Clinton's 'We Blew It on Global Food' speech
example · Bill Clinton / UN speech ·
retold in 3 talks
Clinton admitted at a UN World Food Day gathering that Western pressure to open and commodify third-world agriculture caused the global food crisis; Žižek uses this to argue that once you accept food, water, energy, environment, culture, and health as non-commodities, you must raise the question of communism.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“If you bring Clinton's reasoning to the end, we have to raise the question of communism again.”
“Clinton says this: 'The result is mass hunger now.'…'The lesson is food is too important to be simply left to the market.'”
“"We all blew it, including me when I was president, by treating food crops as commodities instead of as a vital right of the world's poor."”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 1 jobsuses
communism of the commons
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
Jacques Vergès2George Galloway1August Bebel1Massimo Cacciari1Marilyn Chambers1Barbet Schroeder1Sary Makdisi1Carlo Vercellone1
alongside works
Every retelling 3
Clinton admitted at a UN World Food Day gathering that Western pressure to open and commodify third-world agriculture caused the global food crisis; Žižek uses this to argue that once you accept food, water, energy, environment, culture, and health as non-commodities, you must raise the question of communism., illustrating commons and communism,becoming-rent-of-profit,global food crisis
Clinton admitted in a UN Food Day text that US pressure to open Third World agriculture to the market caused mass hunger: best land was taken for export crops, and when global prices spiked in 2008, countries could no longer feed themselves. Žižek uses this to extend the logic: if food cannot be left to the market, neither can education, health, or arms., illustrating market limits and communism,global hunger as antagonism capitalism cannot solve
Žižek uses Clinton's honest admission at a UN World Food Day event, that the US and Western institutions destroyed third-world food self-sufficiency by treating food as a commodity and imposing structural adjustment, as evidence a leftist argument can sometimes come from an unlikely source., illustrating global food crisis,capitalism,ideology