Across three volumes—Food, Dependency and Dispossession (2022), Sickening Profits (2023) and Power Play: The Future of Food (2024)—I have mapped this critique in layered terms. What emerges is not a sectoral failure but a planetary regime of dispossession: a machinery that converts ecological life into economic assets, undermines autonomy under the banner of development and metabolises resistance into market-friendly reform.
The food system is not broken. It is a weapon. And it is intended as such. It concentrates power, severs people from land, deskills and displaces producers and commodifies nourishment. It benefits financial capital and corporate actors while externalising its costs—to health, biodiversity, labour and culture.
In the Global South, ‘development’ is the velvet glove of structural dependency. It arrives cloaked in the language of poverty reduction and climate resilience—while deepening indebtedness, consolidating proprietary seed systems and subordinating food sovereignty to export-driven logic. For all its rhetoric and well-laundered PR, Bayer is not saving Indian agriculture. It is enclosing it.
Behind the slick brand messaging lies a familiar pattern. Corporate contracts replace commons. Proprietary inputs replace knowledge. The land is enclosed—not always by fences, but by code, debt and bureaucratic abstraction. This is not progress. It is programmed disempowerment. Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of rationalisation is no longer metaphor—it is agronomic policy, algorithmic governance and institutional capture....<<<Read More>>>...