Why Big Business is Bad for Food
In the run up to tomorrow’s annual Soil Association Conference I thought I’d post my introductory remarks from the at the Battle of Ideas debate last October…
Food is a really dynamic subject area and more complex than a lot of us realise. On the one hand it’s in our faces – literally – every day. On the other it’s something remote and almost untouchable because the globalisation of our food industry has left many of us completely out of touch with the processes by which it gets there, the assumptions that those processes depend on, as well as the way that our food system both reflects and helps to reinforce prevailing moral, social, economic and political norms.
The bigger world of food is heavily polluted by the same notions that caused our financial institutions to implode, namely that it is too big to fail.
But our food system is failing on a lot of important measures.
The double burden
There are approximately 1 billion people in the world that are starving, Now you could argue that whereas our global population has doubled in the last 40 years that figure for starvation hasn’t changed much. And that’s true.
But let’s not get too complacent because the problems of not getting the right amount of food have become bigger and more complex as the system itself has become bigger and more complex.
Starvation is a result of malnutrition and malnutrition is a general term for a lack or an imbalance of some or all nutritional elements necessary for human health.
In the modern world of food markets, the problem of malnutrition hasn’t got smaller, it has simply fragmented to the opposite ends of a spectrum: 1 billion are starving and 1 billion are dangerously overweight. It’s what the UN Food and Agriculture Organization calls the “double burden” of malnutrition.
At both ends of this spectrum people are at higher risk of premature death from the complications of inadequate nutrition. And so, in the years since the green revolution, which was going to feed us all, the figure for malnutrition has in fact kept pace with population growth.
Destructive monocultures
Our food system is not only damaging to human health, it is damaging to the environment because it relies on intensive monocultures of both plants and animals. Supporting these monocultures requires – in the case of plants, huge amounts of pesticides and fertilisers – which damage soil, water and wildlife.
Monocultures of animals – the kind of inbreeding that is required to produce chickens that mature in half the time or cows that produce twice the amount of milk – leaves the animals sick, stressed and vulnerable to disease. And in the case of poultry and pigs these diseases can sometimes mutate into diseases that threaten human health.
Waste, and more waste
People who think that big business is good for food, will tell you that big systems are efficient. But this efficiency comes at a cost. The modern food system is disgracefully wasteful so much so that it can be hard to get your head around it.
For instance, if everyone in this room represented the amount of food produced in the world every year, 37% of you would be thrown out by food producers before you ever reached the market.
If everyone in this room represented the amount of food that does reach the market and is bought by consumers 25% of you would be thrown away uneaten. Looked at another way that’s 52% of the food we produced and consumed.
If everyone in this room represented all the fish we catch globally 25% of you would be thrown back in the sea dead and dying.
If everyone in this room represented all the apples we buy each year in the UK – 31% of you would be thrown out uneaten. That’s 4.4 million apples every day.
Bread purchased in the UK? We throw away 29% 7 million slices daily
Poultry? We waste 10% of what we produce – 330,000 chicken portions and 5,500 chickens every day
Potatoes? 5% or 5.1 million are wasted each day.
The system fails us because it encourages us to buy things we don’t need and things we don’t want and to buy them in quantities we can’t possibly consume.
The bigger picture
One of the reasons why the food debate is so dynamic is that our food system mirrors the larger system. Indeed there is no area of life or politics or economics or social inequality that the food system does not touch or is not touched by.
Food is a way for us to understand the world at large. Food is a constant in human life and the history of how we eat, what we eat, and who gets to eat and who doesn’t get to eat is the history of humanity. It’s a story how we have progressed, it’s the story of good intentions gone awry, it’s the wrong turns we’ve taken, it’s the inequalities that we turn a blind eye to and the assumptions that we never question.
The study of food opens up ways of understanding how power operates and is wielded within societies throughout the world.
You could argue that people want cheap food, and the free market is giving it to them. But this of course denies the reality that there is no free market (and I would argue not much free, or even informed choice). The so called ‘free market’ of food is manipulated on all sides.
Monopolies and more
It’s manipulated by financial speculators who see food not as a human necessity but as another commodity to be traded. By both direct and indirect government subsidies that make it profitable to grow some things but not others and that hides the true cost of food from consumers. By the corporate cartels, or even monopolies, that control the flow of food into the marketplace and which, by the way, wield significant lobbying power against our politicians.
It may seem that monopoly is a strong word, but at this moment in time:
• Ten corporations control 80% of the global agrochemical market.
• Ten companies control 31% of the seed market and four agribusinesses (Syngenta, Du Pont, Monsanto and Bayer) control almost 100% of the transgenic (GM) seed market.
• Six processors (Arla/Express, Dairy Crest, Robert Wiseman, Glanbia, Associated Co-operative Creameries and Nestle) control 93% of UK dairy processing.
• Just two companies Rank Hovis (part of Tomkins PLC) and Archer Daniels Midland Milling account for more than 50% of bread flour milled in the UK.
• In 1960 small independent retailers had a 60% share of the food retail market. By 2000, their share was reduced to 6%.
• Today four supermarkets (Tesco, Asda/Wal-mart, Sainsbury and Somerfield) control 75% of UK food retailing.
• Although there are 30,000 products in an average supermatket these are produce by only a few companies (UK Unilever, Nestle, Danone, in the US General Mills, Kraft and Kelloggs).
Not one answer but many
The way that we eat food, the way that we buy food, the way that we stupidly use certain types of food as status symbols, the way that we obsess about food is all an outgrowth of the way the business of food has been allowed to take precedence over food’s social meaning and significance.
What I would say, in closing, is that if you have come here today hoping to find a single answer to the problem of food then go home now. There aren’t any single answers. Any more than there are single answers to the banking crisis or the energy crisis or whatever other crises we are currently face. There are only lots of co-factors that have to work together to form a solution and I hope this morning’s session will proves constructive and enlightening in teasing out what some of those might be.
- Note: this speech was given in 2012. Many of the companies mentioned have merged to form larger conglomerates.
- You can listen to the entire debate and Q&A session here.
