Raj Patel: The Value of Nothing

Freedom is a Constant Struggle TV show, September 18, 2009

Our guest, Raj Patel is a writer, activist and academic. He has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO and been tear-gassed on four continents protesting against them. He’s 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 and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First.

He was recently invited to share his views on the global food crisis in testimony 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, NY Times.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer. His first book is Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and he is the author of the forthcoming book “The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy”.

www.rajpatel.org