Supermarket shelves have never been fuller, yet diets have become poorer. Across the world, food systems praised for their productivity now deliver an abundance of calories alongside widespread micronutrient deficiency, ecological collapse and rural precarity. This is the outcome of an agricultural model that equates food security with yield and […]
The global disruptions we have seen in recent years are frequently presented as a chaotic sequence of events: a ‘pandemic’, inflation, energy shortages and war. Little wonder that most people are confused. However, a structural analysis reveals a more deliberate controlled demolition of the 20th-century social contract. We are witnessing […]
Gleaming office buildings, concrete flyovers and ever-sprawling housing developments and industrial parks, the modern city is increasingly presented as a symbol of progress. But what if this very ‘progress’ conceals a destructive order? What if the modern city represents the command-centre of an extractive, neoliberal order that has reshaped land, […]
The following article is adapted from the author’s new book The Agrarian Imagination: Development and the Art of the Impossible, which is freely available to read online or download here. At its best, writing bears witness to truths that society may not want to hear or that prevailing realities make almost impossible. […]
“A great deal depends upon a right relationship with the soil; the right relationship with the soil is the basis for the right relationship with one another.”Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (1977) In today’s world, food and land are increasingly dominated by huge corporations and global supply chains. These […]
Antonio Gramsci argued that propaganda is the main fabric through which contemporary power asserts itself. For Gramsci, propaganda is central to cultural hegemony; in other words, the dominance of a particular worldview (often that of the ruling class or elite) that is so deeply internalised by society that it becomes ‘common sense’ and uncritically accepted as natural and inevitable. There are many reasons why transnational agribusiness has been able to secure […]
The Yuka app is a mobile application designed to help consumers quickly assess the health quality of food and cosmetic products by scanning their barcodes. It produces a health score ranging from 0 to 100 and provides a colour-coded rating, which categorises products as excellent, good, mediocre or poor for […]
Alot has been written on the global food system—its industrialisation, ecological consequences and the erosion of cultural, economic and food sovereignty. Despite this onslaught, however, traditional rhythms and communal resilience persist in the countryside, especially in countries like India. Cultural practices continue to foster a sense of rootedness. What’s more, […]
As India celebrates its 78th Independence Day on 15 August, the tricolour will flutter proudly across the nation. Speeches will echo the triumphs of freedom, resilience and progress. But beneath the patriotic fervour will lie an uncomfortable truth: independence means little if the nation’s food, land and farmers are being […]
On 15 August, India will celebrate its Independence Day. There will be the usual celebratory flag-waving and flypasts in Delhi along with sound bites about ‘the world’s biggest democracy’. But what has ‘independence’ come to mean? Placing an X on a ballot paper every now and then does not constitute democracy. If […]