Raj Patel

Rajeev "Raj" Patel (born 1972) is a British academic, journalist, activist and writer who has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the United States for extended periods.

He has been referred to as "the rock star of social justice writing."

Born to a mother from Kenya and a father from Fiji, he grew up in Golders Green in north-west London where his family ran a corner shop.

Patel was one of many organizers in the 1999 protests in Seattle, Washington, and has organised in support of food sovereignty.

More recently he has resided and worked extensively in Zimbabwe and in South Africa.

He was refused a visa extension by the Mugabe regime for his political involvement with the pro-democracy movement.

He is associated through his work on food with the Via Campesina movement, and through his work on urban poverty and resistance with Abahlali baseMjondolo and the now defunct Landless Peoples Movement in South Africa.

Patel has written a number of criticisms of various aspects of the policies and research methods of the World Bank and was a co-editor, with Christopher Brooke, of the online leftist webzine The Voice of the Turtle.

Patel received a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), from Oxford, and a master's degree from the London School of Economics, and gained his PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University in 2002.

As part of his academic training, Patel worked at the World Bank, World Trade Organization, and the United Nations.

He has since become an outspoken public critic of all of these organisations, and reports having been tear-gassed on four continents protesting against his former employers.

Patel is an educator and academic.

He has written articles and books.

In 2007 he was invited to give the keynote address at the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo graduation ceremony.

He administers the organisation's website.

He is possibly best known for his 2008 book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.

In 2008 he was asked to testify on the global food crisis before the House Financial Services Committee in the USA.

In 2009, he published The Value of Nothing which was on The New York Times best-seller list during February 2010.

In 2009 he joined the advisory board of Corporate Accountability International's Value the Meal campaign.

In January 2010 some adherents of Share International, following an announcement by Benjamin Creme, concluded that Patel could be the Maitreya.

Patel denied being the Maitreya.

Patel is a libertarian socialist and has described himself as "someone who has very strong anarchist sympathies."

In his book The Value of Nothing he praised the grassroots participatory democracy practised in the Zapatista Councils of Good Government in southern Mexico and has advocated similar decentralist models of economic democracy and confederal administration as templates to go by for social justice movements in the global north.

He described himself in 2010 as "not a communist [or socialist] ... just open minded".

Nonetheless, the analysis of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, published seven years later, locates its concept of "cheapness" within a Marxist framework.

According to the authors, "Capitalism values only what it can count, and it can count only dollars. Every capitalist wants to invest as little and profit as much as possible. For capitalism, this means that the whole system thrives when powerful states and capitalists can reorganize global nature, invest as little as they can, and receive as much food, work, energy, and raw materials with as little disruption as possible."

This extrapolates a key formulation by Marx: “The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities.”

"What we should be a little taken aback by is, not that corporations are miscreants, but that there are markets in food at all. Why are there markets in food? Why is there a global market in anything? I mean global markets in food are very weird."

- Raj Patel, speaking about the global food economy at Marquette University

Patel became a US citizen on 7 January 2010.

In an interview with The New Yorker's Lauren Collins, he said he considers himself an atheist Hindu.

In 2012, he appeared in the National Film Board of Canada documentary Payback, based on Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

He appears in the documentary film A Place at the Table which opened in the US on 1 March 2013.

In 2017, he published, with co-author Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (University of California Press).

He has been a visiting scholar at Yale University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Patel is listed as a Research Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas at Austin.