Global Capitalism And The Corporate Food System: Raj Patel's "Stuffed and Starved"

The dust jacket describes Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System as a book written “in the style of No Logo”, Naomi Klein’s 2000 anticorporate manifesto, and so it is. And this is its strength and its weakness. I've written a brief review here.

What I found most useful about Raj Patel's overview is the clear sense he makes of of the weird hourglass shape the global capitalist food system has taken on, with so much money and power concentrated in the wholesale corporate bottleneck, which leaves the rest of us, the masses of producers and consumers, relegated to the margins. Patel should be congratulated for paying such close attention to the problem of food production, distribution and consumption, and you can keep an eye on his tracking of developments here.

It's the precariousness of the global food system that I find most worrisome. Not that there aren't lots of other things to worry about, but when the price of rice jumps by 30 per cent across Asia all of a sudden, you know something's wrong.

In this month's Vanity Fair, there's an investigation of some of the darker aspects of corporate monopoly control of food production, and the Institute for Food and Development Policy presents an interesting insight into the contradictions between "slow food" and "food sovereignty" here.