Beyond the thirty-year experiment in free-market ideology having been judged a failure in financial markets, one thing is clear: as Kerry Trueman reminded us in a recent post, unfettered capitalism has also been bad for our health, and indeed the safety of our food.
Last week, The New York Times reported that this administration has said it will take a harder line on anti-trust legislation, in diverse sectors of the economy including agriculture. Perhaps its premature to tell what this will look like, but enforcing the laws that we already have on the books would be a great start to building a better food system.
This is because the largest sectors of the agribusiness world (grain, meatpacking, biotechnology, etc) are monopolizing food from seed to supermarket shelf and thereby deciding what we can (and can't) buy and eat across this country, and by extension, the world.
These are the companies that are trying to efficiently process tens of thousands of cows per day -- cows that have been lined up in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and fed grain (more efficient than using land to feed them their natural diet of grass), pumped with hormones and other antibiotics to keep them from dying, which means a glut on the market of cheap (anti-biotic-filled) beef. And these are the companies that are creating the seeds -- those seeds that the farmer can't even save for fear of litigation -- to grow the crops that require the use of their pesticides, and which produce a proliferation of fast food.
Yes, efficiency is the bottom line in our current agricultural system. Not safety, not health, or least of all taste; no, for a corporation that is beholden first to it's shareholders, its all about the quickest way to get to the bottom line. Besides exacerbating obesity, heart disease and diabetes cases, this kind of thinking can only be limited in its long term ability to maintain itself, because it refuses to take a holistic approach to creating goods for the common good. In other words, we know it can't be sustained, and therefore it is not sustainable.
But these mega-companies aren't fully to blame, because this is what our economic system has been set up to do for thirty years or more: build a conflagration of trusts.
Will Obama pull a Teddy Roosevelt and begin a new era of trust-busting? Here's hoping he will, and that he begins with Big Ag.
Last week on The Leonard Lopate Show, when he was asked how taking a harder line on anti-trust law could effect the food industry, Michael Pollan responded:
"It's very significant, actually, because you have more concentration in the food industry than in just about any other industry. Most anti-trust experts say that if 4 [or fewer] companies control 40% or more of a marketplace, it's not competitive. And in food we have that in meatpacking, [where] there are 4 companies that control 85% of the beef, [and in] seed production, fertilizer production... there is this tight little hourglass in the food industry, [which means] lots of farmers, very few buyers, which forces farmers to take prices, they have no control over prices at all. So if indeed we were to push an anti-trust agenda in the food industry, it would be the best thing for farmers and the best thing for consumers."
To this I ask, is this food system not an oligopoly, a market form most at risk for collusion? all the more reason to investigate the mega-firms that form through the process of mergers.
That "hourglass" concept Pollan mentioned comes from William Heffernan and Mary Hendrickson's report Consolidation in the Food and Agriculture System (1999) [PDF], which revealed the "food chain clusters" forming through constant mergers within the food system, and also gave the first comprehensive data on concentration ratios of each firm in the food sector. (An updated version from 2007 is here [PDF].)
One of the biggest fall-outs of this phenomenon has been the price paid in rural America. From Heffernan and Hendrickson's report:
"In the past when family businesses were the predominant system in rural communities, researchers talked of multiplier effects of three or four. Newly generated dollars in the agricultural sector would circulate in the community, changing hands from one entrepreneurial family to another three or four times before leaving the rural community. This greatly enhanced the economic viability of the community.
Large non-local corporations... see labor as just another input cost to be purchased as cheaply as possible. The "profits" then are allocated to return on management and capital and are usually taken from the rural community. They go to the company's headquarters and are then sent to all corners of the globe to be reinvested in the food system. One can ask the question, why were agriculturally based rural communities, with an ample natural resource base, more economically viable than mining based rural communities which also had an ample natural resource base? The answer lies primarily with the economic structure of the major economic base. Increasingly, our agriculturally based communities, like regions with major poultry operations, are looking like mining communities."
Having an hourglass of production power also means the creation of giant facilities to produce our food as fast as possible. E coli bacteria present in a giant shared sink with thousands of servings of spinach has the potential to do more harm than a similar, isolated incident on a small farm would. In creating factory-like facilities to process and package our food, we are exponentially increasing the risks of food contamination. This is the single best argument for decentralizing the food system.
It's time to admit that hyper-efficiency is not working. It may seem counter-intuitive, but being a little less efficient creates room for checks and balances. We need redundancy, and some fostered competition. It is the only way to assure the health of our nation and the safety of our food supply.
Originally published on Civil Eats
but Illinois is a farm state.
Obama firmly supports agribusiness, always has.
Finally, nit picking a bit but I hate extreme critiques that are not detailed because it shows a lack of wanting to be fair, but Round-up is not a pesticide.
History shows that government tentacles in Agriculture almost always lead to market inefficiencies and dislocations. We need to be careful of unintented consequences of sticking our noses in ag once again.
If you are concerned about Agribusiness, we should stop subsidizing them. End all agriculture support money from the government immediately, that will help.
At some point, there are thousands of competitors in the marketplace. Eventually, people go out of business, can’t compete, etc. The cream rises to the top. There were at one point, hundreds of fizzy soda companies all on equal footing. Now there are two big players, and the other 10% filled by niche producers. That’s not monopoly, that’s natural market action.
If anyone finds these companies too distasteful to buy from- don’t buy from them. There is nothing stopping you from growing your own food, or patronizing a farmer that grows things the way you want them, or forming your own food collective, etc.
“The law is not a sword, but a shield.”
Farmers are installing nest boxes to encourage the owls
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Owls and kestrels are being employed as agricultural pest controllers in the Middle East.
Many farmers are installing nest boxes to encourage the birds, which hunt the crop-damaging rodents.
In Israel, where there is a drive to reduce the use of toxic chemical pesticides, this has been turned into a government-funded national programme.
Jordanian and Palestinian scientists and conservation charities have joined the scheme.
To insure their monopoly, Monsanto developed ROUND UP herbicide that kills all other plants that are not genetically Engineered by Monsanto. Round-Up herbicide is non-biodegradable and the land sprayed with Monsanto's Round-Up poisons the land and the very food that is grown on the poisoned land; any one walking bare foot through a field sprayed by Round-Up develops cancerous sores, and any live stoc k animals wandering in the field dies.
In other words any derivatives of Monsanto corn, soy, etc. has enough traces of Round-Up herbicide that is poisoning the consumer, a trace at a time.
Corn syrup is 20 times sweeter than cane suger and much cheaper, so all artificial sweetners for your coffee or lemonad or canned processed foods is sweetened with Monsanto Corn.
Rescinding the Bush Copyright for seeds is the only way to stop this deadly insidious poising of consumers.
Corn syrup is only cheaper because of government agriculture policy on sugar that include domestic subsidies and import restrictions:
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8381
We should be importing cane sugar from Cuba (since they are near us) as well as the major producers: Brazil, and the PRC.
Much of this is due to a 1980 Supreme Court case that is as important as Roe-v-Wade or Brown-v-Board of Education. It is Diamond-v-Chakrabarty. In that case the Supremes voted 5-4 to allow life forms to be patented. Another agriculture expert, Prof. Neil Harl has said: "In the long run it will be quite feasible for one company to have virtually total control of the world's germ plasm in respect to food."
It is the ability to patent life forms (seeds now, animals soon) that enables companies like Monsanto to financially strangle small farmers. The "foodies" of America who are so concerned about "Frankenfood" need to demand new legislation to eliminate patenting life forms. That's the best and perhaps only hope for saving independent farming in America. If we don't act, total genetic modification of our food supply with royalties paid to predatory corporations for everything we eat may be fait accompli.
Vince Wade
Huntington Beach, CA
It's so loosely written that people could be sued for procreating.