DR RAJ PATEL INTERVIEW - Wednesday 30th April, 2008
So why is so much of the world suddenly going hungry? Dr Raj
Patel is a fellow at the Institute of Food Development policy in
California, he is the author of a recent book about the food crisis
with the catchy title ‘Stuffed and Starved’ and
George Negus spoke with him in the San Francisco-based Dr Patel before
he left Australia last week.
GEORGE NEGUS: Dr Patel, if the stats can be believed the price of rice,
wheat, corn and other basic food stuffs has either doubled or trebled
in the last year or so. And as a result of that, we are now seeing
these food riots all over the world, almost. How the heck did we get
ourselves into this state and is there any one thing we can point to,
to cause it?
RAJ PATEL, FOOD ANALYST AND AUTHOR: There are five reasons why
this has all come together at the same time. Firstly the price of oil,
being - well, at the moment it's higher than US$115 a barrel. The
reason that matters is because for every calorie we eat it usually
takes about a calorie of fossil fuel to be able to produce it, you
know, not just the shipping but fertiliser as well. So when the price
of oil goes up the price of food does too.
Then you've got increased demand for meat, particularly in developing
countries, and that means that grain gets diverted from the people who
can only afford to eat grain and into the bellies of livestock. Then on
top of that you've had the bad harvest, of course, as you've seen in
Australia, and on top of that you've got biofuels, which is a
preposterous idea. I mean, it was something that was conceived as a
sort of answer to climate change, but has been proven to be a very,
very bad idea and yet it continues, particularly here in America, where
it's perceived as sort of a boon to the national economy to be able to
burn American corn rather than Saudi oil. Then of course, there is the
financial speculation. So you've got those five reasons all happen at
the same time.
GEORGE NEGUS: Right, so they've all come together, as you say.
I guess the question we novices would ask is should have we seen it
coming, was there something that we should have been doing that we
weren't doing to avoid this situation, which now you and others are
calling dire and the word 'crisis' just falls off our lips every time
the word 'food' comes up - should have we seen it coming?
RAJ PATEL: It's not unusual in history to have fluctuations in
the price in food and there will be fluctuations in the availability of
food. But what's changed recently - and the past 30 years has been the
sort of trajectory of this - is that slowly the supports, the buffers
in between an economy and the international price - those buffers have
been eroded. So under the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund and the World Trade Organisation, developing economies in
particular have been denied the sort of thing that the European Union
and US have. They've been denied farm supports and they are being
denied grain storage and they're denied sort of sustainable
agricultural supports. And actually, farmers in developing countries
have been saying, crying - warning of this danger for over 20 years,
but the trouble is, of course, no-one listened to that.
GEORGE NEGUS: Right, I know it's hard to point the finger at
particular people or even particular institutions but you were pretty
rough on Robert Zoellick and the World Bank. You said it's hard to
listen to the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, on this issue
without gagging. I mean, is he the villain in the piece or are you
being a bit too critical?
RAJ PATEL: Well, I mean, there's no one villain that is able
to - that one can say, if it weren't for this bloke then we would be
fine. But Robert Zoellick I find particularly distasteful because he
was the United States trade representative, the US's representative at
the World Trade Organisation and now he is the head of the World Bank
and he's sort of carried his mission across. And his mission is to
liberalise, to enforce the kind of policies that got us into this mess
in the first place. And what I find particularly repugnant is the fact
that he's using this crisis as an excuse to argue for more trade
liberalisation. But of course, the economies that are worst affected by
these riots are the ones that are liberalised the most, the ones that
are most exposed to the will of the market. They've got very little
else to liberalise, and they are paying the price for it right now, and
for Zoellick this is just another opportunity to push his agenda
further. So yeah, I find it very distasteful.
GEORGE NEGUS: You've used some very colourful examples. I
mean, you've said that food prices are really just toppling people into
straightforward hunger and famine. In Haiti, for instance, you've said
that people are eating mud cakes in order to keep hunger pains at bay,
that's how dire the situation is, but others have said that Haiti is
just the tip of the iceberg, there maybe other people literally eating
dirt to stay alive.
RAJ PATEL: Tragically, I think that's true, and a part of the
reason is this. In a good year like last year, the year before, we had
850 million people going hungry, this was without all the food crisis,
without the current sort of word of 'panic' and apocalyptic discussions
that we are having at the moment. 850 million people is a lot, and they
were just teetering on the edge of what looks like a crisis now, and
it's taken this sort of, this jolt of the price shock to tip people
right into that hunger. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were
other parts of the world where people are forced to eat mud cakes,
where people are absolutely at their wits end and I don't think we
should expect - I mean, we should certainly expect to see more in the
way of food riots as well.
GEORGE NEGUS: Right, is there an easy solution, or is it going
to take, as Robert Zoellick himself said, maybe 2015 before we get
anywhere with this? He talks about seven lost years. I mean, it's a
hard road to hoe that we've got ahead of us.
RAJ PATEL: Well, yeah, but I think in the short term there are
things we can do, we can certainly ensure that countries that look like
they're in a food crisis get to be able to buy grain within their
region. One of the reasons that farmers are being driven out of
business in these developing country economies is that when there is a
crisis, food aid comes from Kansas, it comes from the United States, it
gets shipped halfway around the world, and when you bring food aid into
an economy it wipes out the farmers who are there. But in the medium
and long term, I think things like grain stores, like support for
sustainable agriculture that involves zero fossil fuels, I think those
kinds of policies are possible and they have been done very quickly in
terms of a crisis. I mean, Cuba was able to institute these kinds of
policies very quickly after the fall of the Soviet Union, and it only
took them two years, and I think that offers hope for the rest of the
world.
GEORGE NEGUS: Doctor, do you agree with Geoffrey Sacks,
another well-known economist and adviser to the UN Secretary-General, a
lot of other things. He's now suggesting that not only this is a food
crisis, it could become a political crisis if governments, if they
don't respond to the crisis and to the riots that we are now seeing.
RAJ PATEL: Well, yeah, I think he is right and what he omits
is that the reason these governments are in the dire position they are
in is because they have been forced over the past 20 to 30 years to
implement these policies that Robert Zoellick has been pushing, and
they've always been very unpopular with their people. But governments
have had to do these policies because if they don't, they don't get
money from the World Bank, so the World Bank has with it an incentive
to be antidemocratic. So it's not surprising then that right now whe is
a crisis people don't trust their democracies, they don't trust their
elected representative will listen to them, because in the past they
have done a very poor job of that.
GEORGE NEGUS: We can't help wondering whether or not the
international community is actually responding seriously enough to this
situation, and I guess the other irony is that it's been shoved off the
world's agenda by our preoccupation with climate change. Can we bring
these two things together somehow?
RAJ PATEL: Yes, two of the - well, actually more than two of
the reasons that we have this price shock is a climate change related -
certainly this biofuels debate that does transfer grain and land out of
food production and into fuels. I mean, that's a specious remedy to
climate change, but it's been touted as such. And luckily the European
Union is taking this quite seriously and previously they were quite
gunhoe about biofuels, but now they are retreating from that position.
The only place really that's taking it very, very seriously in the
developed World, is the United States, and the only reason that's
happening is because it's an election year here, and all the
presidential candidates want the votes of the farmers in the Midwest.
But certainly that climate change angle is also hovering over the fact
that the way we grow food is so ridiculously dependent on the use of
fossil fuel. I think that one of the best solutions to climate change
is shifting away from the kind of agriculture we use at the moment,
very fossil fuel intensive. So I think, you know, there are solutions,
there are ways forward here, but it's going to take political will to
implement them.
GEORGE NEGUS: Well, Doctor, at least the fact that we are
talking together about it now means that it isn't any longer a case of
"crisis, what crisis?" But thank you very much for talking to us.
RAJ PATEL: It's a pleasure, George.