A revised version (September 2024) of the open-access e-book Food Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order (2022) by Colin Todhunter is now available.
A brand-new concluding chapter, “The Violence of Development”, rounds off a book that presents a scathing critique of the global industrial agriculture system and its proponents. The book takes aim at the Green Revolution and its modern equivalent (genetically modified organisms), the displacement of traditional farming practices, and the devastating impacts of a neoliberal agenda that is conveniently passed off as ‘development’.
By critically examining the concept of ‘development’ and how it has been implemented globally, the new chapter argues that dependency and dispossession remain core elements of the global economic system. Those who are sacrificed on the altar of plunder in the countryside, in the forests or in the hills become regarded as the price worth paying for ‘progress’.
The chapter frames conventional development as based on Western hegemony, imposing certain ideals on the rest of the world and cites post-development theorist Arturo Escobar’s critique of development as a top-down, ethnocentric approach.
The violence of development takes the form of outright brutality and an ideological hegemony: a power play concerned with redefining who we are or what we should be, what is acceptable and what is unacceptable.
As Escobar notes:
Development was and continues to be—in theory and practice—a top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic approach, which treated people and cultures as abstract concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down in the charts of ‘progress’.
By challenging the notion of a unilinear path to development, the chapter argues that historical outcomes were often shaped by chance and conflict rather than following a predetermined course. If history teaches us one thing, it is that humanity has ended up at its current point due to a multitude of struggles and conflicts, the outcomes of which were often in the balance. There is no unilinear path to development and no fixed standard as to what it constitutes.
In other words, we have ended up where we are as much by chance as design. And much of that design was based on colonialism and imperialism. The development of Britain owes much to the $45 trillion that was sucked from India alone, according to economist Utsa Patnaik.
And that situation, in the name of ‘development’, is happening again, as noted by the prominent campaigner Aruna Rodrigues. In discussing the book, she said the following about the chapters on India:
Colin Todhunter at his best: this is graphic, a detailed horror tale in the making for India, an exposé on what is planned, via the farm laws, to hand over Indian sovereignty and food security to big business. There will come a time pretty soon — (not something out there but imminent, unfolding even now), when we will pay the Cargills, Ambanis, Bill Gates, Walmarts — in the absence of national buffer food stocks (an agri policy change to cash crops, the end to small-scale farmers, pushed aside by contract farming and GM crops) — we will pay them to send us food and finance borrowing from international markets to do it.
And this is called ‘development’.
The new conclusion advocates for reestablishing humanity’s connections to the land, drawing inspiration from Gandhi’s philosophy and his concept of a ‘non-interventionist lifestyle’. It frames food justice and food sovereignty as part of a larger struggle against social, economic and environmental injustice and brutality disguised as ‘development’.
Overall, this new concluding chapter provides a comprehensive critique of the global development paradigm, connecting it to the book’s themes of food, dependency and dispossession.
The revised version of Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order can be read for free at Academia.edu (pdf), Heyzine (flipbook) and Global Research.
