Home > Work > Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System QUOTES

Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System QUOTES

1 " It’s not the people that are the problem. It is the way we consume through this food system, which allows a few to eat healthily, many to eat unhealthily, and many more not to eat at all. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

2 " Increasingly, obesity and hunger are two points on a continuum of poverty. But the stuffed and the starved are also linked through the chains of production that bring food from fields to our plate. Guided by the profit motive, food corporations shape and constrain how we eat, and how we think about food. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

3 " It was announced, to awe and insult, that the subsidy for every head of EU cattle was more, per day, than the income of three Mexican farmers. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

4 " The certainty of a domestically earned monthly wage is one that NAFTA took away. And migration is a global response to the rural insecurity that economic liberalization in agriculture has fostered. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

5 " Development was, in other words, part of a policy mindset that linked international trade, military power and a programme of redistribution. What was to be redistributed was, it turned out, food. The Marshall Plan – the US aid programme to Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War – had instigated, among other initiatives, the transfer of food to the hungry and possibly querulous European population in response to the post-war food shortages. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

6 " Any US-aligned government that found itself battling worker-led organizing or, indeed, any plausibly left-wing political opposition could gain access to the US strategic grain reserve. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

7 " Between 1956 and 1960 more than one-third of the world trade in wheat was accounted for by American aid. The world price of wheat was kept artificially low through food aid, hurting growers, but hooking countries of the Global South on US largesse. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

8 " There’s no tombstone for it, but the post-war food order died in 1973. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

9 " The price of oil quadrupled from October 1973 to 1974. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

10 " The oil shock also forced a recalculation of the economics and politics of the Cold War. With drivers lining up for gasoline in the United States, securing the domestic supply of fuel became a strategic priority. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

11 " The new political economy of food rested not on control through the United States’ food surplus, but through the Global South’s fiscal debt. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

12 " banks in which oil exporters had invested were lending money to anyone who’d take it. It was a system ready to collapse at the slightest breath of change. When that change came, with the high interest rates and global recession at the end of the 1970s, the accumulated debt set large parts of Latin America, Africa and eventually Asia on the route to bankruptcy. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

13 " times. To do this, countries needed to borrow and, precisely because it was a time of recession, with high rates of inflation (and therefore high interest rates), money was much harder to come by. With the shrinking of other lending sources, a new series of actors were able to shape the destinies of the Global South: international financial institutions. This cluster of organizations is funded by taxpayer dollars "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

14 " Under these conditions governments ceded large parts of their economic and social spending sovereignty to their donors. From this point on, choices over national development would be shaped not by national governments, but by their creditors.64 "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

15 " And the Global North managed to replace the old colonial instruments of command and control with newer, and cheaper, mechanisms of ‘self-imposed’ market discipline. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

16 " With the blows dealt to worker organizing in the 1980s, and through the breaking of union power around the world,65 fears of worker insurrection were set, temporarily, at bay. The new food order offered a way of maintaining cheap food supplies globally, but with an increased role not just for the US government, but for the private sector, in providing agricultural technologies and in international trade itself. And one institution above all was to frame this new agricultural order – the World Trade Organization. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

17 " In the Great 2008 Price Spike, one of the agricultural commodities with the highest price rise was fertilizer, which more than doubled in price from August 2007 to 2008. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

18 " Companies and governments from India, China, Saudi Arabia and the United States have all thrown their money at poorer parts of the world, where an acre of land and, most important, the groundwater beneath it can be had for a few dollars. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

19 " This new scramble not only for African land, but for the resources of the poor, sets us up for a century of resource conflicts the likes of which we have never before seen. "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System

20 " Some have suggested that half of all adults in the US may be obese by 2030 (with similar increases on the horizon for every other high and middle income country). "

― Raj Patel , Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System