Affiliation: Visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First.

Location: San Francisco

Bio: Raj Patel has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and is an Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, he regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the LA Times, NYTimes.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and most recently, The Value of Nothing.

Photo credit: Andrea Ismert, www.rajpatel.org

Can you please explain the concept of food sovereignty, and what policies and programs will help encourage it?

Food sovereignty is about communities’, states’ and unions’ rights to shape their own food and agricultural policy. Now that may sound like a whole lot of nothing, because you’re actually not making a policy demand, you’re just saying that people need to be able to make their own decisions. But, actually, that’s a huge thing. Because in general, particularly for smaller farmers in developing countries, and particularly for women, decisions about food and agricultural policy have never been made by them. They’ve always been imposed.