Media for social change

Raj Patel is a food activist and the acclaimed author of "Stuff and Starved and more recently, "The Value of Nothing". He's very critical of the policies and research methods of the World Bank and is one of the few people that has both worked for the World Bank and protested it. Patel was invited to speak in Ottawa as part of the Ottawa Writers' Festival. Patel mostly talked about how, in a world of excessive consumption and capitalist systems leading people into abject poverty, sounder, more organic consumption of food is good, but not enough. Patel says that, in order for the world to feed the hungry and respect everyone's human right to food, their needs to be more civically engage people, that want a real system change. He cites the example of International Peasant Movement, La Via Campesina and how it declared in 2009 that "Food sovereignty is about an end to all forms of violence against women."Women grow 70 per cent of food worldwide yet they are the most vulnerable when it comes to food security. So, Patel says, how do we change that? Maybe it's time to talk about food sovereignty?