Food for thought

FOOD PRODUCTION:A new book by Raj Patel challenges traditional attitudes towards food production, supply and demand. Here we get two opposing views from people involved in the 'business of food'

THE AID AGENCY CHIEF EXECUTIVE

Raj Patel's Stuffed and Starved starts by pointing out the "Big Fat Contradiction" that, today, we produce more food than ever, yet more than one in 10 people are hungry. And, while more than 800 million people are undernourished, they are outnumbered by one billion who are overweight.

The author gives more attention to the problem of obesity than to hunger, while arguing there is a connection between the two. That connection is made through the global food system and through the powerful players - food and chemical companies, supermarkets, transporters- which make the system work.

Patel is critical about the market power exercised by these key players. One chapter is titled The Customer is Our Enemy, where he posits the view that the effect of turning food production over to the market has been to produce less competition, offer more structural power to the largest companies, with customers suffering as a result.

Another chapter focuses on the role of food companies in changing consumption habits. Innovations in food processing and transportation over the last two centuries led to dietary improvements for most of the world's population.

Then the 1950s brought the "TV dinners" in the US, the precursors of the fast-food economy which reigns in much of the developed world and an increasing part of the developing world. This fast-food economy, allied to urbanisation and lifestyle changes, has given rise to the obesity problem.

The issue of hunger is mainly examined through the perspectives of increasingly powerless small farmers and rural communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Patel writes movingly about the tragedy of rural suicides in India. He describes farmer groups and social movements in Mexico, Brazil and India which offer a different vision of development based on the notion of "food sovereignty", defined as people and countries shaping their own agricultural and food policy without interference from the wider international community.

Yet in discussing Africa, the region with the most intractable hunger problem, Patel swiftly brings the focus to biotechnology and a number of interventions by biotech companies of which he is very critical. This appears to be an oversimplification both of the problem and the potential solution.

A strength of Patel's analysis is the historical perspective he brings to many of the topics discussed.

It is therefore curious there is so little perspective on the future, apart from a broad position that the current global food system is unhealthy and unsustainable.

Neither are the alternatives to the current global food system, set out in the concluding chapter, convincing. The author says we should transform our tastes through eating better home-cooked food, eating locally and seasonally and supporting locally-owned businesses.

Most people would be broadly in favour of such desirable developments. But no indication is given as to what practical policies are necessary to achieve them - or what difference they would make if achieved.

Yet, the issues identified by Patel are of the most profound current and future importance and merit wide discussion.

What are the political initiatives and policies needed to accelerate the fight against the scandal of global hunger? What specific role can Ireland play in leading that fight at international level? Answers to these questions should be provided by the Irish government's Hunger Task Force, which has recently started its work and is due to report within the first half of next year.

We need to find ways of discussing the food and biotechnology issues and Patel's book provides much valuable material for the debate.

Tom Arnold is chief executive of Concern and a member of the government's Hunger Task Force.

THE SUPERMARKET CHAIRMAN: 'The WTO comes under repeated attack'

When you read in the introduction to a book that the author "has been tear-gassed on four continents", you get some idea of the book's likely perspective.

Its premise is that the large food corporations, along with some governments and trade organisations, act to exploit food producers whilst manipulating consumer tastes to their own ends.

Although, as the chairman of a supermarket business, I was sure to be on Patel's list of evildoers, I was looking forward to reading what promised to be a fascinating study of the world food system and its shortcomings. However, I have to say that I was disappointed. Not because my own business sector came out badly (I had expected that), but because the quality of analysis and argument in the book is so poor.

By no means is it all bad, mind. It does focus on some fascinating and worrying aspects of the food industry. I was particularly struck by the "hourglass" model, with large populations of food producers and consumers being connected to each other through a very narrow and powerful group of intermediaries. Price-fixing, political lobbying and other abuses by these entities and their effects on groups of farmers or consumers are amply expounded, though there was nothing particularly new in the points made about these practices.

What was new, certainly to me, was the notion that some groups, notably lower income and certain racial groups, were being induced to eat much more poorly because there was often little or no quality food offering in their area.

In other words, good quality food is more expensive and, so, the assumption is made that there will be little or no demand for it in these neighbourhoods; therefore if major supermarkets go there at all, they stock a different, lower quality range.

The book makes out that this is wholly the doing of the retail corporations, who steer customers towards certain food choices, which is probably unfair.

But it is in this area that the book lands some of its best punches, with some well-argued thoughts backed up by good use of statistical data and local anecdotes.

In many cases though, the arguments tend to be confused or compromised by the presentation. The use of pejorative language frequently strips away any sense of analytic objectivity - for example, suggesting that tea-drinking in Britain developed as a way for "exploited" workers to get energy, like slaves chewing sugar; or describing supermarket shoppers as "rats in a maze". This kind of language abounds, creating a sense of harangue rather than argument.

Frequent use is made of local examples and anecdotes to illustrate an aspect of the argument: but often they are unsuitable, like the very first one, a tragic story of an Indian farmer who committed suicide by drinking pesticide.

This example is used as an opener to an account of the failure of agricultural reform in India and its consequences in elevated rates of farmer suicide.

But as the story makes clear, the cause of this particular farmer's desperation was debt incurred through repeated crop failures due to weather-induced drought, and nothing to do with the reforms.

Organisations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and other trade bodies come in for repeated attack, and I would have been fascinated to learn exactly how they wreak their evils - but I didn't.

International trade is described as being based intrinsically on exploitation dating back to slavery, but it wasn't clear to me how this is still true today.

And there are some extraordinary omissions. For example, I would think that anyone wanting to write about the distortions and inequity of the agriculture and food sector could do no better than start with our own European Common Agricultural Policy, with its Green Pounds, land subsidised for lying fallow, and mountains of unwanted food. But the subject is not addressed at all.

I found the book difficult to finish. I felt bombarded by a relentless stream of anecdotes and statistics, but often could not follow the thread of the argument.

If you read this book you will certainly know more about the world food system and its history, but you may not be much the wiser.

Simon Burke is chief executive of Superquinn.

Stuffed & Starved, by Raj Patel, is published by Portobello Books, price: £16.99