In this episode of Keen On, Andrew Keen is joined by Robert Paarlberg, the author of Resetting the Table, to discuss food politics. Robert puts the current state of agriculture and health in America under the microscope in an attempt to predict the future of Americans' relationships with food.
Robert Paarlberg does most of his research and consulting in the area of international food and agricultural policy, especially in Africa and the developing world. This topic connects Robert both to his own family history (his father grew up on a farm in Indiana) and to important current issues in international development: How to help farmers in Africa – most of whom are women – increase their productivity to better feed their families and escape poverty. In the past decade he has worked in more than a dozen countries in Africa, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the United States Agency for International Development. Paarlberg's 2008 book from Harvard University Press (Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa) has a foreword by two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug. His current research examines the impact of international trade on agricultural land use.
In recent year, his students at Wellesley have taken an increased interest in issues of food and farming around the world. They want to know what kinds of food and farm systems can provide not just increased production, but social justice, improved nutrition, and environmental sustainability as well. Robert addressed these questions in a senior seminar he taught every year, and in 2010 he published a book from Oxford University Press (Food Politics: What Everybody Needs to Know) based on the materials developed in this seminar. He also taught two large international relations courses every year, one on international economic policy and the other on “theories” of United States foreign policy. In addition, he taught the introductory course in his department, which showcases eight important books written by political scientists, from Machiavelli to the present.
Robert's work on international agriculture engages him with a wide variety of audiences beyond the academic world. In past years he has given talks to the executive leadership of the Mars Candy Company (on cocoa, in Africa), to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome (on agricultural technology), and to a conference on African farming in Uganda. In addition, he gave testimony in 2009 to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on U.S. agricultural development assistance policy. Most interesting to Robert, however, are the visits he makes to farms and farmers in the developing world, where a combination of bad history and bad current policy have held too many people in poverty for too long.
In the summer months, between work and travel, Robert enjoys retreating with my wife Marianne to their place on the coast of Maine, where there is plenty of hiking, biking, swimming, fishing, boating, golfing, and picture taking to do, and where the lobsters always taste good.
Robert Paarlberg on Food Politics