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Past the Farm Legal guidelines: Company Cloud Poised to Reign Over India’s Fields

Practically 4 years after India’s historic year-long farmers’ protests pressured the repeal of three pro-corporate farm legal guidelines, it’s clear that the federal government’s underlying agenda stays intact. The repeal was little greater than a tactical retreat.

As we speak, the identical agenda of corporatisation (recolonisation) is being superior by bureaucratic schemes, digital agriculture partnerships and coverage frameworks that promote ‘effectivity’ and ‘modernisation’.

The ebook Meals Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order affords insights into India’s agrarian disaster, with a number of chapters and substantial sections analysing the affect of neoliberal insurance policies, the Inexperienced Revolution and the farm legal guidelines. In that ebook, I warned that company energy would reassert itself following the repeal of the three legal guidelines. The ebook explored the true beneficiaries of the laws, the motives of the highly effective pursuits that demanded it and its far-reaching penalties for nationwide sovereignty, farmers and the general public.

In February 2022, when that ebook was printed, I acknowledged that repealing the three legal guidelines was:

“… little greater than a tactical manoeuvre… The highly effective world pursuits behind these legal guidelines haven’t gone away… These pursuits have been behind a decades-long agenda to displace the prevailing agri-food system in India… the aim and underlying framework to seize and radically restructure the sector stays. The farmers’ battle in India is just not over.”

The intention to impose neoliberal shock remedy on Indian agriculture has by no means waned and stays clear in central authorities schemes and public-private partnerships.

The Pradhan Mantri Dhan Dhaanya Krishi Yojana (PMDDKY) is now the federal government’s flagship ‘umbrella scheme’ for agriculture. In keeping with reporting by The Wire, it merges 36 present programmes throughout 11 ministries right into a single centralised plan, ostensibly to advertise convergence and coordination. However farmer unions and coverage critics argue that it represents an enormous centralisation of agricultural governance that strikes energy, funds and oversight away from state governments and into the arms of the Union Centre.

The scheme, they warn, might turn out to be a company Malicious program, making a framework by which public–personal partnerships with corporations reminiscent of ITC, Mahindra and Godrej can quietly take management of rural infrastructure and extension companies. Beneath the guise of coordination, the state is vacating house for highly effective firms to occupy.

This creeping company management is being strengthened by the Indian Council of Agricultural Analysis (ICAR), the nation’s premier agricultural physique. Between 2023 and 2024, ICAR signed a sequence of partnerships with multinational agribusiness and know-how firms, together with Bayer, Amazon and Syngenta. Formally, these memoranda of understanding are about selling ‘climate-resilient’ and ‘digital’ agriculture.

In actuality, nonetheless, they mark a decisive step in outsourcing analysis, know-how and information administration to firms, lots of which have a historical past of scientific deception, aggressive lobbying, subterfuge, vilifying critics and self-serving political manipulation.

Bayer, an organization infamous for its historical past of poisonous agrochemicals and monopolistic seed management, is now concerned in designing carbon markets and crop-protection regimes. Amazon Kisan integrates India’s farm produce into its digital provide chains, successfully positioning the e-commerce big as a gatekeeper between farmer and shopper. And Syngenta’s position in drone and AI-based ‘precision’ farming embeds costly, proprietary applied sciences that make farmers depending on company platforms.

Beneath the guise of ‘modernisation’, we’re seeing the development of a posh that binds farmers into new types of digital company dependency. Data, information and decision-making shifts from the sector to the cloud.

Distinction this enthusiasm for state-corporate partnerships with the shortage of progress on the promise of a authorized assure for the minimal assist worth (MSP) (a flooring worth for numerous crops) made throughout the repeal of the farm legal guidelines in 2021. The committee on MSP fashioned that 12 months has produced no tangible outcomes. In the meantime, company collaborations transfer with lightning velocity and with little to no democratic oversight or accountability.

There may be additionally the draft Nationwide Coverage Framework on Agricultural Advertising and marketing (NPFAM), which farmer organisations such because the Samyukta Kisan Morcha and All India Kisan Sabha describe because the “return of the farm legal guidelines by stealth.” The framework’s discuss of “market integration” and “value-chain infrastructure” intently mirrors the deregulation proposed within the repealed legal guidelines. It encourages the creation of personal wholesale markets and permits direct procurement by company agribusinesses reminiscent of Cargill, Walmart and Amazon, bypassing state-regulated wholesale markets or mandis. It additionally envisions the gradual switch of storage and distribution infrastructure to non-public management.

Collectively, these measures threaten to dismantle the final remaining security web for farmers throughout worth volatility and market shocks.

The federal government claims that reforms will create a “unified nationwide market.” In follow, they’re meant to create a corporate-controlled market. With no legally enforceable MSP, farmers are left to the mercy of fluctuating costs and company buying energy. The result’s a system designed for revenue extraction reasonably than public welfare.

Mumbai-based Janata Weekly notes that expenditure on procurement and worth assist has been slashed or merged into imprecise umbrella schemes, diluting their effectiveness, whereas funds for digitalisation and private-sector “innovation missions” have grown. Janata Weekly states that the political financial system is evident: the state’s position is being redefined from guarantor of livelihoods to dealer for company funding.

If these plans succeed, it’s seemingly that the end-result would be the weakening and eventual withdrawal of public establishments such because the Meals Company of India and the Public Distribution System, thereby eroding one of many world’s largest meals safety networks (beneath the Nationwide Meals Safety Act, India’s meals welfare programmes at the moment serve greater than 800 million folks, offering subsidised meals to a good portion of the inhabitants). The ensuing vacuum could be crammed by multinational provide chains. The seemingly final result, as The Wire warns, is a future the place India should depend on the identical firms that now dominate its agricultural coverage to buy its personal staples.

In response, since early 2024, new waves of protests have erupted. The calls for stay constant: a authorized assure for MSP, debt waivers and the repeal of corporate-friendly insurance policies such because the NPFAM. The response has been acquainted too within the type of detentions, tear fuel, bulldozed encampments and web shutdowns in protest zones. Social media accounts of union leaders and journalists have been taken down beneath official orders.

The power to feed a inhabitants by itself phrases is the muse of nationwide sovereignty. Because the state retreats and world capital advances, India dangers changing into dependent not solely on imports however on the dictates of multinational provide chains that prioritise revenue and management over diet and wish.

The farmers protest 2020-2021 obtained huge world media protection. The agitation led to the repeal of the farm legal guidelines, however it was a symbolic victory and didn’t change the underlying trajectory. Except India ensures its meals system serves the general public good—grounded in meals sovereignty and the safety of farmer rights—company seize will solely deepen.

[Colin Todhunter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). The CRG is an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists. In 2018, he was named a ‘Living Peace and Justice Leader/Model’ by Engaging Peace Inc. in recognition of his writing. Courtesy: Global Research, the online media platform of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), an independent research and media organization based in Montreal, Canada.]

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Farmers’ Wrestle in India: The Farm Legal guidelines and a Neoliberal Dying Knell

[This essay, taken from Colin Todhunter’s book, “Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order”, was written prior to the Indian government’s announcement in late 2021 that the three farm laws discussed would be repealed. This is little more than a tactical manoeuvre given that state elections were upcoming in key rural heartlands in 2022.

The powerful global interests behind these laws have not gone away and the concerns expressed below are still highly relevant. These interests have been behind a decades-long agenda to displace the prevailing agri-food system in India. The laws might have been struck down, but the goal and underlying framework to capture and radically restructure the sector remains. The farmers’ struggle in India is not over.]

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In 1830, British colonial administrator Lord Metcalfe mentioned India’s villages had been little republics that had practically all the things they may need for inside themselves. India’s means to endure derived from these communities:

“Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down however the village group stays the identical. It’s in a excessive diploma conducive to their happiness, and to the enjoyment of an incredible portion of freedom and independence.”

Metcalfe was acutely conscious that to subjugate India this capability to ‘endure’ needed to be damaged. Since gaining independence from the British, India’s rulers have solely additional served to undermine the vibrancy or rural India. However now a possible demise knell for rural India and its villages is underway.

There’s a plan for the way forward for India and most of its present farmers don’t have a task in it.

Three essential farm payments are geared toward imposing the shock remedy of neoliberalism on India’s agri-food sector for the good thing about massive commodity merchants and different (worldwide) firms: many if not most smallholderfarmers might go to the wall in a panorama of ‘get massive or get out’.

This laws includes the Farmers’ Produce Commerce and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act 2020, the Farmers (Empowerment and Safety) Settlement on Value Assurance and Farm Providers Act 2020 and the Important Commodities (Modification) Act 2020.

This might signify a remaining demise knell for indigenous agriculture in India. The laws will imply that mandis — state-run market places for farmers to promote their agricultural produce by way of public sale to merchants — may be bypassed, permitting farmers to promote to non-public gamers elsewhere (bodily and on-line), thereby undermining the regulatory position of the general public sector. In commerce areas open to the personal sector, no charges will likely be levied (charges levied in mandis go to the states and, in precept, are used to boost infrastructure to assist farmers).

This might incentivise the company sector working outdoors of the mandis to (initially no less than) provide higher costs to farmers; nonetheless, because the mandi system is run down utterly, these firms will monopolise commerce, seize the sector and dictate costs to farmers.

One other final result might see the largely unregulated storage of produce and hypothesis, opening the farming sector to a free-for-all profiteering payday for the massive merchants and jeopardising meals safety. The federal government will now not regulate and make key produce obtainable to customers at honest costs. This coverage floor is being ceded to influential market gamers.

The laws will allow transnational agri-food firms like Cargill and Walmart and India’s billionaire capitalists Gautam Adani (agribusiness conglomerate) and Mukesh Ambini (Reliance retail chain) to resolve on what’s to be cultivated at what worth, how a lot of it’s to be cultivated inside India and the way it’s to be produced and processed. Industrial agriculture would be the norm with all of the devastating well being, social and environmental prices that the mannequin brings with it.

Cast in Washington

The current agriculture laws represents the ultimate items of a 30-year-old plan that can profit a handful of billionaires within the US and in India. It means the livelihoods of lots of of thousands and thousands (nearly all of the inhabitants)who nonetheless depend on agriculture for a residing are to be sacrificed on the behest of those elite pursuits.

Take into account that a lot of the UK’s wealth got here from sucking $45 trillion from India alone based on famend economist Utsa Patnaik. Britain grew wealthy by underdeveloping India. As we speak, what are little greater than modern-day East India-type firms are at the moment within the technique of serving to themselves to the nation’s most dear asset — agriculture.

In keeping with the World Financial institution’s lending report, based mostly on information compiled as much as 2015, India was simply the most important recipient of its loans within the historical past of the establishment. On the again of India’s overseas alternate disaster within the Nineties, the IMF and World Financial institution needed India to shift lots of of thousands and thousands out of agriculture.

In return for as much as greater than $120 billion in loans on the time, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed provide system, scale back subsidies, run down public agriculture establishments and provide incentives for the rising of money crops to earn overseas alternate.

The small print of this plan seem in a January 2021 article by the Mumbai-based Analysis Unit for Political Economic system (RUPE), ‘Modi’s Farm Produce Act Was Authored Thirty Years In the past, in Washington DC’. The piece says that the present agricultural ‘reforms’ are a part of a broader technique of imperialism’s growing seize of the Indian financial system:

“Indian enterprise giants reminiscent of Reliance and Adani are main recipients of overseas funding, as we’ve seen in sectors reminiscent of telecom, retail, and vitality. On the similar time, multinational firms and different monetary traders within the sectors of agriculture, logistics and retail are additionally organising their very own operations in India. Multinational buying and selling firms dominate world commerce in agricultural commodities… The opening of India’s agriculture and meals financial system to overseas traders and world agribusinesses is a longstanding venture of the imperialist nations.”

The article supplies particulars of a 1991 World Financial institution memorandum, which setout the programme for India.

It states that, on the time, India was nonetheless in its overseas alternate disaster of 1990–91 and had simply submitted itself to an IMF-monitored ‘structural adjustment’ programme. India’s July 1991 price range marked the fateful begin of India’s neoliberal period.

The Modi authorities is trying to dramatically speed up the implementation of the above programme, which to this point has been too sluggish for the overlords in Washington: the dismantling of the general public procurement and distribution of meals is to be facilitated courtesy of the three agriculture-related acts handed by parliament.

What is going on predates the present administration, however it’s as if Modi was particularly groomed to push by the ultimate parts of this agenda.

Describing itself as a serious world communications, stakeholder engagement and enterprise technique firm, APCO Worldwide is a foyer company with agency hyperlinks to the Wall Road/company US institution and facilitates its world agenda.

Some years in the past, Modi turned to APCO to assist rework his picture and switch him into electable pro-corporate PM materials. It additionally helped him get the message out that what he achieved in Gujarat as chief minister was a miracle of financial neoliberalism, though the precise actuality is kind of completely different.

Some years in the past, following the 2008 monetary disaster, APCO acknowledged that India’s resilience in weathering the worldwide downturn has made governments, coverage makers, economists, company homes and fund managers consider that the nation can play a big position within the restoration of world capitalism.

Decoded, this implies world capital shifting into areas and nations and displacing indigenous gamers. The place agriculture is anxious, this hides behind emotive and seemingly altruistic rhetoric about ‘serving to farmers’ and the necessity to ‘feed a burgeoning inhabitants’ (whatever the truth that is precisely what India’s farmers have been doing).

Modi has been on board with this intention and has proudly acknowledged that India is now one of the vital ‘enterprise pleasant’ nations on the planet. What he actually means is that India is in compliance with World Financial institution directives on ‘ease of doing enterprise’ and ‘enabling the enterprise of agriculture’ by facilitating additional privatisation of public enterprises, environment-destroying insurance policies and forcing working folks to participate in a race to the underside based mostly on ‘free’ market fundamentalism.

APCO has described India as a trillion-dollar market. It talks about positioning worldwide funds and facilitating firms’ means to use markets, promote merchandise and safe revenue. None of it is a recipe for nationwide sovereignty, letalone meals safety.

Famend agronomist MS Swaminathan has acknowledged:

“Unbiased overseas coverage is simply doable with meals safety. Subsequently, meals has extra than simply consuming implications. It protects nationwide sovereignty, nationwide rights and nationwide status.”

The drive is to drastically dilute the position of the general public sector in agriculture, decreasing it to a facilitator of personal capital. The norm will likely be industrial (GM) commodity-crop farming suited to the wants of the likes of Cargill, Archer Daniels Midlands, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and India’s retail and agribusiness giants in addition to the worldwide agritech, seed and agrochemical firms and Silicon Valley, which is main the drive for ‘data-driven agriculture’.

In fact, these fund managers and company homes talked about by APCO are little doubt additionally nicely positioned to take benefit, not least by way of the acquisition of land and land hypothesis. For instance, the Karnataka Land Reform Act will make it simpler for enterprise to buy agricultural land, ensuing inincreased landlessness and concrete migration.

On account of the continued programme, greater than 300,000 farmers in India have taken their lives since 1997 and lots of extra are experiencing financial misery or have left farming because of debt, a shift to money crops and financial liberalisation. There was an ongoing technique to make farming non-viable for a lot of of India’s farmers.

The variety of cultivators in India declined from 166 million to 146 million between 2004 and 2011. Some 6,700 left farming every day. Between 2015 and 2022, the variety of cultivators is more likely to lower to round 127 million.

We have now seen the operating down of the sector for many years, spiralling enter prices, withdrawal of presidency help and the impacts of low cost, subsidised imports, which depress farmers’ incomes. India’s spurt of excessive GDP growthduring the final decade was partly fuelled on the again of low cost meals and thesubsequent impoverishment of farmers: the hole between farmers’ earnings and the remainder of the inhabitants has widened enormously.

Whereas underperforming firms obtain huge handouts and have loans written off, the shortage of a safe earnings, publicity to worldwide market costs and low cost imports contribute to farmers’ distress of not having the ability to cowl the prices of manufacturing.

With greater than 800 million folks, rural India is arguably probably the most fascinating and sophisticated place on the planet however is stricken by farmer suicides, youngster malnourishment, rising unemployment, elevated informalisation, indebtedness and an general collapse of agriculture.

On condition that India continues to be an agrarian-based society, famend journalist P Sainath says what’s going down may be described as a disaster of civilisation proportions and may be defined in simply 5 phrases: hijack of agriculture by firms. He notes the method by which it’s being finished in 5 phrases too: predatory commercialisation of the countryside. And one other 5 phrases to explain the result: largest displacement in our historical past.

Take the cultivation of pulses, as an example, which highlights the plight of farmers. In keeping with a report within the Indian Specific (September 2017), pulses manufacturing elevated by 40% throughout the earlier 12 months (a 12 months of document manufacturing). On the similar time, nonetheless, imports additionally rose leading to black gram promoting at 4,000 rupees per quintal (a lot lower than throughout the earlier 12 months). This successfully pushed down costs thereby decreasing farmers already meagre incomes.

We have now already witnessed a operating down of the indigenous edible oils sector because of Indonesian palm oil imports (which advantages Cargill) on the again of World Financial institution stress to cut back tariffs (India was nearly self-sufficient in edible oils within the Nineties however now faces growing import prices).

The stress from the richer nations for the Indian authorities to additional scale back assist given to farmers and confide in imports and export-oriented ‘free market’ commerce is predicated on nothing however hypocrisy.

On the ‘All the way down to Earth’ web site in late 2017, it was acknowledged some 3.2 million folks had been engaged in agriculture within the US in 2015. The US authorities supplied them every with a subsidy of $7,860 on common. Japan supplies a subsidy of $14,136 and New Zealand $2,623 to its farmers. In 2015, a British farmer earned $2,800 and $37,000 was added by subsidies. The Indian authorities supplies on common a subsidy of $873 to farmers. Nevertheless, between 2012 and 2014, India decreased the subsidy on agriculture and meals safety by $3 billion.

In keeping with coverage analyst Devinder Sharma, subsidies supplied to US wheat and rice farmers are greater than the market value of those two crops. He additionally notes that, per day, every cow in Europe receives subsidy value greater than an Indian farmer’s each day earnings.

The Indian farmer merely can’t compete with this. The World Financial institution, WTO and the IMF have successfully served to undermine the indigenous farm sector in India.

And now, based mostly on the brand new farm legal guidelines, by decreasing public sector buffer shares and facilitating corporate-dictated contract farming and full-scale neoliberal marketisation for the sale and procurement of produce, India will likely be sacrificing its farmers and its personal meals safety for the good thing about a handful of billionaires.

In fact, many thousands and thousands have already been displaced from the Indian countryside and have needed to search work within the cities. And if the coronavirus-related lockdown has indicated something, it’s that many of those ‘migrant staff’ had failed to achieve a safe foothold in city centres and had been compelled to return ‘dwelling’ to their villages. Their lives are outlined by low pay and insecurity even after 30 years of neoliberal ‘reforms’.

Constitution for change

In late November 2018, a constitution was launched by the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (an umbrella group of round 250 farmers’ organisations) to coincide with the large, well-publicised farmers’ march that was then going down in Delhi.

The constitution acknowledged:

“Farmers should not only a residue from our previous; farmers, agriculture and village India are integral to the way forward for India and the world; as bearers of historic information, abilities and tradition; as brokers of meals security, safety and sovereignty; and as guardians of biodiversity and ecological sustainability.”

The farmers acknowledged that they had been alarmed on the financial, ecological, social and existential disaster of Indian agriculture in addition to the persistent state neglect of the sector and discrimination in opposition to farming communities.

They had been additionally involved concerning the deepening penetration of huge, predatory and revenue hungry firms, farmers’ suicide throughout the nation and the insufferable burden of indebtedness and the widening disparities between farmers and different sectors.

The constitution known as on the Indian parliament to right away maintain a particular session to cross and enact two payments that had been of, by and for the farmers of India.

If handed by parliament, amongst different issues, the Farmers’ Freedom from Indebtedness Invoice 2018 would have supplied for the entire mortgage waiver for all farmers and agricultural staff.

The second invoice, The Farmers’ Proper to Assured Remunerative Minimal Help Costs for Agricultural Commodities Invoice 2018, would have seen the federal government take measures to carry down the enter price of farming by particular regulation of the costs of seeds, agriculture equipment and tools, diesel, fertilisers and pesticides, whereas making buy of farm produce under the minimal assist worth (MSP) each unlawful and punishable.

The constitution additionally known as for a particular dialogue on the universalisation of the general public distribution system, the withdrawal of pesticides which were banned elsewhere and the non-approval of genetically engineered seeds and not using a complete want and affect evaluation.

Different calls for included no overseas direct funding in agriculture and meals processing, the safety of farmers from company plunder within the title of contract farming, funding in farmers’ collectives to create farmer producer organisations and peasant cooperatives and the promotion of agroecology based mostly on appropriate cropping patterns and native seed variety revival.

Now, in 2021, reasonably than responding to those necessities, we see the Indian authorities’s promotion and facilitation of — by means of current laws — the corporatisation of agriculture and the dismantling of the general public distribution system (and the MSP) in addition to the laying of groundwork for contract farming.

Though the 2 aforementioned payments from 2018 have now lapsed, farmers are demanding that the brand new pro-corporate (anti-farmer) farm legal guidelines are changed with a authorized framework that ensures the MSP to farmers.

Certainly, the RUPE notes that MSPs by way of authorities procurement of important crops and commodities ought to be prolonged to the likes of maize, cotton, oilseed and pulses. In the mean time, solely farmers in sure states who produce rice and wheat are the primary beneficiaries of presidency procurement at MSP.

Since per capita protein consumption in India is abysmally low and has fallen additional throughout the liberalisation period, the availability of pulses within the public distribution system (PDS) is lengthy overdue and desperately wanted. The RUPE argues that the ‘extra’ shares of meals grain with the Meals Company of India are merely the results of the failure or refusal of the federal government to distribute grain to the folks.

(For these not accustomed to the PDS: central authorities by way of the Meals Company of India FCI is accountable for shopping for meals grains from farmers at MSP at state-run market yards or mandis. It then allocates the grains to every state. State governments then ship to the ration outlets.)

If public procurement of a wider vary of crops on the MSP had been to happen — and MSP had been assured for rice and wheat throughout all states — it could assist handle starvation and malnutrition in addition to farmer misery.

As a substitute of rolling again the position of the general public sector and surrendering the system to overseas firms, there’s a must additional broaden official procurement and public distribution. This may happen by extending procurement to extra states and increasing the vary of commodities beneath the PDS. In fact, some will elevate a crimson flag right here and say this may price an excessive amount of. However because the RUPE notes, it could price round 20% of the present handouts (‘incentives’) obtained by firms and their super-rich house owners, which donot profit the majority of the broader inhabitants in any means. Additionally it is value contemplating that the loans supplied to only 5 massive firms in India had been in 2016 equal to your complete farm debt.

However this isn’t the place the federal government’s priorities lie.

It’s clear that the existence of the MSP, the Meals Company of India, the general public distribution system and publicly held buffer shares represent an impediment to the profit-driven necessities of world agribusiness pursuits who’ve sat with authorities businesses and set out their wish-lists.

The RUPE notes that India accounts for 15% of world consumption of cereals. India’s buffer shares are equal to fifteen–25% of world shares and 40% of world commerce in rice and wheat. Any massive discount in these shares will virtually actually have an effect on world costs: farmers could be hit by depressed costs; later, as soon as India turned depending on imports, costs might rise on the worldwide market and Indian customers could be hit.

On the similar time, the richer nations are making use of monumental stress on India to scrap its meagre agricultural subsidies; but their very own subsidies are huge multiples of India’s. The top consequence could possibly be India changing into depending on imports and the restructure of its personal agriculture to crops destined for export.

Huge buffer shares would in fact nonetheless exist; however as a substitute of India holding these shares, they might be held by multinational buying and selling corporations and India would bid for them with borrowed funds. In different phrases, as a substitute of holding bodily buffer shares, India would maintain overseas alternate reserves.

Successive administrations have made the nation depending on risky flows of overseas capital and India’s overseas alternate reserves have been constructed up by borrowing and overseas investments. The concern of capital flight is ever current. Insurance policies are sometimes ruled by the drive to draw and retain these inflows and preserve market confidence by ceding to the calls for of worldwide capital.

This throttling of democracy and the ‘financialisation’ of agriculture would severely undermine the nation’s meals safety and depart virtually 1.4 billion folks on the mercy of worldwide speculators and markets and overseas funding.

If unrepealed, the current laws represents the last word betrayal of India’s farmers and democracy in addition to the ultimate give up of meals safety and meals sovereignty to unaccountable firms. This laws might ultimately result in the nation counting on outdoors forces to feed its inhabitants — and a doable return to hand-to-mouth imports, particularly in an more and more risky world liable to battle, public well being scares, unregulated land and commodity hypothesis and worth shocks.

[Courtesy: Colin Todhunter’s public data, available at: https://figshare.com. The book has been published by Global Research, the online media platform of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), an independent research and media organization based in Montreal, Canada.]