Raj Patel Quotes

In the U.S and Europe over the last year we've been focused on the prices of gasoline at the pump. While many worry about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs. And it's getting more and more difficult every day.

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

When the fish price is too low, the fishermen starve.

How can anyone live off of minimum wage?

Poverty is on the increase - due to welfare cuts - and demand for food banks has rocketed.

Every day I've got to hear about unemployment and people starving.

People are hungry not because there aren't enough farmers or food, but because they don't have access to it or can't afford it.

For too many, to work means having less income.

I know what it's like not to have food in the fridge or money to buy more.

Does anyone really believe it is possible to make even the most basic ends meet on $5.15 an hour?

Sometimes we used to eat once a day... chicken backs. You could buy four chicken backs for a quarter.

When I was a deacon, the ominous signs of the Great Depression began to appear. Tens of thousands lost their jobs. Money was scarce. Families had to do without. Some young people did not ask their mothers, 'What's for dinner?' because they knew all too well that their cupboards held very little.

People who didn't know the depression just don't know what being poor means.

The chief problem with lower income farmers is poverty

Too many jobs don't pay enough to get by, let alone get ahead.

My mom didn't have a lot of money.

I have way more experience being poor than I do having money.

I grew up pretty poor - not poor compared with people in India or Africa who are really poor, but poor enough so that the worry about money really cast a pall over your life a lot of the time.

Actually if you were to buy a bag of dried lentils it would cost you a couple of quid. Some people don't have that to spend in the first place. And not everyone wants to eat lentils.

I do think we have a food problem. In 2006, which is the year for which we have the latest data, 35.5 million Americans were food insecure. That means there are 35.5 million Americans who are so hard up at some point during the year that they didn't know where their next meal was coming from. That's a lot of Americans. They don't get reported very much because there's nothing spectacular about people skipping a meal because they're poor. The media tends to ignore that, just as it ignores the sort of chronic food shortages elsewhere in the world.

Hunger is the worst form of deprivation of a human being. Although inability to access food is the immediate cause of hunger, the real cause in most of the incidents of hunger is lack of ability to pay for food. If we are looking for ways to end hunger then we should be looking at ways to ensure a reasonable level of income for all

This is the first national administration we've ever seen where the housewife couldn't afford to buy groceries and the farmer couldn't afford to grow them.

Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.

The full extent of the problem of hunger is not obvious to most of us. We see the homeless, but there are a great number of working poor, struggling to survive, who don't have enough money to put adequate food on the table. We must find a solution to this ever-increasing problem - and quickly.

Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it's conceivable that it could happen. Country people have always known this.