A third world economy, during the 20th century, may well have moved rapidly from that of essentially diverse simple subsistence to that based mostly upon external trade - exporting and importing. The exports might be mostly of one product and the imports will be of such manufactured goods and services as the outside world can induce them, the local population, to take - even though some of the imports may be either not really worth having or items which the earlier subsistence regime managed to make locally.
Local politics would have changed from that of rule according to understood custom, age-old tradition which worked - more or less - to that of imported western-style democracy which does not (yet?) work very well because the conditions that can make it work are not in place. These conditions include a reasonably high standard of living enjoyed by most of the population -which tends to take the heat out of politics and the incentive out of possible corruption. Also, to make make western-style democracy even begin to work, it has to be developed out of popular demand rather than to have been introduced as a fashion accessory from countries perceived as role models - as practising a superior quality of public life. Instead of rule by people with active local roots and well-honed local knowledge, the rulers now tend to be people who have acquired some of the attitudes of western life - perhaps by training in law, accountancy or public relations - people who have replaced the old colonial rulers and not always for the better.
Socially, there is centralisation on a few cities - where the new political elite, their cosmopolitan contacts, their patrons and manipulators, practise wealthy lifestyles and to which the peasantry - displaced by monoculture - gravitate to form an under-employed underclass living in sprawling shanty towns, there to breed crime and terrorism.
Culturally, the concomitant of these economic, political and social changes has been the erosion of a genuine, albeit limited and perhaps primitive but viable-for-centuries, local culture. In its place is an imitative whizz-kid culture in which those who do the whizzing are very keen on Presidential Palaces, Mickey Mouse Airlines and a repressive security apparatus which keeps the noses, of those unable to whizz, hard on the grindstone of the globally manipulated one-product economy.
How can such a country react constructively when its one crop fails, when its one product becomes unsaleable, perhaps because of unexpected and intractable disease of plants or animals or perhaps because of market collapse stemming from a possibly ill-founded fear of such disease.
Is beef-based Orkney anything like the archetypal third world country which we often, mistakenly, suppose to exist only in faraway places of which we know little?
It has been said, memorably, that 'priests ought both to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable.' Perhaps, artists, writers and journalists should do the same - with particular reference to the second part of that memorable precept.