Corporate Agribusiness--America's Merchants of Greed

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CALAMITY HOWLER
by A.V. Krebs
Merchants of Greed

Corporation: n. "that inglorious device for obtaining individual profit
without individual responsibility." - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's
Dictionary, Neale Publishing Co: 1911

Greed: n. "excessive, inordinate or rapacious desire, esp. for wealth . ..
.. when unqualified, suggests a craving for food; it may, however, be
applied to all avid desires ..." - The Random House Dictionary of the
English Language (Unabridged Edition), Random House: 1967

In another era they would have been called "the robber barons." Today, the
ADMs, the Cargills, the ConAgras, the IBPs, the Smithfield Foods, the
Tysons, the Chiquitas and other corporate agribusiness behemoths which
produce and manufacture our food have become the merchants of greed.
Food, next to life itself, is our greatest common denominator, but to the
merchants of greed it is but the coin of the realm, a means by which they
can enrich themselves while the poor go hungry; family farmers are
discarded as "excess human resources;" farm and food workers and peasants
become the slaves they rent; while politicians, regulatory agencies and
academics serve merely as corporate figureheads to be bought, borrowed and
brown nosed, while consumers, in the immortal words of Archer Daniels
Midland (ADM) "Supermarkup to the World", "the competitor is our friend,
the consumer is our enemy,"are all being fashioned merely to serve a
self-serving corporate definition of "free enterprise" and "free trade."
To these merchants of greed food is but an international weapon while
multilateral trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) and multinational bodies like the World Trade Organization (WTO)
have not only become simple policy and governing instruments whereby these
corporations can implement their "economic imperialist" agenda, but in
reality their wholly owned subsidiaries.

In its process of substituting capital for efficiency and technology for
labor, corporate agribusiness, the realm in which these merchants of greed
rule, have turned family farmers not only in the US, but throughout the
world, into technological "junkies," endangering their own and their
families' health and safety, converting "stewards" of the land into
"miners" of the land, creating an elite class of corporate "welfare cheats"
living off taxpayer dollars, and basing farm survival not on earned farm
income but on borrowed capital and so-called "rural development." The human
toll, however, of such tactics is and continues to be staggering.
By deifying, for example, "cost benefit analysis" at the expense of the
"common good," corporate agribusiness has also managed to annul the
positive dimensions of the family farm system and eliminate its economic
and environmental advantages, particularly as they relate to building
genuine communities.

As social anthropologists Patricia L. Allen and Carolyn E. Sachs point out,
any system built upon a foundation of structural inequities "is ultimately
unsustainable in the sense that it will result in increasing conflict and
struggle along the lines of class, gender, and ethnicity." Corporate
agribusiness has become just such a system.

Thus, we have arrived at a point where our family farm system of
agriculture is facing its dark night of the soul, standing now on the
threshold of eradication. Throughout the 1980s we saw an ever-mounting
numbers of farm bankruptcies, foreclosures, and forced evictions reap a
grim "human harvest" of suicides, alcoholism, divorce, family violence,
personal stress, and loss of community.

Continuing into the 1990s we witnessed the very economic and social fabric
of rural America being ripped asunder as the control of our food supply was
seized by those merchants of greed whose purpose is not to feed people, or
provide jobs, or husband the land, but simply to increase their cash flow
and reduce their transactional costs in order to placate their
excess-profit-obsessed institutional investors.

Thus, in the grand scheme of history, the 20th century may well be
remembered as the point in the evolution of humanity when those
corporations that trade, process, manufacturer, pack, ship and sell the
world's food successfully removed the culture from agriculture and in the
name of "efficiency" and in the pursuit of a globalized industrialization
of the world's food supply reshaped agri-culture into an agri-business.
By attempting to deify their own myopic view of efficiency, however,
corporate agribusiness has brought family farming, the democratic control
of the people's food supply, and a wholesome and healthy natural
environment to the brink of global disaster which, unless immediately
recognized, confronted and thwarted, will inevitably lead to worldwide
economic, political, social and environmental chaos unlike any seen in
human history. For in measuring efficiency in strictly quantitative and
economic terms, such as is currently being practiced by corporate
agribusiness and its merchants of greed, the qualitative aspects of an
agri-culture and a family farm food production structure are rapidly being
discarded on the scrap heap of history as mere impediments to improving the
"bottom line" of the unaccountable corporations that process and
manufactured our food.

And as corporate agribusiness seeks to metamorphose agriculture from a
culture based upon the traditional family farm system of agriculture into a
business where capital is substituted for genuine economic, social and
environmental efficiency, and where expensive technology is substituted for
labor we see a standardization of our food supply through an industrial
manufacturing process based on the creation of synthetic foods, such as is
now taking place through the use of genetic engineering.
Considering those characteristics with which corporate agribusiness has
become identified, and comparing them with the historical characteristics
of the family farm/peasant system of agriculture, we begin to see more
clearly how corporate agribusiness is the antithesis of family farm
agriculture and how incompatible the two systems are in a democratically
structured society.

Whereas family farming/peasant agriculture has traditionally sought to
nurture and care for the land, corporate agribusiness, exclusive by nature,
seeks to "mine" the land, solely interested in monetizing its natural
wealth and thus measure efficiency by its profits, by pride in its "bottom
line." Family farmers, meanwhile, see efficiency in terms of respecting,
caring and contributing to the overall health and well-being of the land,
the environment, the communities and the nations in which they live.
While corporate agribusiness stresses institutionalized organization,
hierarchical decision making, volume, speed, standardization of the food
supply and extracting as much production from the land as quickly and
impersonally as possible, family farmers and peasants strive through order,
labor, pride in the quality of their work, and a certain strength of
character and sense of community to take from the land only what it is
willing to give so as not to damage its dependability or diminish its
sustainability.

But the so-called "conventional wisdom" in agriculture historically has
been that through the continual substituting of capital for efficiency and
technology for labor "inefficient" farm operators are eliminated by "market
forces" while those who survive manage to thrive.
Such "wisdom" also perpetuates the myth that the world's agricultural
system is still dominated by independent family-operated farms and with the
ever-increasing elimination of "inefficient producers""excess human
resources"we will witness a never-ending expansion of production to feed
the world.

Nowhere has this "conventional wisdom" been more apparent and become the
driving force of a nation's agricultural and food policy than in the United
States. Today, such failed policies derived from such "wisdom" are being
exported globally by the US by way of corporate agribusiness and its
merchants of greed's self-serving trade policies. Thus, it is imperative
that farm and food policy makers, family farmers, peasants, workers and
consumers world wide understand the implications and dire consequences of
such "conventional wisdom," for to ignore or dismiss corporate
agribusiness's inefficiencies as merely
anti-capitalist rhetoric is to do so at their own future peril.

While some of these "merchants of greed" may not be familiar to most urban
consumers, as they have no recognizable food brands on the local
supermarket shelves, their meddlesome hands continue to shape this country
and the world's agriculture and food policies while the ingredients they
manufacture are found in nearly all of our foodstuffs.

In the Cargill Corp., the nation's largest private corporation, we see the
political and economic power and ability of the world's largest commodity
trader to influence, shape and implement food policies that benefit its own
corporate interests. At the same time that it hides behind the cloak of
privacy, until only very recently unrecognizable to brand-conscious grocery
shoppers, it often remains the sole market to which a farmer is forced both
by geography and/or lack of competitive markets to sell the raw materials
that they have produced on their farms.

No corporation other than Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) probably better
illustrates the depths to which the corporate culture will sink, fraud,
conspiracy and corruption, in its efforts to control world markets in farm
commodities. While producing and manufacturing a wide array of food, feed
and fuel additives, it also has the reputation as the nation's single
largest benefactor of corporate welfare through federal subsidies and tax
loopholes.

At the same time, through its former board chairman and CEO Dwayne O.
Andreas, the self-styled "Supermarket to the World" has in the post-war
years been extraordinarily well politically connected and whose law firms
Williams & Connolly and Akin Gump Hauer & Feld have been shown to have
unbridled influence within the US Department of Justice.
One of the most dominant characteristics of modern-day corporate
agribusiness has been its "urge to merge," to concentrate market power,
reduce raw material and labor expenditures and eliminate competition. No
better examples of this rush to concentrate can be found than in Tyson
Foods and IBP, Inc. Here we have the world's largest poultry producer and
processor and the nation's largest meatpacking company respectively
dominating their industry.

THEN IN LATE 2000 Tyson's announced its intent to purchase the controlling
interest in IBP's stock, leaving the nation's independent cattle producers
and poultry growers, much less the consumers of these two staples of the
American diet, at the price determining and availability mercy of Tysons.
Now, because IBP was not forthcoming in some questionable past financial
dealings, the two corporate giants are embroiled in a legal battle to
determine who pays and who profits from Tyson's attempt to monopolize the
meat and poultry industry.

Likewise, along with increasing concentration in the food production,
processing and manufacturing industry we have also witnessed in the past 50
years the rapid movement toward vertical integration, where one corporation
controls many or all of the various stages of food production. There is
only corporation, however, that can boast that it literally controls
everything from "the ground to the table" and that corporation is ConAgra,
the nation's second largest food manufacturer behind tobacco king Philip
Morris.

Its story of how it acquired such power, marked by its ruthlessness in its
relationships with its suppliers while purporting to give consumers healthy
choices in their brand selection, is emblematic of corporate agribusiness
today.

Used and abused perhaps best summarizes the fate of the environment at the
hands of corporate agribusiness, and in Smithfield Foods, the nation and
the world's largest pork producer and processor, we see case after case
where its processing facilities and its factory farms have been despoilers
of the water and air we and nature depend on for life.
Finally, there is Chiquita International. For anyone familiar with the
history of 20th century Central American political intrigue, economics and
land ownership the name should be no stranger. The history of the company,
recently known as United Brands and before that the infamous United Fruit
Company, now currently under the control of Cincinnati businessman Carl H.
Lindner Jr., Chiquita's chairman and chief executive officer, and his
family, is notorious.

Not only has the company maintained its historically cruel tradition in its
treatment of its foreign workers, but efforts by ex-president Bill Clinton
to express his gratitude for a generous Lindner campaign contribution has
in recent years precipitated an all-out trade war between the European
Union (EU) and the US, acting on behalf of Chiquita, over banana imports
abroad.

Thus, with just these seven merchants of greed, we can see exposed not only
what has become standard corporate behavior in pursuit of economic and
political dominance, but a lexicon of those characteristics that threaten
to destroy our family farm system of agriculture, do immeasurable damage to
our environment, sell farm and field workers into economic slavery while
destroying rural communities, raise serious questions about the health and
safety of our food supply, and restrict the consumer's
freedom of choice while at the same time leaving them less and less
democratic control over the price and availability of their daily food
supply.
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A.V. Krebs operates the Corporate Agribusiness Research Project, P.O. Box
2201, Everett, Washington 98203; email avkrebs@earthlink.net; web:
www.ea1.com/CARP/