Big Agriculture

Food, Industry

Big Agriculture  link ()
A handful of food and chemical corporations completely dominate what we eat and how food is made, supposedly in competition with one another.

Big agriculture (Big Ag) is a shorthand for referring to a handful of large companies which completely dominate and monopolize all aspects of food production and regulation. These include seed producers, chemical and fertilizer companies, biotech (genetic engineering) and retailers.

• There are somewhere between 50 million and 100 million farms in the world (excluding those smaller than 6-7 hectares). But about half the crops produced by those farms rely on the seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides supplied by a mere dozen or so companies.

• Most of those crops are bought, traded, and transported around the world by another half dozen.

• The so-called Big Six, Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont, Bayer, and BASF produce roughly three-quarters of the pesticides used in the world. The first five also sell more than half the name-brand seeds that farmers plant, including varieties modified for resistance to the very pesticides they also sell. Meanwhile, if farmers want fertilizer, a list of 10 other companies, starting with PotashCorp, account for about two-thirds of the world market.

• Around 80 percent of major crops pass through the hands of four traders: Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus. ADM processes about a third of all soybeans in the United States and a sixth of those grown around the globe.

• On the retail side, there are a huge selection of brands, but most of them come from a handful of companies. And the retail outlets are concentrated in a few large supermarket chains.

Impact on nutrition and health

• Many of the product choices made by Big Ag are impossible to avoid in everyday life, like high-fructose corn syrup (Archer Daniels Midland) or Monsanto with its herbicide Roundup and genetically engineered foodstuff and seeds.

• Industrial meat production in megafarms destroys animal welfare and necessitates a high input of chemicals and medicines,Template:Cn while creating a huge waste problem.

Great Power politics

For decades, the United States follows a conscious strategy of controlling strategic basic foods, preferring to grow and export staples (grains) while letting countries in the global south export cash crops (coffee).Template:Cn