READING THURSDAYS !

Thursdays are clearly becoming our ritual for reading. ON 26TH AUGUST 2010, we read a text which is the introduction from Raj Patel’s “stuffed and starved”. As you may know by now our team is aiming at building a powerful campaign around having a hunger free world, it is therefore of extreme importance that we have as much information around this topic as we can. Hence, our focus today on this brilliant and exhaustively researched book called stuffed and starved.
Just to highlight a few salient points from his book, in his introduction, Raj Patel argues that
• Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on earth are hungry!!
• Global hunger and obesity are symptoms of the same problem and, what’s more, the route to eradicating world hunger is also a way to prevent global epidemics of diabetes and heart disease and to address a host of environmental and social ills.
After reviewing this text we looked at the root causes to hunger in relation to the text and also relating our findings to situations in our countries.

Two major root causes discussed were that

1. What we are offered in stores is controlled by a few key players’ hence local farmers losing their markets.
2. Big corporations influence governments (World trade organisation), consumers (money), hence and interests of farmers are not protected
Conclusion: Raj Patel helps us deconstruct the long accepted folk wisdom that “the poor are hungry because they are lazy”