I’m writing mostly about books I want to read, just now, rather than those I’m reading, but this is one I really, really do want: The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy, by Raj Patel.
Patel once worked as an economist at the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO), and after what he saw there, about how the world food system is organized and how it exploits (and often destroys) almost everyone, he quit those organizations and became an activist working against them. A couple of years ago, I wrote about his visit to Toronto where he discussed his book, Stuffed and Starved. (“If we are what we eat, we’re in big, big trouble“) What I learned then horrified me so much that I really began supporting local farmers’ markets and buying as much local food as I could.
Now he’s got his new book, The Value of Nothing, and he goes still further in his push to reorganize the production of food so that the producers on the ground are honoured and paid properly, and no longer expend their life’s blood to feed gigantic mega-corporations like Cargill.
An interesting list from his book is found in his own post, Cheaponomics, where he shows that several things we believe should be really cheap ought to cost way more than they do. This is because that’s what the price would be if we factored in all the real costs of creating such products as bottled water or cell phones. As he says,
…in the US, the annual energy wasted on bottled water adds the equivalent to 100,000 cars on roads and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And the price we pay for water doesn’t begin to address the longer term issues of global shortage for something that everyone needs to survive
I want to read this book, in a way, because it makes me afraid. But I feel like I need to know these things, and that somehow we have to force governments and megacorporations from going what they’re doing. I don’t know how possible that really is. Patel seems to think it can be done. Some days the best I can do is rely on his hope for that, since I can’t muste any.
Must.read.this.book.
