Introduction
The world food system has been in dynamism since the development of food trade and the need to create consumer preferences as demanded by every company or nation that had got the opportunity to produce, market and distribute food commodities (Leong-Salobir, 2011). This lead to expansion of agro-food based industries. This expansion however, being more effective and significant to the superior countries proved to be severe and detrimental to the colonized state. The Author puts the severity of this change as beyond the colonized nation’s individual’s health challenges. For instance the French food policy changes dictated the authorities of Senegal on the use of up to half of the land on the growth of specific cash crops. Ground nuts and other cash crops for instance, were to be grown on half the colony’s land. This led to the favoring of imported rice from Indo-China in respect to the native food grains which were abandoned and instead the imported rice used to feed the Senegal population.
Sharma depicts that the industrial expansion took place at the expense of colony’s native subsistence grains that the locals grew for food. Various policies negatively affected the food system of the Colonies’. This is evidenced in the British Indian imperial law enforcement that drastically affected the native colonies’ livelihood and commercial engagement. At times the British enforced laws that forced the colonies to grow primary commodities at extensive large scale in order to meet the rising demand for such commodities (Pilcher, 2012). Since then, the colonies agro-food industry and the whole agricultural system became colonized and up to now the author thinks that the colonization is still in practice as after independence, international corporations are extending the colonization.
Liberalization of the food market at around the late nineteenth century favored the bigger economies. Through this liberalization, Europe, Japan and Britain started accessing abundant food stuffs at lower costs than any other developing civilizations (Leong-Salobir, 2011). The food safety became a major concern at the mid nineteenth century thus making consumers sensitive on what they were consuming. Laws were enacted to safeguard the food safety matters. This in led to the reliance on the twentieth century developed corporations and supermarkets which at the moment are the colonizers of the globe food chain system. Large corporations and supermarkets remain the current imperial colonizers of the food chain since they control the global food from growing to consumption.
References
Leong-Salobir, C. (2011). Food culture in colonial Asia: A taste of empire. Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge.
Pilcher, J. M. (2012). The Oxford handbook of food history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
