Humanity produces enough food to feed everyone in the world today, and yet the world is disfigured by inequality. There are today one and a half billion people overweight, and one billion are hungry. And it’s likely to get worse. We’ll soon be living in a world of 10 billion people. The planet can’t sustain the way that we in the Global North live, and one doesn’t need to be a catastrophe theorist to worry about how we’ll all get to eat tomorrow. Plans for the future include a revamp of the Green Revolution, big land deals, and more intensive farming. Yet while Big Agriculture has plans to profit from 10 billion mouths, the real solutions for tomorrow’s hunger will come from the communities in the Global South that are already producing food, managing climate change, and fighting poverty in the twenty-first century.
Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist and academic. He has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. He is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First. He is also an IATP Food and Community Fellow. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and is an Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. In addition to numerous scholarly publications in economics, philosophy, politics and public health journals, he regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the LA Times, NYTimes.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer. His first book was Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and his latest, The Value of Nothing, is a New York Times best-seller. He is currently working on a documentary about the global food system with award-winning director Steve James.
See Raj Patel discuss his most recent book The Value of Nothing on The Colbert Report (January 12, 2010).
Generously co-sponsored by the Alexa Fullerton Hampton Fund.