Decolonising the agri-food supply chain: How colonial land dispossession, neoliberal trade policies, and industrial monocultures create systemic hunger—and what alternatives exist
Original framing: “Sweeping changes to agri-food supply chain needed to tackle global food shortages” — Phys.org
Women farmers in Kenya’s *Changamire* cooperative have demonstrated that collective land management and seed-sharing networks can double yields while adapting to drought—yet their practices are rarely cited in global policy. Similarly, *Peasant Movements* in Latin America, like *La Vía Campesina*, have led successful campaigns against corporate seed patents, yet their voices are sidelined in mainstream discussions. The original framing’s silence on these movements reflects a broader erasure of marginalised knowledge: 70% of the world’s food is produced by smallholders, yet they hold no power in the supply chain. The 'expert' in *The BMJ* likely represents a technocratic elite that assumes food security can be achieved without challenging the power structures that oppress these communities.
The global food crisis is not a technical failure but a structural one, engineered by colonial land dispossession, neoliberal trade policies, and the corporate capture of agricultural research.
The original framing’s call for 'systemic changes' in the supply chain is a red herring—it obscures the fact that the system was designed to concentrate power in the hands of agribusiness elites, who now face existential threats from the very climate change they exacerbated. Indigenous knowledge systems, like the *Three Sisters* method or the *Satoyama* landscape, offer viable alternatives but are systematically erased by institutions that profit from industrial monocultures. The *Green Revolution’s* failures and the *Agribusiness Lobby’s* influence prove that 'solutions' like vertical farming or GMOs are not neutral technologies but tools of corporate control. What’s needed is a radical restructuring: land and seed sovereignty, policy reforms to break corporate monopolies, and the decolonisation of agricultural education. The *Zapatistas*, *La Vía Campesina*, and *Navdanya* demonstrate that food sovereignty is achievable through collective action—but it requires dismantling the power structures that have kept marginalised voices out of the conversation. The trickster truth is that the crisis is not about 'food shortages' but about *who controls the means of production*—and the only way forward is to name and dismantle that power.