, former president of the National Family Farm Coalition—USA
Related News
This book makes a critical contribution to discussions of the current food crisis and what can be done to increase food equality, security and justice. It covers multiple global regions and in particular Africa, Latin America, Europe and the United States. I was particularly amazed by the statistics indicating that organic, smallholder, local, polycrop farms are more productive than the intensive monocropping with chemical inputs. This is a critical point. The book would have been strengthened by more expanded treatment of the pervasive arguments for GMO and Green Revolution technologies. The value of these agricultural "innovations" is assumed by a large section of those concerned with food, and who are not necessarily convinced by a significantly one-sided argument in opposition. The arguments that resonate with less financially invested individuals must be addressed at their maximum strength in order to prove convincing. This weakness, however, should in no way detract from the invaluable contributions that this book makes to projects for sustainable food security.
A critical contribution -Nick Jackson Sep 9, 2009
Related Resources
-Eric Holt-Giménez May 11, 2009
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