From the supermarkets that dominate food sales, through distribution
systems, to agriculture and its increasing dependence on chemicals and back
down the chain to gene research, the story is one of the concentration of power
in fewer and fewer corporations.
By 2011, as this report
shows, the world’s top 10 seed companies controlled three quarters (75%) of the
market for their products. The same six global corporations
control 75% of all private sector plant breeding research;
60% of the commercial seed market and 76% of global agrochemical sales. Some
also have links to animal pharmaceuticals.
For the authors, the ETC Group, “this creates a
vulnerability in the world food system” not seen since the founding of the UN
Food and Agriculture Organisation in 1945.
No one is anyone any longer much surprised by the destructive
impacts of the competitive pursuit of profits on people’s lives and on the
ecological systems that we depend upon. As the ETC point out:
“The agro-industrial farming system has been spectacularly
successful at encouraging uniformity, destroying diversity, polluting soil and
water, corroding human health and impoverishing farm labour”
In its 2013 report, Cost
of Inaction, the United Nations Environment Programme estimates that, for
smallholder farmers in 37 sub-Saharan African countries, the costs of pesticide
poisonings (lost work days, outpatient medical treatment, and inpatient
hospitalisation) amounted to $4.4 billion in 2005 (not including the cost of
lost lives and livelihoods, environmental health effects and effects of other
chemicals).
UNEP projects the total cost of pesticide-related illness
and injury in sub-Saharan Africa between 2005 and 2020 could reach a staggering
$90 billion.
You might even laugh out loud in a kind of helpless desperation
at the latest antics of the big pesticide producers Bayer and Monsanto whose
products are designed to kill insects. Bayer produces neonicotinoid-based
chemicals which scientific studies show to be implicated in the massive die-off
of the bees which all of humanity depends on to pollinate the crops we eat.
In an attempt to fend off any extension - and even reverse -
the new European Union ban on neonicotinoids, Bayer has embarked on a
rebranding exercise, presenting itself as a promoter of bee-health. Monsanto,
the world’s number one seed producer, and manufacturer of killer chemical
Roundup, goes a step further. It has bought Beeologics, an R&D company
providing targeted control of pests and diseases. Its mission is “to become the
guardian of bee health worldwide.” LOL.
But it’s not all bad news. Corporate control of the food
chain is very far from being a completed process. There’s still time to end it.
The vast majority of farmers - peasant farmers who continue
to feed 70% of the world’s population – are not tied to the corporate food chain. And
the majority of the world’s meat and milk is still produced by small-scale
farmers in mixed crop-and-livestock systems, rather than the new profit–led
systems of industrialised intensive production.
La
Via Campesina, representing the interests of small, peasant farmers
worldwide, puts forward its proposals to coincide with the latest meeting of
the World Trade Organisation now underway in Bali.
“We are living a global emergency situation, greater than
any that we have lived, and intellectual property rights for profit should not
have precedence over nature and humanity. Trade is needed but a different kind
of trade, one that is not based on the exploitation of people and nature and
whose rules benefit the communities and not the corporations.
“The kind of trade we need is complementary and equitable
trade not corporate free trade. To really address the climate crisis, a world
without the WTO and the FTAs [free trade agreements], one that is not dominated
by transnational corporations and the global free trade regimes, is necessary!
“We have to change the system, and we have to do this now.”
What more can you say?
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
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