Raj Patel > Quotes

“Agricultural sustainability doesn't depend on agritechnology. To believe it does is to put the emphasis on the wrong bit of 'agriculture.' What sustainability depends on isn't agri- so much as culture.”
― Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

“If war is gods way of teaching geography to Americans, then recession is his way of teaching little economics to everyone”
― Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

“the politics behind witch hunts concerns a new vision of the world, where women who insisted on their rights to value land, to their freedom to common, had no place.14 It was in their defense of commoning that women were killed as witches.”
― Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

“and making excuses when they fail spectacularly, is no less a confabulation”
― Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

“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: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“Capitalism's geography has a distinctive pyrogeography, one that is part of the fossil record. Indigenous People had thoroughly modified New World landscapes through fire. In eastern North America, they coproduced the 'mosaic quality' of forest, savannah, and meadow that Europeans took for pristine nature. Between Columbus' arrival and around 1650, disease and colonial violence reduced Indigenous populations in the Americas by 95 percent. With fewer humans burning and cutting them down, forests recovered so vigorously that the New World became a planetary carbon sink. Forest growth cooled the planet so much that the Indigenous holocaust contributed to the Little Ice Age's severity....it would be wrong to characterize this episode of genocide and reforestation as anthropogenic. The colonial exterminations of Indigenous Peoples were the work not of all humans, but of conquerors and capitalists. *Capitalogenic* would be more appropriate. And if we are tempted to conflate capitalism with the Industrial Revolution, these transformations ought to serve notice that early capitalism's destruction was so profound that it changed planetary climate four centuries ago.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“If Capitalism is a disease, then it's one that eats your flesh -- and then profits from selling your bones for fertilizer, and then invests that profit to reap the cane harvest, and then sells that harvest to tourists who pay to visit your headstone.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“What happens next is unpredictable at one level and entirely predictable at another. Regardless of what humans decide to do, the twenty-first century will be a time of "abrupt and irreversible" changes in the web of life. Earth system scientists have a rather dry term for such a fundamental turning point in the life of a biospheric system: state shift. Unfortunately, the ecology from which this geological change has emerged has also produced humans who are ill equipped to receive news of this state shift. Nietsche's madman announcing the death of god was met in a similar fashion....The twenty-first century has an analogue: it's easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“studies are beginning to show that our ability to appreciate the intrinsic value of generosity, sharing and selflessness is central to maximizing our well-being. MAKING HOMO ECONOMICUS HAPPY When this theory is applied to people, Becker argues that we become Homo economicus in a very specific way: Everyone is a producer of his or her own happiness. We obtain our own utility, to use his language, “through the productive activity of combining purchased market goods and services with some of the house hold’s own time.”
― Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

“The built environment is designed, intentionally or not, to cause depression, cognitive decline, dementia, and other illnesses - all mediated by inflammatory cytokines.”
― Raj Patel, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

“Today’s human activity isn’t exterminating mammoths through centuries of overhunting. Some humans are currently killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times higher than the background rate.9 We argue that what changed is capitalism, that modern history has, since the 1400s, unfolded in what is better termed the Capitalocene.10 Using this name means taking capitalism seriously, understanding it not just as an economic system but as a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“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: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“In the Cheyenne language, the word for home is 'Enovo,' which means 'you are home.' Not 'your home.' 'You are home': which could mean falling asleep on the couch at your grandmother's or sitting at the table of your auntie while she cooks or returning to the land your family takes care of or speaking your community's language. 'You are home' defines a system of relationships between humans, and between humans and their built environment and the web of life. A sense of well-being comes with a shared language, shared purpose, and common cause, a political community that stretches beyond the concept of nation with its vocabulary of rights. It is a consciousness of balance and happiness that is reflected in the very chemistry of our bodies.”
― Raj Patel, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

“The limits of production, consumption, and reproduction are fixed only by the system in which we find ourselves. Such limits are neither outside nor inside but both, knitted together by capitalism’s ecology of power, production, and nature. The individual footprint teaches us to think of consumption as determined by “lifestyle choices”3 rather than socially enforced logics. If you have been gentrified out of your old neighborhood and need to commute an hour to your job, your ecological footprint isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s a choice in the same way that English peasants, once kicked off the land, were “free” to find wage work—or starve.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“while the drug-related homicide rate fell in urban areas in the 1990s, it tripled in rural areas.31 In 2009 almost one in six people living in rural areas in the US fell below the poverty line.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“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: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“California has a higher number of people in poverty than any other US state.96 Within agriculture, farm workers die on the job at rates five times higher than other comparable work.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“The mechanics of setting up a global food system involved the twin processes of colonization and the forced creation of markets.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“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: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“In 1645 (at the beginning of the two-centuries-long era of slavery), records show the purchase of 1,000 slaves for Barbadian cane sugar production. A commentator noted that more slaves would soon be on their way, for so lucrative was the sugar industry, and so low the value of human life, that within eighteen months, slaves had recouped their strike-price for their masters.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“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: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“In 2002, for instance, US corn cost US$1.74 per bushel to buy but US$2.66 for US farmers to produce.8 This, because the United States had long supported its farmers and had made a range of subsidies available to them for machinery, fertilizer, credit and transport”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“In Mexico, there have also been changes in the foods people eat as a result of NAFTA, particularly in the increased availability and consumption of high-calorie food.62 This has led to a spike in levels of obesity with, as noted in the introduction, the observation that the closer a family lives to the border with United States, the more likely it is that its children are overweight.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“free’ landless poor made their way to the cities to seek work. Those who remained on the land worked for a wage and only after-hours worked to feed themselves. On the other hand, for those who owned land, the shift from feudal to capitalist economics generated vast efficiencies, profits and hence the means to fund a growing national appetite to buy foreign food.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“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: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“egoism would lead to the best of all possible worlds, and that any form of restraint would result in disaster.”
― Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

“The crisis of fuel isn't necessarily a crisis of scarcity or overproduction. The shift away from fossil fuels isn't the end of the regime of cheap energy. Indeed, the climate crisis has afforded an opportunity for finance to present itself as a mechanism of global salvation: it is through carbon credits, offsets, and permits to pollute the atmosphere that the atmosphere will be saved - or so we are told. This is where commoning can finally be ended - through the full financial externalization of collective responsibility, turning what need to be collective decisions on the fate of the commons into a financial product in a global market.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“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: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“The frontier works only through connection, fixing its failures by siphoning life from elsewhere. A frontier is a site where crises encourage new strategies for profit. Frontiers are frontiers because they are the encounter zones between capital and all kinds of nature - humans included. They are always then, about reducing the costs of doing business. Capitalism not only has frontiers; it exists only through frontiers, expanding from one place to the next, transforming socioecological relations, producing more and more kinds of goods and services that circulate through an expanding series of exchanges. But more important, frontiers are sites where power is exercised - and not just economic power. Through frontiers, states and empires use violence, culture, and knowledge to mobilize nature's low cost. It's this cheapening that makes possible capitalism's expansive markets.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“Part of the telling of the fairy tale of ‘Shining India’ demands that the poor disappear. In India, this has been achieved through the waving of a magical, statistical wand.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated