ABSTRACT
Issues of ‘development’ are an inescapable part of our everyday lives. The imagined geographies of our world, as fuelled by the graphic pictures and reporting of television news and documentary, are regularly topped up with images of the latest famine, warfare, impoverishment or refugee migrations in some far off ‘third world’ country. Mega charity spectacles such as Children in Need and Comic Relief regularly pull at our heartstrings and purse strings in response to the victims of ‘underdevelopment’. Our environmental concerns, for example, over the chopping down of rainforests or the erosion of biodiversity, bring us into direct contact with issues of how the commercial conduct of economic development (in this case of agricultural production) is often at odds with global ecological objectives. The more discerning of us may even allow the components of our everyday diet to remind us of the global geographies of food, and of the likelihood that what we are eating is directly connected with unfair trade and production conditions that benefit big international firms but impoverish those whose labour has been directly involved in food production.
