Where Are All the Farmers?

After reading Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel, I look at my life through fresh eyes. I am so lucky to have the life I do where I don’t have to worry about whether or not I will eat dinner when I get home or if my dad’s job will be able to provide for our family. I have neither the problem of being starved nor the burden of being stuffed. I am one of the few healthy individuals who does not suffer from the worldwide epidemic of obesity. I am truly grateful for my health.

In Stuffed and Starved, Patel discusses how corporate greed affects lowly farmers in a negative way. Farmers are unable to make a substantial profit anymore because companies know they can pay less and sell for higher to make a bigger profit for themselves. This causes farmers to take out bigger loans to stay afloat in their own business; however, they are not always able to survive this economic downfall. “82 per cent of farmers are in debt” Patel states. This debt causes much unrest for not just the farmer, but the family as well. They are forced to make their children help where they can to make ends meet. They fight back by “working themselves to

exhaustion and scraping together whatever they can to be able to maintain some sort of standard of living.” Often farmers’ land is taken from them if their business is too unsuccessful causing the farmer and family pure devastation. Many times this causes some farmers to commit suicide for failing not only their family but the generations of their family before them.  Most of the time the farms have been passed down through the generations, so the burden of losing the family farm can be too much to bear for just one man.

Unfortunately, “farmer suicides cease to be full stops at the end of a life.” After the male dies, the woman bears the burden of raising the family and trying to stay afloat financially and physically. Sometimes they are driven to alternative methods of making money. In addition to the people who do have land, “the landless families systematically face the threat of starvation.”  Essentially, a farmer can start with land only to have it ripped from his family. This then causes them to be landless and more likely to starve for lack of money and means to buy food.

In this section of the book Patel focuses mainly on different parts of India where this economic crisis takes place. I am horrified at these events that are currently occurring worldwide. I had no idea such desperation was so prevalent in a rural society. It is ironic that the people who grow the food to stuff the wealthy are currently starving living in poverty. Patel captures this concept perfectly through his enlightening title. Change needs to happen to minimize both the stuffed and starved.