Best-selling author, activist and academic, Dr. Raj Patel delivered the fourth annual David Morrison Lecture in International Development on Tuesday, October 4 at Market Hall, with his talk entitled, “The Long Green Evolution.”

How will we feed a world of 10 billion people in 2100? According to Dr. Raj Patel, this question – so often the starting point for a discussion on world hunger – is one that needs re-examining. “The question, when put this way, is pernicious,” explained Professor Patel, “and does a great deal of thinking for us. It comes to us already racialized whether one realizes it or not. There is this underlying sense of fear of ‘those people over there’ and what to do about them: They’re reproducing like rabbits and their kids are hungry – they’re shagging and eating and it’s all they do. This fear of a population explosion and of being overrun is always a racial one.”

According to Prof. Patel, this same racial and political subtext formed the basis for the Green Revolution (the post World War II initiative to increase global crop yields using industrial farming techniques), and continues to be reflected in global food policy today. “The fear during the Cold War,” explained Prof. Patel, “was that if poor people got sufficiently hungry they’d take to the streets and demand a change in government, and that demand would be for communism and the rich would lose everything. The Green Revolution, in other words, was a counter-strategy to communism. It was an alternative to expropriation and re-distribution of land, and was a way of managing elite fears. The result is a system that is not going to feed the world, and lies at the heart of some of the major problems we see around contemporary international agriculture. The Green Revolution,” asserted Prof. Patel, “is a system of agriculture that is hurtling us towards unsustainability. What we really need is a revolution – a far greener, and genuinely revolutionary revolution.”

While the Green Revolution has arguably produced more food in parts of the world at various times since its inception, it has not, according to Prof. Patel, resulted in greater food security. “We now live in a world where there are roughly a billion people who are overweight and more than a half billion people who are starving, and where, even in America, there are currently 50 million people who do not know where their next meal will come from. Food insecurity,” he explained, “is entirely compatible with having a lot of food. We need to imagine a system where not only is more food produced, but more people get fed.”

The solution, according to Prof. Patel, is to be found in food sovereignty – the movement that aims to put the control over food systems back in the hands of the people most directly impacted by them. As a model for positive change, Prof. Patel pointed to an example in northern Malawi where a farming community of 5,000 has been experimenting with ways to produce more food without the use of industrial agricultural techniques. They are succeeding in producing more food, but they are also addressing the issues that affect food distribution, such as gender inequality, through communal discussion and problem-solving.

“The thing I want to emphasize is that we need to get together and talk,” said Prof. Patel. “We need to organize. And the joy of organizing through food is that it is pleasurable and if it’s not, then you’re doing it wrong. Organize and eat meals together,” he exhorted the audience, “and then use those meals as sites of political discussion. Use them as opportunities to talk about real politics - about moving beyond work, about moving towards a world where we care for one another in ways that aren’t monetized. Those kinds of conversations can work because food brings people together and makes it pleasurable to think, and to expand our minds.”

Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist and academic with degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University. He is currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for African Studies, an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy (also known as Food First) and an IATP Food and Community Fellow.

The David Morrison Lecture in International Development is funded by a generous endowment made to Trent University in the name of Dr. David Morrison, professor emeritus from Trent’s Department of Politics and Dr. Alena Heitlinger, Trent professor in the Department of Sociology. The endowment brings globally distinguished scholars who are renowned for the impact that their intellectual and applied work has had on international development studies to Trent University to address members of the Trent and Peterborough communities.