It’s one of the big takeaways I got from Michael Hudson’s Superimpetialism, specifically chapter 8, American Strategy Within the World Bank, and chapter 9, The Imperialism of US Foreign Aid.

In those chapters, among other things, Hudson discusses how a Mathusian population control became World Bank policy, due to how their loans needed to be used to support high value export industries and not development of domestic production let alone agriculture for food sovereignty. Some imperial officials began to see how this would also be very useful in terms of oppressing anyone who wouldn’t follow the Washington Consensus, and as a sort of “kill switch” to make sure that exploited countries wouldn’t be in any position to do anything once their valuable natural resources are fully depleted. A country reliant on food imports yet with no means of generating the foreign currency to buy said imports would very quickly collapse and thus pose no threat to the empire.

Furthermore the food aid programs of the US are designed to prop up domestic agriculture by providing a customer for all the surplusses produced. Without a buyer, US farmers would suffer from a price collapse, so their surplus product, primarily grains, are sold via “aid” programs (being careful not to displace sales that would have happened anyway). This is all structured in a way similar to the USD denominated loans (or is indeed paid for with this debt), in that in order to earn the dollars required to pay for the food, products the US wants must be produced and exported.

I don’t know about the “explicitly forbidden” stuff knfrmity is mentioning but here is my perspective.

The US and Europe heavily subsidizes grain production, which combined with their huge arable land share leads to an inmense surplus of grain, which makes it dirt cheap.

This makes it nearly impossible for global south countries, which have less efficient machinery and often very archaic land reforms that encourage small scale farming, to compete with. So in order to pay loans denomitated in USD, global south countries have to switch to an export oriented model of crops that are very resource intensive like produce or fruits.

Since the US and Europe control the grain supply of these nations, grains being the most important commodity for the food industry, they can starve them if they do not follow their commands.

The article is a big example of this, monetary speaking poppy is a very profitable crop but it does not feed the people, the imperialists want these nations to stick to these export crops to continue controlling their food supply and thus controlling their policies.