It is becoming increasingly clear that over the last few years the pandemic has allowed for “crisis profiteering” in the food industry. Those profits are also leading to a new round of corporate concentration in the food industry — and the direction agri-business is taking globally provides a lot to “chew on”.
So states a report published by the ETC Group, a respected, small, international, research and action collective which advocates for just and ecological agri-food systems.
The recently published report titled Food Barons 2022: Crisis Profiteering, Digitalizaton, and Shifting Power, lays out the global landscape in 10 major areas of our food and agriculture system, identifies the key corporate players in each, and measures how concentrated their power has become. Just a handful of corporations, between four and six, operate in each of the sectors ranging from agro-chemicals, seeds, synthetic fertilizers, livestock genetics, farm machinery, through to food retail and delivery systems.
Twenty-five years ago the ETC Group reported that just 10 companies controlled 40 per cent of the seed industry. Fast forward to today, and only two companies control the same market share in the seed industry. Sector by sector, Food Barons 2022 chronicles corporate concentration in the global food system with staggering facts and figures.
The report, which includes an eerily beautiful cover, reads a bit like science fiction — but that is wishful thinking, since what is documented is real and happening as I write.
Food Barons 2022 also delves into the deeper impacts of corporate concentration as related to the digitalization of agriculture, and the industrial food systems promise that technology and “precision agriculture” will bring about a cleaner, more productive, and healthier food system.
To use an old farm expression — some hope that this pig in a poke will pass muster in our eagerness to find ways to mitigate climate change, offset carbon, and promote sustainability and food production. Meanwhile the authors of the report note that this is the false promise of yet another Green Revolution. Food Barons 2022 is an attempt to let the cat out of the bag.
The full report of Food Barons 2022 is 137 pages. The shorter read is a 42-page summary. Whatever your choice, these documents offer plenty to think about — and each section of the report provides capsules under a section called “chew on this”.
Besides the corporate concentration noted, the report also chronicles the growing use of big data and its impacts on agriculture globally. The report links corporate concentration to land grabbing, venture capital speculation in agriculture, the digitalization of agriculture and big data, to the promise that technology will deliver the solutions.
“Digitalizing food and agriculture from farm to front door. The vista of new digital initiatives in food and ag is dizzying. On the farm, it includes concerted attempts to impose digital agriculture, weaving in drone sprayers, Artificial Intelligence-driven robotic planters and automated animal-feeding operations tricked out with facial recognition for livestock. Big Ag giants such as Bayer, Deere & Company, Corteva, Syngenta and Nutrien are restructuring their entire businesses around Big Data platforms. Bayer’s ‘Field View’ digital platform, for example, extracts 87.5 billion datapoints from 180 million acres (78.2 million hectares) of farmland in 23 countries and funnels it into the cloud servers of Microsoft and Amazon.17 Deere, the world’s largest farm machinery company, now employs more software engineers than mechanical engineers.” -Food Barons 2022
The report states: “In this way the driving purpose of food systems moves ever further away from feeding people to feeding profits.”
Food Barons 2022 is indeed sobering, leaving the reader with a lot to consider and chew on as it identifies three critical trends — Big Ag, Big Data, and Big Finance. And while the information might be overwhelming, the report also provides optimistic notes as it informs about the organizing of global movements working to counteract the current trends in corporate agriculture.
The report reminds the reader: “The Peasant Food Web still feeds the equivalent of 70% of the world’s people with less than 30% of the world’s land, water and agricultural resources, even though the Food Barons are trying to extend their tentacles through further land- and water-grabs and technological appropriation of the commons. The Peasant Food Web provides an essential counterweight to the grim tale of concentration and profiteering that we detail in this report, through its inspiring diversification and proliferating territorial food initiatives that re-distribute and share the inherent power of sun, soil, seed and animals amongst people — providing food to billions.”
Food Barons 2022 is one of the documents that will provide information required by these forums and global movements to understand the depth of concentration and the most recent trends in food system control encouraged by the corporate world.
The report also contains notes of optimism by providing a section on conclusions and key proposals for action. A few are noted below.
- Support food sovereignty: The report’s authors identify food sovereignty movements as effective vehicles to challenge the current direction of big agriculture, and note in particular ongoing planning of meetings organized through the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty. A global forum on food sovereignty is planned for March of 2023 to foster a new edition of the Nyéléni Process. During these meetings and those leading up to the forum the plan is to create conversations and bring together thousands of people, peasants, small-scale fishers, Indigenous Peoples, consumers, non-governmental organizations and scholars, to propose solutions and priorities for the next 25 years of the food sovereignty movements. Bringing together labour, health, consumer, environmental, and agricultural movements is key to supporting food sovereignty.
- Divest from the chain: As the report notes, the financialization of agriculture by the corporate giants noted in the report can be challenged. It urges “…Schools, universities, pension funds, local authorities and other public institutions holding investments in the identified companies should consider withdrawing their funds from specific Food Barons and even from the entire destructive Industrial Food Chain, making a strategic switch to transparent and unconditional long-term support for agroecology and food sovereignty…” The report also notes: “…Institutions under pressure from civil society have already succeeded in partly directing funds away from tobacco, arms and fossil fuels on moral grounds. Grassroots climate movements have successfully named fossil fuel companies as the obstruction to meaningful climate action. Food movements should follow suit…”
- Anti-monopoly action and competition treaties: A key recommendation is to pressure governments where competition laws are in effect to apply and update legislation that reinforces anti-monopoly laws. The report adds that calling for an International Treaty on Competition “with teeth could enable international oversight of corporate power (including the Food Barons).”
And while the tasks of taking on the Food Barons can seem challenging, the report ends on a positive note, in a section called the Last Word:
“… it can be daunting to imagine taking on the Food Barons, but their power is not inevitable — it is a historical oddity that is barely a century old and still only feeds less than a third of people on the planet, and badly at that. They may be backed by the titans of capital, have their claws in around 10% percent of the global economy and be ruthlessly proactive in buttressing the Industrial Food Chain with new technologies and slick false promises – but as more and more of the food chain comes under the control of fewer and fewer entities these companies also become more exposed and vulnerable to being toppled.”
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