Colonialism, Food Insecurity, and the !Kung People
This paper examines the roots of global hunger and food insecurity through the lens of colonialism, drawing on Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins's essay "Why Can't People Feed Themselves?" and John Marshall's documentary N!ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman. The paper argues that food insecurity is not the result of overpopulation but rather the enduring legacy of colonial exploitation — the dismantling of traditional subsistence systems, forced labor, and the prioritization of export agriculture over local nourishment. The !Kung people of northern Namibia serve as a case study illustrating how these colonial patterns persist long after formal colonialism has ended.
- Colonial Roots of Global Hunger: Colonialism as the cause of food insecurity
- Colonies as Agricultural Establishments and the Export Model: Export agriculture and devalued colonial labor
- The !Kung People Before and After Colonial Disruption: !Kung traditional life lost to displacement
- Persistent Colonial Legacies in N!ai's Story: Ongoing exploitation after formal colonialism ends
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper maintains a clear, consistent thesis — that food insecurity stems from colonial exploitation rather than overpopulation — and returns to it in each section.
- It integrates two distinct sources (a scholarly essay and a documentary film) to support the same argument, demonstrating cross-medium analytical thinking.
- Specific details from N!ai's life (men joining the army, women posing for tourists) are connected directly to the theoretical framework provided by Lappe and Collins, grounding abstract arguments in concrete human experience.
Key academic technique demonstrated
This paper demonstrates effective use of a theoretical framework to analyze a primary source. Rather than treating the documentary and the essay as separate discussions, the student uses Lappe and Collins's argument as a lens through which to interpret the events depicted in N!ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman. This comparative, framework-driven approach is a hallmark of strong interdisciplinary writing at the undergraduate level.
Structure breakdown
The paper is organized into two main analytical movements. The first establishes the theoretical argument from Lappe and Collins, focusing on colonial exploitation, agricultural establishments, and the divorce of agriculture from nourishment. The second applies that framework to the documentary, tracing how the !Kung people's forced displacement from traditional subsistence living mirrors the colonial patterns described in the essay. A works cited section closes the paper.
Colonial Roots of Global Hunger
In their essay "Why Can't People Feed Themselves?", Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins discuss global hunger and food insecurity as a direct result of colonialism. Colonialism left a legacy of exploitation of both human and natural resources. As the authors put it, "One side was on top largely because the other side was on the bottom" (Lappe and Collins 182). Colonialism dismantled traditional social and political structures successively over multiple generations, disrupted the transmission of knowledge related to the natural world, led to patterns of forced migration of laborers to work on plantations as slaves or slave-like laborers, and systematically prevented people from growing their own food on a small subsistence scale.
Through a collection of nefarious interventions, colonial governments and their successors in modern nation-states maintained an imbalance of power. The answer to the question "why can't people feed themselves?" cannot be satisfied with the overly simple response of "overpopulation." Instead, the answer lies in a deeper examination of social, political, and economic injustice. People cannot feed themselves because of the "heritage of a colonial order" (Lappe and Collins 183).
Colonies as Agricultural Establishments and the Export Model
Two important points made by Lappe and Collins in support of their overall argument are the concept of colonies as "agricultural establishments" and the "overemphasis on export production" that arose from the capitalist agricultural model. On the first point, Lappe and Collins argue that colonial powers like France and England treated their colonies as extensions of themselves. As "agricultural establishments," the colonies were deemed ripe for the taking, and all natural and human resources were thereby repossessed, misappropriated, and exploited.
On the second point, Lappe and Collins note that the rise of agribusiness relied on a system in which labor was devalued and laborers were dehumanized. The "divorce of agriculture from nourishment" was essential to the capitalist model (Lappe and Collins 184).
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