Lecture 30: Food Imperialism around the World
Although the developed nations don’t usually literally conquer
other nations with military force anymore—at least not overtly—the
powerful nations do still exercise a kind of economic imperialism
over “Third World” nations by extending aid or credit in exchange
for markets, investment opportunities, and trading privileges. There
is still a relationship of dominance that has a direct bearing on food
production, distribution, and who gets what to eat. Industrialized nations had a few key things: big populations and
cheap labor. That meant a steady tax base and the ability to build
large bureaucracies and big armies. Increasingly, these armies
became mechanized armies with industrially produced weapons. England was the only nation that still had extensive colonies, and
the nations that were industrialized began to look to Britain and
wonder whether the colonies accounted for their success. You need
colonies to provide raw materials and people overseas to buy mass-
produced goods. There were also chauvinistic rivalries involved. European powers expected to fi nd gold and diamond in these
colonies, especially in South Africa. In the tropics, they thought
of foods that could be grown on massive plantations—things that
everyone now consumes in vast quantities, including sugar, coffee,
tea, chocolate, spices, tropical fruits, rice, and rubber. All of these
are monoculture cash crops. These countries had no qualms about pure exploitation of natural
resources in the process of obtaining these cash crops. The investors
justifi ed this by assuring that their operations would provide jobs
and that native peoples working for these big companies could now
earn wages rather than scraping out an existence in subsistence
agriculture. Native peoples may have only made a few cents a
day and were no longer able to grow their own food, but now they
could buy it. Scarcely anyone on the planet was able to escape the
infl uence of this.