Colin Todhunter In the above short video on the empirediaries.com YouTube channel, a protesting farmer camped near Delhi says that during lockdown and times of crisis farmers are treated like “gods”, but when they ask for their rights, they are smeared and labelled as “terrorists”. He, along with thousands of other farmers, are mobilising against …
While trying to find sustainable, durable solutions to problems which have been building up over a long time, it is very helpful to keep in mind that the outward manifestation is not necessarily the real problem or its core. This is very evident in the context of farming where a number of serious problems have been building up over the[Read More...]
In many countries with varying levels of development, a large number of farmers have been losing their land , sometimes to the extent of even losing their status as independent landowning farmers. Various economic, technological, social, political, legal and other factors are involved, and one is hesitant to generalize or oversimplify a complex situation. Nevertheless this much can be stated[Read More...]
Colin Todhunter Agriculture in India is at a crossroads. Indeed, given that over 60 per cent of the country’s 1.3-billion-plus population still make a living from agriculture (directly or indirectly), what is at stake is the future of India. Unscrupulous interests are intent on destroying India’s indigenous agri-food sector and recasting it in their own …
Colin Todhunter The world is fast losing farms and farmers through the concentration of land into the hands of rich and powerful land speculators and agribusiness corporations. Smallholder farmers are being criminalised and even made to disappear when it comes to the struggle for land. They are constantly exposed to systematic expulsion. In 2014, the …
Colin Todhunter The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting at the end of January in Davos, Switzerland, brings together international business and political leaders, economists and other high-profile individuals to discuss global issues. Driven by the vision of its influential CEO Klaus Schwab, the WEF is the main driving force for the dystopian ‘great reset’, …
John Griffin From the vantage point of a remote Portuguese hill village, life in faraway cities seems either quirky or crazed. The Celtic inhabitants—my neighbours—have managed to weather (or not noticed) the coming of the Phoenicians, the Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, and Moors. Self-sufficient farmers, their days are circumscribed by their small plots of land and …
Colin Todhunter The deregulation of international capital flows (financial liberalisation) has effectively turned the planet into a free-for-all bonanza for the world’s richest capitalists. Under the post-World-War Two Bretton Woods monetary regime, nations put restrictions on the flow of capital. Domestic firms and banks could not freely borrow from banks elsewhere or from international capital …
Although millions of people were suffering, the hope was that the Covid-19 crisis, there was a belief that people working together with their respective governments could start building a fairer capitalism and more sustainable economies. However, we see exactly the opposite taking place.
We are already seeing food shortages in the making. In India, for instance, supply chains have been disrupted, farm input systems for the supply of seeds and fertilisers have almost collapsed in some places and crops are not being harvested.
