Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System | 
 enlarge | Author: Raj Patel
Publisher: Melville House
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 8303
Media: Paperback
Edition: 398
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.2
ISBN: 1933633492
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.19
EAN: 9781933633497
ASIN: 1933633492
Publication Date: April 25, 2008
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Product Description
“One of the most dazzling books I have read in a very long time. The product of a brilliant mind and a gift to a world hungering for justice.”?Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine Half the world is malnourished, the other half obese?both symptoms of the corporate food monopoly. To show how a few powerful distributors control the health of the entire world, Raj Patel conducts a global investigation, traveling from the “green deserts” of Brazil and protester-packed streets of South Korea to bankrupt Ugandan coffee farms and barren fields of India. What he uncovers is shocking?the real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa, an epidemic of farmer suicides, and the false choices and conveniences in supermarkets. Yet he also finds hope?in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable, and joyful food system. From seed to store to plate, Stuffed and Starved explains the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance. RAJ PATEL, policy analyst for Food First, a leading food think tank, is a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies. 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Sheds light on a difficult subject August 8, 2008
Daniel B. Schuster says:
I was entranced by this book. Mr Patel discusses the micro effects of our agriculture system as well as the macro effects and shows their interaction.. On both farmers and consumers. Every claim or fact in the book is footnoted. And the graphs. The geek part of me could finally understand relationships between farmers, processors and consumers based on the charts of Mr Patel. I've read several books that tried to explain this but failed. Mr. Patel was able to take a complex topic and break it down step by step. Great book.
I agree with the previous reviewer - this book will cause indigestion with mega producers of food.
 A Disappointing Polemic July 12, 2008
3 out of 11 found this review helpful
I won't cover the same ground as Mr. Vannoni did. His review is spot on. I wish I had seen it before I bought this book.
Readers should know first that the book's title is cleverly misleading. The book is only tangentially about the unhealthy make-up of the modern diet and the agribusiness oligopolies that have created it.
Instead, author Patel seems to be mainly concerned with fixing blame for the world's food problems, and that blame rests almost exclusively with Britain and the U.S. We are told over and over that even when they were seemingly doing good, it was with evil motives. He "proves" this by selective quotations which he dredges up and takes as representing whole nations, and by assuming that if multiple motives are possible, only the worst one can be true. Thus, for example, it was with wholly evil intent that the U.S. led the Green Revolution (which much of the world enthusiastically followed) by developing high-yield fast-growing crop strains. The rich and well-off are always bad, and the poor are always innocent and good. And if governments of poorer countries do wrong by their people, it is only because the rich bad countries made them do it. These are not unlike the views I had when I was 15. But when you grow up you learn that the world is a much more complex place than that.
Patel grossly misuses statistics. Everything is twisted to support a predetermined result. He calls this "teasing out" the truth. Twisting is more like it. The book is basically a collection of whatever he can find, however obscure, to support his agenda, while ignoring or twisting anything that contradicts his view. Thus he tells us Mexicans living near the border are less healthy because they are now compelled to eat processed junk, while at the same time he notes that they are better off economically the closer to the border they are. It never occurs to him that they are eating junk for the same reason people in the U.S. do: not because they have no choice, but because, just like us, they like cheap fatty sugary unhealthy junk food.
This is not to say that Mr. Patel is wrong about everything. Far from it. But he has an agenda and it isn't to inform. It's to inflame, and that spoils the book. I read half of it before I decided that there are better books I can read, and since I won't live forever, I'll spend my time on them.
required reading June 3, 2008
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
A very digestible read for the consumer that's liable to provoke dyspepsia in the bellies of food giants and governments alike.
In taking a moralistic view of starvation and obesity, our media, governments and many NGOs have condemned those suffering to more of the same. While the institutional causes remain unaddressed - in large part thanks to public sector responsibility being abdicated to private sector interests - we can only expect more headlines about food riots and editorials on farmer suicides, just as diabetes (II) continues apace.
The resounding conclusion is that `free market' policies remain accountable only to shareholders - not to farmers, not to consumers, and certainly not to the governments that unleashed them.
But Stuffed & Starved is as prescriptive as it is diagnostic. By identifying the grassroots organisations that have come to terms with the problems and begun to enact the social changes necessary for remedy, Patel brings to the page a message of hope and understanding with great clarity. To his credit, he is no less objective or critical in examining these social movements (as they struggle to develop) than he is of the corporations, WTO, and World Bank.
If you're interested in a comprehensive overview of what's behind the headlines, of what's causing the paradox of starvation at the same time as an epidemic of obesity, this is the book.
The world food crisis explained May 28, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
The price of food is skyrocketing. There are food riots emerging across the globe. It's a crisis that threatens the stability of some governments. Why is this happening? Raj Patel explains how we got here in this remarkably prophetic book. And he's not afraid to name the bad guys. Patel has deservedly emerged as one of the top experts on this crisis, and he writes with an abundance of passion and wit.
-Kemble Scott, editor, SoMa Literary Review
A big disappointment May 24, 2008
22 out of 37 found this review helpful
I bought this book with high hopes and was disappointed within 50 pages.
I will share general reasons as well as specific instances.
First, the title is misleading. Throughout the book the author hints at people in developed countries having a poor choice and quality of food. However, you wont find anywhere an explicit and sustained narrative about the conditions that would link the "stuffed" north to the "starved" south.
Secondly, we are left with the impression that the Anglo-Saxons (UK and now the US) are the sole culprits in the presumed debacle of the world food system.
This leads me to point three and the main contradiction in this book. Free-trade and capitalism are made guilty by association, they are borne of the Anglo-Saxon culture which we are told is bad. However, Mr Patel states that what ails the world food system, is the distortion and near monopoly that cartels and single companies may have e.g. corn-syrup producers or supermarkets. So the problem, which is the logical conclusion of the case studies that Raj Patel highlights, is not fair trade but indeed, the lack of it. Corn subsidies in the US hurt sugar producers in poorer countries because the subsidy prevents the latter from selling their product in the US at a competitive price.
Fourth, the problems highlighted by Mr Patel are old news. Monopolies lead to higher prices and poor quality, chemicals in food are bad for your health, small producers are being overwhelmed by larger producers and distributors.
Now here are the details.
The most interesting insight takes place in the introduction. There are millions of producers and millions of consumers yet, connecting the two are very few intermediaries. These intermediaries, precisely because they are few, have the power to dictate their terms to both producers and consumers.
The English and then the Americans are blamed for all that is going wrong today. Colonialism in general should have been a target of critique. There is no mention of either other colonial powers; France, Spain, Portugal; nor is there mention of the USSR and the communist system and the fact that by the early 1970's the USSR stopped providing demographic data to the U.N.. (This in turn lead French researchers at the CNRS to predict accurately the eventual collapse of the system.) The picture seems completely one-sided against the UK and US.
In fact Mr Patel informs us that the USSR was so short on food that it traded oil for food with the US. Surprisingly, Mr Patel portrays this deal as being shameful to the US.
Mr Patel also overlooks several topics which should have been mentioned given the title. For instance, have we chosen to forsake quality for quantity thus being able to feed more people?
What other system would allow products, say oranges, to be eaten and benefit people, say in northern Europe, whose immediate ecosystem does not support such variety.
What evidence does he have to state that local produce is cheaper than what you find at supermarkets? Economies of scale enable low prices. The Wall Street Journal reported that, in Southern France, tomato paste is cheaper to import from China to Southern France than to buy it there directly. In addition, how much more are people willing to pay for healthier products.
Perhaps this book should be recast as the tragic impact a distorted world food production and distribution system has on local farmers. The evidence Mr Patel gives in that respect is quite comprehensive and heartbreaking.
I will end with Mr Patel's own reflection which I will recast to a grander scale; this maybe a transitory period towards better food.
Wahyd Vannoni
www.vannoni.com
Further reading:
New Yorker Magazine
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/05/19/080519crat_atlarge_wilson
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