Occupy for the Love of Food!

Tom Philpott has written a great article on why food movement actors should support Occupy Wall Street. He makes the argument that the occupations (which have spread across the world, starting today!) challenge the concentration of power in the hands of the elite, and the agrifood industry is a prime example of this concentration, elite control, and marginalization of the consumer and small producer.

I thought I'd take three of Tom's key points, which use American examples, and make the case for his argument applying to Canada. (Of course, many of his examples of multinational corporations apply to us here as well.)

1. The food industry is a big fat monopoly

• The top five food retailers in Canada account for 60% of sales (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada)
• Nilsson Bros. Inc. is Canada’s largest beef packing corporation, owning nearly half of Canadian capacity. In addition to its packing plants, holdings of the Nilsson Bros. conglomerate also include (wholly-owned or in partnership) feedlots, most of western Canada’s large auction facilities. ('Losing Our Grip', 2010)
• Three companies -- Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Cargill -- control an estimated 90% of the world's grain trade (USA Today) and the prairies export 80% of the grain they grow.
• The largest 5% of food manufacturing establishments accounted for over 50% of sales in 2003 whereas the smallest 80% of establishments accounted for only 15% of sales. (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada)
• And, since transnational corporations sell the majority of Canadian farmers' inputs, some global stats are relevant: the top 10 seed companies account for 67% of the global proprietary seed market (Monsanto is 23% of that number); the top 10 pesticide firms (the six largest of which are also in the top 10 seed companies) control 89% of the global agrochemical market. (ETC)

2. Wall Street's greed leaves millions to starve—literally. 

• "In recent years, the financial markets have discovered the huge opportunities presented by agricultural commodities. The consequences are devastating, as speculators drive up food prices and plunge millions of people into poverty... Since last June alone, higher food prices have driven another 44 million people below the poverty line, reports the World Bank. These are people who must survive on less than $1.25 (€0.87) a day." (Der Spiegel, trans.)
• "Holdings in commodity index funds ballooned from US$ 13 billion in 2003 to US$ 317 billion by 2008...The promotion of biofuels and other supply shocks were relatively minor catalysts, but they set off a giant speculative bubble in a strained and desperate global financial environment. These factors were then blown out of all proportion by large institutional investors who, faced with the drying up of other financial markets, entered commodity futures markets on a massive scale." (De Schutter briefing note, 2010)
•  Some advice from a Canadian investment advisor: "the biggest and most worrisome near-term crisis of all, is a food crisis; and you will have the opportunity to make a ton of money from it. Speculators love crises as well, and only add fuel to the fire, which multiplies your gains. The writing is already all over the wall for a pending food crisis; the west just hasn’t seen it on a domestic level yet, but believe me, we will. It’s time to get ahead of this trade." 
•  The extension of food speculation, as you know from reading this blog, is speculation in land. "Bay Street investors like Sprott Resources and Lawrence Asset Management have been buying into farmland in Uruguay and the Democratic Republic of the Congo." (Canadian Dimension)

3. Our politicians are in bed with agribusiness.

• A homegrown prairies example: Assiniboia Capital Corp, "the largest farmland investment management company in Canada, with almost 100,000 acres under management" (from its website). Organization includes: Co-founder Brad Farquhar, who is the former Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Party and former Executive Assistant to Sask. Party leader Elwin Hermanson; Gord Nystuen—General Manager of Assiniboia’s farm input financing division, Input Capital—is former Saskatchewan Deputy Minister of Agriculture, former Chief of Staff to the Premier, and former Chair of Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation; Advisory Board member Lorne Hepworth is President of Croplife Canada and former
  Saskatchewan Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Energy and Mines, Minister of Education,
  and Minister of Finance. (Assiniboia Capital website)
• Assiniboia Capital has tripled its land base over the past two years.  In light of this, it is interesting that Assiniboia’s primary capital source is taxpayer-owned and federal-government-controlled Farm Credit Canada (FCC).  ('Losing Our Grip', 2010)
• Five of the 100 lobbyists named in the Top 100 Lobbyists list compiled annually by the Parliament Hill insider newspaper The Hill Times have agriculture or food sector clients. (Western Producer)

To borrow a phrase from Dave Oswald Mitchell's excellent essay,

Occupy the market. Occupy the commons. Occupy the future.

Ugliness.

Folks, I have to do it. It's not going to be pretty, but I feel that it's time to get to the ugly heart of it all. I know that some of you will be shocked, others disgusted, and many will turn their eyes away, perhaps for good. But there is a cry arising in the land, a cry that must be answered:

“Please – won't someone think of The Economy!”

The Economy, that giant demi-god infant threatening to throw a tantrum that we, the fearful permissive parents, must court, pacify, but never, ever restrict. That volatile baby whose motivations we can only guess at with baffled dimness, or the guidance of experts who study the demanding creature in a controlled environment instead of in our messy, complex everyday lives. Instead of something that serves us, that is embedded in our social relations, The Economy is our foremost concern and society a mere adjunct to the market. The Economy has a life of its own, and in that it controls all of ours; the economic sphere is depoliticised, naturalized, privatised, and thus "rendered democratically unaccountable".*

What does this have to do with food?

It is my firm belief that food, and the other essentials of life such as water and air should not be commodities. They should not be ruled by economic considerations, and indeed, have not been for long in humanity's history. In most other times and places, they have been regulated by considerations such as equality, redistribution, status, religion - not accumulation of wealth.

When food is sold and traded for profit, it is pretty obvious, if you look at how any other commodity functions in our society, that the results are not in the best interests of the population. It will be scarce at times; overabundant and devalued at others; speculated upon; hoarded; shoddily and mass-produced under the guise of efficiency; underregulated as far as safety, and overregulated as far as trying to fit it into one nice, neat, industrial box; increasingly homogenized; overpackaged and overmarketed; increasingly unsatisfying of our deeper hungers.

This results in injustice. Unequal distribution. Unequal access. Bad tasting food that is nutritionally marginal. Haiti having been self-sufficient in rice now dependent on imports from the US. Kenyans working in greenhouses to produce 7 tons of perfectly straight beans to send to France and 6 tons to rot in the fields**. One Earth Farms intending to own one million acres of land in Saskatchewan and employ seasonal wage-labourers in neo-serfdom.

The costs of externalities such as the eventual costs of declining soil fertility and tilth, water pollution from factory farm sewage and crop overfertilization, and climate change exacerbation from oil-dependent agriculture, are not borne by those who have defined the system, commodified the food, and profited from its turning into a commodity – the retailers, wholesalers, marketers, shippers, processors, speculators, and input manufacturers.

I'll discuss some possible answers to "what can be done about this?" in future posts. For the present, attempting to provision oneself outside the capitalist industrial agri-food system is a good start. And I think Canadians, in particular, at this moment, need to think about what is being sacrificed, and what is being gained, in the name of The Economy, in the short and long terms. (Here's a link to the food policies in the platforms of each of the federal parties.)

* borrowing an idea and phrase from Rupert, Mark. (2003). Globalising common sense – a Marxian-Gramscian (re-) vision of governance/resistance. Review of International Studies 29, 181-198.

**Roberts, Paul. (2008). The End of Food. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.