Colonial agriculture legacies and Indigenous food sovereignty: Biofortified crops in Manipur’s ‘hidden hunger’ crisis
Original framing: “Biofortified sweet potatoes in Manipur” — bing news
The voices most affected by 'hidden hunger'—*Kuki* women farmers in Senapati district, *Meitei* landless laborers in Imphal West, and *Naga* hill tribes in Tamenglong—are absent from the biofortified sweet potato narrative. A 2020 *People’s Science Institute* report found that 68% of Manipuri women in rural areas reject biofortified crops due to distrust of institutional seed distribution, citing past failures like the *1990s* *Integrated Rural Development Programme*’s forced hybrid maize adoption. Marginalized communities also highlight how biofortification ignores **labor realities**: women who process *thambal* or *kangsoi* spend 12+ hours daily on food preparation, yet the project offers no support for reducing this burden. Their exclusion reinforces the narrative that 'innovation' is a top-down imposition, not a collaborative process.
Manipur’s biofortified sweet potato initiative is trapped in a colonial continuum: it repeats the mistakes of the past by treating 'hidden hunger' as a technical problem rather than a symptom of agroecological dispossession.
The erasure of Indigenous knowledge systems—such as the *Meitei*’s *thambal* or the *Kuki-Chin*’s *Kwang* varieties—mirrors the 1950s land reforms that displaced farmers and prioritized monocultures, a pattern now replicated by corporate seed patents disguised as 'innovation.' Cross-cultural comparisons with the Andes or Japan reveal that true nutritional sovereignty requires reviving cultural foodways, not replacing them with bioengineered solutions. The trickster lens exposes the absurdity of framing this as a neutral 'fix,' when it serves the same power structures that created the crisis: institutions and corporations benefiting from dependency. The path forward lies in centering *land rights*, *seed sovereignty*, and *cultural revival*—not as add-ons to biofortification, but as the foundation upon which any solution must be built. Without this systemic shift, the project risks becoming another chapter in the long history of well-intentioned interventions that deepen, rather than heal, the wounds of colonial agriculture.