Since the collapse of Bretton Woods, financial liberalisation has given global capital a licence to roam and left governments begging for ‘market confidence’. Instead of planning for food security, states are told to impress bond markets and credit‑rating agencies. India’s long history of World Bank loans and ‘reform’ has reshaped policy, turning the countryside into a testing ground for a food system run to satisfy investors before citizens.

Agrarian dispossession and debt are built into this model. When governments cut support to small farmers and pull back from public procurement and storage, it is sold as ‘fiscal discipline’. In reality, it clears the way for private capital to step into the space abdicated by the state. What appears in villages as suicide, migration and loss appears in boardrooms as ‘consolidation’ and ‘efficiency’.

Once food and farming are wired into global markets, shocks far from India—an interest‑rate hike in Washington, a sell‑off in emerging markets—can help push up food prices or crash farm incomes. While for farmers and consumers this means insecurity, for traders and speculators it means another chance to profit from volatility. The same policies that make life precarious in the countryside help to protect corporate profits in bad times and boost them in good times.

India has borrowed more from the World Bank than any other nation in that institution’s history. In the 1990s, the bank promoted reforms explicitly designed to push hundreds of millions off the land and out of subsistence farming. Public investment in agriculture has been steadily reduced, with an ultimate aim of opening the land for private equity and the agri‑cartel.

We are seeing smallholders bankrupted, soils depleted and communities shattered. By 2030, Delhi’s population is projected to hit 37 million—a megacity ringed by concrete deserts where fertile fields once stood. This is the urbanisation the technocrats demand: sprawling cities that rely entirely on industrial‑scale agriculture and supermarket chains, effectively crowding out local, sovereign food systems.

Food policy itself has been quietly hijacked. The International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI)—financed by Coca‑Cola, PepsiCo, Monsanto and hundreds of other corporations—has infiltrated government bodies worldwide. A 2019 New York Times investigation exposed how ILSI shapes high‑level food policy to legitimise ultra‑processed foods laden with fat, sugar and salt.

This is regulatory capture in plain sight. In 2016, a UN committee led by two ILSI officials ruled that glyphosate was “probably not carcinogenic”, directly contradicting the WHO’s own cancer agency. In India, ILSI’s influence has expanded precisely as rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes skyrocket. The West has already endured this transformation: de-nutrified food, monolithic diets and a cartel of corporations controlling the supply chain. Now the same model is being forced onto the Global South