India's Farmers Against the Global Agri-Cartel: Chronicling Resistance to Corporate Enclosures

Compiling 19 essential essays written over a decade (2015–2026), this collection offers an in-depth look at India’s unfolding agrarian crisis. These pieces—previously published in print and on digital platforms—now serve as a unified resource for activists, researchers and concerned citizens. As a topical archive, the book is built for flexibility; each essay stands alone, inviting readers to explore the complexities of our food systems at their own pace and interest.

While the essays focus on India, the questions they raise transcend national boundaries. The forces reshaping India’s countryside—corporate capture of food systems, erosion of rural livelihoods and the struggle to defend local autonomy—are global in scope. Readers, wherever they may reside, will recognise parallels in their own societies, as the same logics of commodification and control transform landscapes and lives across the world.

This volume is more than a record of economic struggle; it is a chronicle of a war on life itself, on our connection to nature and the land, on what it means to be human. Behind the memoranda of understanding and the digital control grids lies an attempt to strip the 'soul' from Indian agriculture and rural India. This archive documents the refusal of millions to be reduced to data points. The book is, in essence, the story of a attack on the ‘Agrarian Imagination’—an ancient, resilient ‘way of being’ that is trying to fight a 'bio-digital enclosure' designed to eradicate cultures, food sovereignty, self-sufficiency and autonomy.

Contents

Note to the Reader

Artwork: Kisan vs Corporate Raj

1: Background

2: What the Green Revolution Did for India

3: Farmers’ Struggle: Farm Laws and a Neoliberal Death Knell

4: Colonial Deindustrialisation: Predation and Inequality

5: Economic Terrorism, Smashing Farmers’ Heads

6: Ongoing Corporate Capture of Indian Agriculture

7: Amazon Gets Fresh, Bayer Loves Basmati

8: GMOs Essential to Feed India?

9: Reckless Gamble Placed Cotton Farmers in Corporate Noose

10: From Monsanto to Bayer: Worst of Both Worlds

11: Bayer’s ‘Backward’ Claim: Bid to Control Indian Agriculture

12: Comforting Myth in a Dispossessed Reality

13: Toxic Platter for India

14: India’s Farmers: Unyielding Barrier to Corporate Domination

15: Get Out, Stay Out, Quit India!

16: Corporate Cloud Poised to Reign Over India’s Fields

17: India and the Agri-Cartel’s 35-Year Siege

18: Urban Mirage Built on Rural Ruin

19: Corporate Welfare: The Global Scam of ‘Feeding the World’