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The problem with cheap food
Raj Patel
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Raj Patel: The Arabian Spring began with a winter of frustration.
Tess Vigeland: Commentator Raj Patel.
Patel: In North Africa, the urban poor couldn't afford the rising prices of staples like bread and milk. Starting in Algeria, they took to the streets. And, at least in Tunisia, it worked. One of last things that former President Ben Ali did was to slash the price of bread, milk and sugar.
It didn't save Ben Ali's presidency. But cheap food has been the way that governments around the world have kept the lid on urban discontent for more than 2,000 years. We do it in the U.S. too. Cheap food has been a policy choice for decades, bought with a great chain of subsidy for big agriculture and big food.
That's why we spend far less on food at the checkout than pretty much any other industrial country -- the Japanese, for example, spend more than twice as much of their household income to eat than we do.
Of course, there are worries that our dollar burgers aren't as good for you as European or Asian cheap eats. Recently First Lady Michelle Obama did her bit to address that by backing Walmart's drive to sell cheap organic produce to the poor.
The trouble with this is that cheap food addresses the symptom of hunger rather than its cause. It doesn't matter how cheap cheap food is -- if people are unemployed or don't have the money to buy it, they still go hungry. That's why a record 50 million Americans are food insecure today.
The way to fight hunger in America isn't to give money to big ag and big food. Nor does the answer lie in trimming environmental or labor standards to keep prices low. It's to create jobs with living wages so that instead of being cheap, food becomes affordable to everyone.
America is no stranger to the food protest. Food rebellions predate the American revolution -- and food riots led by women resulted in women's right to vote less than a century ago right here in the United States. In an era of rising prices and persistent unemployment, we can expect not only more food rebellions around the world, but perhaps for them to happen much closer to home.
Vigeland: Raj Patel is the author of the "Value of Nothing." Got a comment? Send 'em in -- click on the contact link. You can also tweet us and post on our Facebook page.
Cheap food has been a policy choice for *centuries*, not decades---and when it is indeed a policy choice rather than the result of the free market, it generally indicates a tyrannical government.
Furthermore, just as expensive food isn't the root cause of hunger, neither are unemployment nor poverty. Those, too, are often symptoms, and government aid doesn't distinguish between those who are hungry because there *is* no work and those who are hungry because they *refuse* to work because they childishly think the world *owes* them. In fact, government aid provides a strong incentive to stay in the second category, while hunger is an even stronger incentive to grow up.
The answer to hunger, as usual, doesn't involve the government at all: the free market (as would be obvious to anyone who's read even a paragraph-long summary of _The Wealth of Nations_), supplemented by the private charity which has been typical of Americans (despite so-called liberals' best efforts) since the earliest colonists arrived here, could ensure that almost no one who is willing to work will go hungry.
A big part of the trick here as another poster pointed out, is to teach people how to purchase and work with inexpensive, healthy food. People need to rediscover the kitchen again, and make food from scratch. Eating cheap food away from home is a killer, financially and health-wise. And yes, you can make the time.
FAO report: 80% of undernourished are farmers. Yes, poverty is key. But he didn't mention low prices as the main cause of poverty for rural countries (LDCs 70% rural). Since 1990, we've had the lowest farm prices in history, and since 1980. Raj never mentions the needed policies: farm price floors and supply reductions for fair trade prices, and price ceilings and reserves if it goes too high. That's the long term solution, but the dilemma is that short term it makes it worse for those who had decades of low farm prices. They starve and must be fed, but at fair trade prices
So we ought to be looking into what wages are so low, and how we might go about increasing wages.
Henry George, in "Progress and Poverty," (1879) laid out the Law of Wages, and the basic facts have not changed. I commend his analysis to your attention; it is online, both unabridged and in a modern abridgment.
The solution will surprise you, unless you've had an economics education rooted in the work of the classical economists, who seem to be out of fashion these days. Neoclassical economics works so much better for the privileged folks, and you have to look hard for faculty who still know what the classical economists taught. Mason Gaffney's work is a good contemporary starting point.
Good, real, clean and fair food can be be accessible to everyone. The most vital tool one could possibly have.. Is the power of "Education in Food." If all future consumers had to enter a cooking class at school or engage in good purchasing, cooking & farming practices on how to cook lentils, pulses, vegetables & obviously proteins too, the choices we would make within our shopping habits would change drastically..
"Be the Change You Want to See."- Mahatma Gandhi
Good food isn't expensive, if you know how to cook. Lentils (high protein), split peas, or any other bean with brown rice is a perfectly balanced meal for little money. Oatmeal is a great breakfast and it takes about 5 minutes. Teach people about GOOD inexpensive foods, please.
