Colin Todhunter The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and an assortment of high-profile figures and policymakers are pushing for unregulated gene-editing technologies, the rollout of bio-synthetic food created in...

Colin Todhunter In June 2018, the Joint Action Committee against Foreign Retail and E-commerce (JACAFRE) issued a statement on Walmart’s acquisition of Flipkart. It argued that it undermines India’s...

Colin Todhunter UK health minister Matt Hancock has warned the government’s timeline for unlocking coronavirus restrictions could be slowed as ministers remain “vigilant” against infection rates. What began in...

Colin Todhunter Globally, there is an ongoing trend of a handful of big companies determining what food is grown, how it is grown, what is in it and who...

The world’s 10 richest billionaires have collectively seen their wealth increase by $540bn over this period. In September 2020, Jeff Bezos could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a...

Colin Todhunter With over 800 million people, rural India is arguably the most interesting and complex place on the planet but is plagued by farmer suicides, child malnourishment, growing...

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...

Colin Todhunter Contingent on World Bank aid to be given to poorer countries in the wake of coronavirus lockdowns, agrifood conglomerates will aim to further expand their influence. These...

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...

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...

Prior to the appearance of COVID-related restrictions and lockdowns, neoliberal capitalism had turned to various mechanisms in the face of economic stagnation and massive inequalities: the raiding of public...

Cotton is the only genetically modified (GM) crop that has been officially approved in India and has been cultivated (illegally then legally) in the country for more than 20...

Colin Todhunter In a 2017 article, I asked what might a future India look like and concluded that, if current neoliberal policies continue, there could be dozens of mega-cities...

Colin Todhunter Insecticidal Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton is the first and only GM (genetically modified) crop that has been approved in India. It has been cultivated in the country...

Colin Todhunter On 6 July 2020, an article extolling the benefits of genetically modified (GM) crops appeared on the BloombergQuint website based on an interview with Dr Ramesh Chand,...

Colin Todhunter Some might ask why India is in complete lockstep with global lockdown despite the very low COVID19-related mortality figures for 1.3 billion people. Embedded above is a...

Was Pyongyang’s destruction this month of a border town ‘liaison office’ – touted as symbol of reconciliation but in reality lacking the truth component – a further manifestation of...

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...

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...

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...