The Violence of Development – The Burning Platform

Guest Post by Colin Todhunter

The following article is taken from a revised version (Sept 2024) of the author’s open-access book Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order (2022). It comprises the book’s new concluding chapter, which advocates for reestablishing humanity’s connections to the land and draws inspiration from Gandhi. This addition provides a critique of the global ‘development’ paradigm, connecting it to the book’s themes of food, dependency and dispossession.

In recent years, there has been much concern about a great reset, techno-feudalism, ecomodernism and technocracy, clampdowns on free speech, dissent and protest and the general erosion of civil liberties. The developments are associated with a ‘new normal’, which is in turn linked to the economic crisis affecting the Western countries and consequent economic restructuring.

However, it is business as before in terms of the ‘old normal’. The ‘old normal’ thrives. The old normal of resource plunder, violence, environmental devastation and human dislocation. Dependency and dispossession remain at the core of the global economic system.

By way of example, the following is a screenshot of a search carried out using the three words ‘tribal’, ‘mining’, ‘India’. The search was restricted to news stories in the last year. And these are just a selection of the stories that have not been disappeared due to censorship (by the magic of algorithm) of certain writers or media platforms.

Nevertheless, there were still pages and pages of news stories with similar headlines.

India was used for the search. But what is set out is not unique to India. Similar things are happening across the globe, from Congo to Bolivia and beyond.

Although civil liberties are under attack in the West, these ‘rights’ tend to be cosmetic but barely even exist in many places across the world (that often call themselves ‘democratic’).

We only see greed and outright plunder underpinned by unconstitutional land takeovers and the trampling of democratic rights. For supporters of cronyism and manipulated markets, which to all extent and purposes is what the neoliberal development agenda has fuelled, there have been untold opportunities for well-placed billionaires to make a fast buck from various infrastructure projects and privatisation sell-offs.

Powerful corporations are shaping the development agenda and have signed secretive memorandums of understanding with governments. The full backing of the state is on hand to forcibly evict (tribal) people from their lands and hand it over to mineral-hungry industries or agribusiness to fuel a warped, unsustainable model of development and swell the pockets of elite interests.

For instance, TIME magazine ran the piece India Is Pulling Back on Coal. For Many, the Damage Is Done in October 2023, highlighting the social and ecological devastation caused by the Adani Group. Much controversy surrounds Gautam Adani, who is now India’s second-richest billionaire.

Around the world, an urban-centric, high-energy model of development is stripping communities and environments bare.

In addition to displacing people to facilitate the needs of resource extraction industries that devastate tribal lands and pristine forests, land grabs for Special Economic Zones, nuclear plants and other projects have forced many others from the land.

And then there are the farmers: a ‘problem’ while on the land and a ‘problem’ to be somehow dealt with once displaced. But food producers, the genuine wealth creators of a nation, only became a problem when Western agribusiness was given the green light to take power away from farmers and recast agriculture in its own image.

In India, Hinduism and tribal society beliefs sanctify certain animals, places, rivers or mountains. But it’s also a country run by Wall Street-sanctioned politicians who convince people to accept or be oblivious to the destruction of the same.

Many are working to challenge the devastating impacts of development. Yet how easy will it be for them to be swept aside by officialdom which seeks to cast them as ‘subversive’? How easy it is for the corrosive impacts of rapacious, hugely powerful corporations to colonise almost every area of social, cultural and economic life and encourage greed, selfishness, apathy, irretrievable materialism and acquisitive individualism.

The corporations behind it achieve hegemony by altering mindsets via advertising, clever PR or by sponsoring (hijacking) major events, by funding research in public institutions and slanting findings and the knowledge paradigm in their favour or by coopting policymakers to ‘structurally readjust’ society for their benefit. They do it by many methods and means.

Before you realise it, culture, politics and the economy have become colonised by powerful private interests. The prevailing economic system soon becomes cloaked with an aura of matter of factuality, an air of naturalness, which is never to be viewed for the controlling power play that it really is.

Seeds, mountains, water, forests and biodiversity are sold off. Farmers and tribals are sold out. And the more that gets sold off, the more who get sold out, the greater the amount of cash that changes hands, and the easier it is for the misinformed to swallow the lie of ‘growth’.

The type of ‘progress and development’ being sold makes many of the beneficiaries of it in the cities blind to the misery and plight of the hundreds of millions who are deprived of their lands and livelihoods. Those who are sacrificed on the altar of plunder in the countryside, in the forests or in the hills become regarded as the price worth paying for ‘progress’.

Hegemony

If you look up a dictionary definition of violence, ‘intense force’ will be included somewhere. You may also find ‘injurious physical force or treatment’ and an ‘unwarranted exertion of force or power’ (all definitions are found to describe violence on Dictionary.com). If we take these terms as our starting point, we may justifiably claim development to be a form of violence.

In many instances, development constitutes ‘injurious physical force or treatment’. In Congo, for example, rich corporations profit from war and conflict. And in India, tens of thousands of militias (including in 2005, Salwa Judum)  were put into tribal areas to forcibly displace 300,000 people and place 50,000 in camps. In the process, rapes and human rights abuses have been common.

But there is another form of violence. It often goes unnoticed and is so institutionalised that it is seldom regarded as actually constituting violence. The fact that many do not regard it as violence is thanks mainly to what philosopher and social theorist Michael Foucault suggested is our taken for granted knowledge about the world in general and how we regard ourselves in it. This ‘common sense’ knowledge may seem benign and neutral but must be viewed within the context of power: it is part of the discourse of the powerful.

Cultural norms and the prevailing social and economic system are an accepted form of ‘truth’, of reality and of how many people view the world and evaluate others. Endless glossy commercials and TV shows that wallow in the veneration of money, fame and narcissism are conveying the message that material wealth represents the epitome of success. This ideology is, in itself, a form of violence: an unwarranted exertion of power.

This hegemonic ideology is, of course, based on a false assumption, on a lingering lie. And part of that lie is the joining of bogus notions of success and failure at the hip. Notions of failure are implicit in the messages surrounding money and wealth. If you are not on the Forbes rich list, or at least aspiring to be on it, you are somehow a failure. If you don’t buy this product or wear that item, you somehow don’t cut it.

In true Foucauldian style, the ideology of modern ‘developed’ society is a power play concerned with redefining who we are or what we should be, what is acceptable and what is unacceptable.

Passive consumerism underpinned by resource plunder has been at the heart of the system. The violence of development is on a sliding scale. At one end of is a hegemonic ideology, at the other, outright brutality.

Underpinning the mindset of this development paradigm is what Vandana Shiva calls a view of the world that encourages humans to regard man as conqueror and owner of the Earth. This has led to the technological hubris of geo-engineering, genetic engineering and nuclear energy. Shiva argues that it has led to the ethical outrage of owning life forms through patents, water through privatisation, the air through carbon trading. It is leading to appropriation of the biodiversity that serves the poor.

Writer Sukumaran CV says:

We look at the state-of-the-art airports, IITs, highways and bridges, the inevitable necessities for the corporate world to spread its tentacles everywhere and thrive, depriving the ordinary people of even the basic necessities of life and believe it is development.”

And we continue to see more rural population displacement and human dislocation, more mining, port and other big infrastructure developments and the further entrenchment of corporate interests and their projects.

In The Greater Common Good, Arundhati Roy writes about the thousands of tribal people displaced by the Narmada Sarovar Dam in India:

Many of those who have been resettled are people who have lived all their lives deep in the forest… Suddenly they find themselves left with the option of starving to death or walking several kilometres to the nearest town, sitting in the marketplace offering themselves as wage labour, like goods on sale… Instead of a forest from which they gathered everything they needed – food, fuel, fodder, rope, gum, tobacco, tooth powder, medicinal herbs, housing materials – they earn between ten and twenty rupees a day…”

State-corporate brutality experienced by society’s most marginalised was also highlighted by Roy in The Ghosts of Capitalism, where she tells of the ‘invisible’ and shoved-aside victims of rampant plunder.

Helena Paul notes a similar situation in Paraguay:

Repression and displacement, often violent, of remaining rural populations, illness, falling local food production have all featured in this picture. Indigenous communities have been displaced and reduced to living on the capital’s rubbish dumps. This is a crime that we can rightly call genocide – the extinguishment of entire Peoples, their culture, their way of life and their environment.”

Happiness is…

Conventional development is based on Western hegemony and has imposed certain ideals on the rest of the world. But there is, in reality, no universal standard as to what development is or should be. Are Western notions of progress applicable everywhere based on top-down, technocratic interventions?

Vincent Tucker does not think so:

Development is the process whereby other peoples are dominated and their destinies are shaped according to an essentially Western way of conceiving and perceiving the world.”

The dominant notions that underpin economic ‘growth’, modern agriculture and development are based on a series of assumptions that betray a mindset steeped in arrogance and contempt: the planet should be cast in an urban-centric, Western-centric model whereby the rural is to be looked down on, nature must be dominated, farmers are a problem to be removed from the land and traditional ways are backward and in need of remedy.

As Vandana Shiva says:

“People are perceived as ‘poor’ if they eat food they have grown rather than commercially distributed junk foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made from ecologically well-adapted materials like bamboo and mud rather than in cinder block or cement houses. They are seen as poor if they wear garments manufactured from handmade natural fibres rather than synthetics.”

In a similar vein, Arturo Escobar notes:

“Development was and continues to be—in theory and practice—a top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic approach, which treated people and cultures as abstract concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down in the charts of ‘progress’.”

If history teaches us one thing, it is that humanity has ended up at its current point due to a multitude of struggles and conflicts, the outcomes of which were often in the balance. There is no unilinear path to development and no fixed standard as to what it constitutes.

The work of Barrington Moore and Robert Brenner highlighted how the specific outcomes of class struggles could have profound long-term consequences for societal development and historical change.

In other words, we have ended up where we are as much by chance as design. And much of that design was based on colonialism and imperialism. The development of Britain owes much to the $45 trillion that was sucked from India alone, according to economist Utsa Patnaik.

And now the modern-day East India corporations of agribusiness and the data giants are in the process of ‘developing’ India again by helping themselves to the country’s public wealth and natural assets.

There are other pathways that humanity can take. Anthropologist Felix Padel and researcher Malvika Gupta offer some insights into what the solutions or alternatives to development might look like:

“Democracy as consensus politics rather than the Western model of liberal democracy that perpetuates division and corruption behind the scenes; exchange labour rather than the ruthless, anti-life logic of ‘the market’; law as reconciliation rather than judgements that depend on exorbitant legal fees and divide people into winners and losers… and learning as something to be shared, not competed over.”

But what of the outcome of the current development model? What of the so-called ‘developed’ societies?

According to various happiness or well-being surveys over the years, the wealthy Western nations have often ranked lower than some poorer countries. It seems that happiness is often higher in countries that prioritize family and friends, social capital rather than financial capital, social equity rather than corporate power and investment in education, health, self-sustaining communities, local economies and the environment.

Countries reported to be happier also tend to avoid undermining the ability of future generations to prosper. The pursuit of material wealth to the exclusion of all else negatively impacts health and the quality of personal relationships, which are among the most potent predictors of happiness.

Shouldn’t genuine development be about well-being and happiness in which co-operative labour, fellowship and affirming our long-standing spiritual connection to the land underpins society? A world that promotes the value of rural society, small farms, widespread property ownership and political decentralisation.

When we hear talk of a ‘spiritual connection’, what is meant by ‘spiritual’? In a broad sense it can be regarded as a concept that refers to thoughts, beliefs and feelings about the meaning of life, rather than just physical existence. A sense of connection to something greater than ourselves.

The spiritual, the diverse and the local are juxtaposed with the selfishness of modern urban society, the increasing homogeneity of thought and practice and an instrumental rationality which becomes an end in itself.

Having a direct link with nature/the land is fundamental to developing an appreciation of a type of ‘being’ and an ‘understanding’ that results in a reality worth living in.

As noted in the previous chapter, humanity’s relationship with farming and food and our connections to land, nature and community has for millennia defined what it means to be human.

Take India, for example. Environmental scientist Viva Kermani says that Hinduism is the world’s largest nature-based religion that:

…recognises and seeks the Divine in nature and acknowledges everything as sacred. It views the earth as our Mother and hence advocates that it should not be exploited. A loss of this understanding that earth is our mother, or rather a deliberate ignorance of this, has resulted in the abuse and the exploitation of the earth and its resources.”

Kermani notes that ancient scriptures instructed people that the animals and plants found in India are sacred and, therefore, all aspects of nature are to be revered. This understanding of and reverence towards the environment is common to all Indic religious and spiritual systems: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

The Vedic deities have deep symbolism and many layers of existence. One such association is with ecology. Surya is associated with the sun, the source of heat and light that nourishes everyone; Indra is associated with rain, crops, and abundance; and Agni is the deity of fire and transformation and controls all changes.

The Vrikshayurveda, an ancient Sanskrit text on the science of plants and trees, contains details about soil conservation, planting, sowing, treatment, propagating, how to deal with pests and diseases and a lot more.

Humanity has a profound cultural, philosophical and practical connection to nature and food production.

And then there is agrarianism, a philosophy based on cooperative labour and fellowship, which stands in stark contrast to the values and impacts of urban life, capitalism and technology that are seen as detrimental to independence and dignity. Agrarianism, too, emphasises a spiritual dimension as well as the value of rural society, small farms, widespread property ownership and political decentralisation.

The prominent proponent of agrarianism Wendell Berry says:

The revolution which began with machines and chemicals now continues with automation, computers and biotechnology.”

For Berry, agrarianism is not a sentimental longing for a time past. Colonial attitudes, domestic, foreign and now global, have resisted true agrarianism almost from the beginning — there has never been fully sustainable, stable, locally adapted, land-based economies.

However, Berry provides many examples of small (and larger) farms that have similar output as industrial agriculture with one third of the energy.

But in the cold, centralised, technocratic dystopia that is planned, humanity’s spiritual connection to the countryside, food and agrarian production are to be cast into the dustbin of history. What we are seeing is an agenda based on a different set of values rooted in a lust for power and money and the total subjugation of ordinary people.

We are told that the corrosive, divisive values of (post)industrial, (post)capitalist society are normal and that the hundreds of millions who suffer along the way are necessary collateral damage on the road to the promised land. Corporate lobbyists say it is ‘progress’.

They say there is no alternative.

Well, they would. As corporations profit, the majority suffer. It is the predictable outcome of what food sovereignty movement La Via Campesina has long warned of. It says that free-market globalisation based on disinvestment, privatisation and the dismantling of national regulatory networks has led:

…to heightened concentration of power among political and corporate elites, in particular through transnational corporations, with devastating consequences for the world’s rural communities and urban workers. Today, almost every country in the world is witnessing growing anger among its rural and urban working class, who have been systematically marginalized and invisibilized by an economic system that expanded with the blessings of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization.”

Gandhi’s applied human ecology

Mention Gandhi in certain circles and the response might be one of cynicism: his ideas are outdated and irrelevant in today’s world. Such a response could not be further from the truth. Gandhi could see the future impact of large-scale industrialisation in terms of the devastation of the environment, the destruction of ecology and the unsustainable plunder of natural resources.

Ideas pertaining to environmentalism, agroecology, sustainable living, fair trade, local self-sufficiency, food sovereignty and so on were all present in Gandhi’s writings. He was committed to inflicting minimal damage on the environment and was concerned that humans should use only those resources they require and not amass wealth beyond their requirements. People had the right to attain certain comforts, but a perceived right to unbridled luxuries would result in damaging the environment and impinge on the species that we share the planet with.

For Gandhi, indigenous capability and local self-reliance (swadeshi) were key to producing a model of sustainable development.

Gandhi felt that the village economy should be central to development and India should not follow the West by aping an urban-industrial system. He noted that it took Britain half the resources of the planet to achieve its prosperity and asked how many planets would a country like India require?

Although there was a role for industrialisation that was not resource- or energy-intensive and which involved, for example, shipbuilding, iron works and machine making, for Gandhi, this would exist alongside village handicrafts.

This type of industrialisation would not make villages and village crafts subservient to cities: nothing would be produced by the cities that could be equally well produced by the villages, and the function of cities would be to serve as clearing houses for village products.

He argued that with new technology even energy could be produced in villages by using sunlight and local materials. And, of course, people would live within the limits imposed by the environment and work in harmony with the natural ecology rather than by forcing it to bend to the will of profiteering industries.

Gandhi offered a vision for a world without meaningless consumption that depleted its finite resources and destroyed habitats and the environment. Given the problems facing humanity, his ideas could serve as an inspiration to us all, whether we live in India or elsewhere.

In the book Mahatma Gandhi: An Apostle of Applied Human Ecology, T N Khoshoo says:

…Gandhiji called the so-called modern society a nine-day wonder. Poverty has been aggravated due to cumulative environmental degradation on account of resource depletion, increasing disparities, rural migration to urban areas resulting in deforestation, soil erosion, loss of soil fertility, desertification, biological impoverishment, pollution of air, water and land on account of lack of sanitation, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and their biomagnification, and a whole range of other problems.”

TN Khoshoo argued that Gandhi’s advocacy of an ‘non-interventionist lifestyle’ provides the answer to the present-day problems. The phrase ‘health of the environment’ is not just a literary coinage. It makes real biological sense because, as Gandhi argued, our planet is like a living organism. Without the innumerable and varied forms of life that the earth inhabits, without respecting the species we share this place with, our world will become lifeless.

The challenge is, however, how can humanity be persuaded to embark on a road whose values are opposed to those of modern society.

Focused protest

Gandhi knew how to connect everyday concerns with wider issues. In 1930, he led a ‘salt march’ to the coast of Gujarat to symbolically collect salt on the shore. His message of resistance against the British Empire revolved around a simple everyday foodstuff.

His focus on salt was questioned by sections of the press and prominent figures on his side (even the British weren’t much concerned about a march about salt), who felt that protest against British rule in India should for instance focus more directly on the heady issues of rights and democracy.

However, Gandhi knew that by concentrating on an item of daily use among ordinary Indians, such a campaign could resonate more with all classes of citizens than an abstract demand for greater political rights.

Even though salt was freely available to those living on the coast (by evaporation of sea water), Indians were forced to purchase it from the colonial government. The tax on salt represented 8.2% of the British Raj tax revenue. The issue of salt encapsulated the essence of colonial oppression at the time.

Explaining his choice, Gandhi said that next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life.

The prominent Congress statesman and future Governor-General of India, C. Rajagopalachari, understood what Gandhi was trying to achieve. He said:

“Suppose a people rise in revolt. They cannot attack the abstract constitution or lead an army against proclamations and statutes…Civil disobedience has to be directed against the salt tax or the land tax or some other particular point – not that that is our final end, but for the time being it is our aim, and we must shoot straight.”

With the British imposing heavy taxes on salt and monopolising its production, Gandhi felt he could strike a chord with the masses by highlighting an issue that directly affected everyone in the country: access to and control over a daily essential. His march drew not only national but international attention to India’s struggle for independence.

Protest and action against widespread oppression, violence and exploitation must be focused. As in Gandhi’s time, it is again food that is playing a central role in raising awareness and provoking resistance. This time, what is at stake is securing independence from the corporate tyranny of global agribusiness, which has the power to have (seed) laws, (trade) rules and (World Bank/IMF) directives written on its behalf.

Vandana Shiva draws a parallel between the seed sovereignty movement and Gandhi’s civil disobedience ‘salt march’:

Gandhi has started the independence movement with the salt satyagraha. Satyagraha means ‘struggle for truth’. The salt satyagraha was a direct action of non-cooperation. When the British tried to create salt monopolies, he went to the beach in Dindi, picked up the salt and said, ‘Nature has given us this for free, it was meant to sustain us, we will not allow it to become a monopoly to finance the Imperial Army …’ For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity – saying ‘no’ to patents on life and developing intellectual ideas of resistance – is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha.”

There is a growing recognition that modern food system is sickening people and devasting peoples and environments.

Food can play a key role in reorienting our values, raising awareness and inspiring resistance. By highlighting systemic inequalities and connecting issues, today’s multifaceted food justice movement is galvanising people to act against broader forms of oppression and poverty.