Chapter 2

The Transition from Agriculture to Agribusiness

In 1956 an article appeared in the Harvard Business Review which was destined to have a profound impact on how food is produced globally today. The author, John Davis, who later became Secretary for Agriculture in the Eisenhower Administration wrote that "the only way to solve the so-called farm problem, once and for all, and avoid cumbersome government programs, is to progress from agriculture to agribusiness"[1].

60 years ago the average family farm was small and pursued a mixed form of agriculture. The farmer and his family were self-sufficient in food. The surplus production was traded, usually on the local markets. The market economy was somewhat peripheral to the farming community since the community was largely self-sufficient and consumed a minimal amount of energy. The crusaders for private enterprise felt that this kind of operation was very inefficient. They proposed to bring farm production and the marketing of agricultural products together under a single business umbrella. They argued that if this were done the wonders of science and research technology could be harnessed in the interests of food production and processing and that the consumer would benefit by having an abundance and variety of food available at cheap prices. Everyone was expected to benefit from this transformation of agriculture so government policies and industry pursued the changes with vigour.

60 years down the track this dream of full and plenty and cheap food is turning into a nightmare. Petrochemical agriculture is destroying land and water and polluting the air. The huge increase in the use of chemicals is causing extensive health and environmental damage. The monocropping culture which it promotes is undermining biodiversity. It has reaped huge benefits for agribusiness corporations but it is not sustainable in the long run because it is based on fossil fuel which is finite.

Furthermore, small and medium size farmers right around the world have been pushed off their land, farm technology and research have ignored the interests of the small, organic farmer and concentrated instead on energy inefficient technologies and machinery which has benefited the agribusiness corporations and machinery manufacturers. Mixed agriculture has been replaced by specialisation in one or two crops; animal power has given way to petroleum powered tractors and animal waste has been replaced by petrochemicals.

The transition has been facilitated with credit from financial institution. Paying the interest on this money and replacing machinery to meet each new phase in the farm technology revolution has ensured that farmers are sucked deeper and deeper into reliance on cash crop agriculture no matter what its impact is on the local social, cultural and physical environment. There has been a huge increase in both soil erosion and the pollution of the land which ultimately affect human health and well-being. The small farmers have been forced to migrate to sprawling cities where they continue to experience hunger as they do not have enough money to buy sufficient food. In 1950 only 18 percent of the population of Third World countries lived in cities. By 2000 that figure has jumped to 40 percent.

We are living through a global clearance policy much more extensive than the one that cleared the Highlands of Scotland in the 18^th century. When small farmers have been cleared, the large farmers and corporations who acquire the land no longer grow staple foods. Instead they switch to export crops like soybeans, sugar, coffee and even flowers. When the prime land in a country is devoted to export-oriented cash crops this puts pressure on the surviving subsistence farmers in many Third World countries to farm in unsuitable areas[2]. Even in the United States the situations for farmers is far from rosy. The farming population has dropped from 6.8 million people in 1935 to 1.9 million in 1995. This is less than the total prison population in the US. In the heartland State of Nebraska many farmers are mortgaging their land to survive. Suicide is now the leading cause of death among US farmers. It is three times the national average[3]

The True Cost of Cheap Food

Agribusiness corporations will claim that food was never so cheap or abundant. It seems to be cheap but only because much of the real cost of food is not reflected in the receipt we receive at the check out counter at the supermarket. Agribusiness has managed to externalise many of the costs of food production to other sectors of the economy and the environment. Because they have become so dominant they can also manipulate the markets so that the farmer gets less and less for his/her produce. 50 years ago the farmers in North America received between 45 and 60 percent of what consumers paid for food. Today it is merely 3.5 percent. The same problems face European farmers[4]. As Katharine Ainger writes in New Internationalist (Jan/Feb 2003) agribusiness corporation "traverse the planet buying at the lowest price, putting every farmer in direct competition with every other farmer[5].

The true cost can only be appreciated when we factor in all the hidden subsidies, the billions spent on medical bills and the huge toll that industrial agriculture is taking on the environment. Many of these costs will be laid at the door of future generations. Very seldom is the transport and greenhouse gas cost of our food properly accounted for. The modern production process encourages long distance transport of food across countries and continents. Between 1965 and 1998 the international trade in food jump three fold. In Britain the transport of milk has increased 30 times[6]

Impact on Human Health

Worrying levels of pesticide residue are found in fruit, vegetables and root crops. In Britain in 1998 potatoes eaten by the average consumer received 12 pesticide applications. Popular varieties are sprayed 16 times during the growing season. Carrots are well dosed with an average of four insecticides, three herbicides and two fungicides. Some of these are organophosphates, highly toxic chemicals which effect the central nervous system [7].

A number of British families whose children were born without eyes are locked in a legal battle with the giant US-transnational chemical company Du Pont. They believe that being exposed to the once popular fungicide Benlate while the women were pregnant caused the injury to their children. Concerns about the safety of benomyl, the chemical agent in Benlate, have been voiced by environmentalists for decades. In 1997 Du Pont had Benlate tested in an independent laboratory in Yorkshire. The researchers who tested benomyl on rats found that a ‘high’ proportion of the chemical was drawn to the eyes. In recent months Du Pont has withdrawn Benlate from circulation because of mounting litigation costs.

The litigation around the Benlate saga proves how powerful TNCs are in the US. In the 1970s the US Environmental Protection Agency suggested to Du Pont that the fungicide ought to carry a warning label that it might cause birth defects and that experiments with laboratory animals showed a significant drop in sperm count. However, Du Pont persuaded the EPA that the concerns were unfounded and as a result no warning appeared. This is a classic example of the corporate control of government agencies in the US. Furthermore, in the present trial ( March 2002) taken by parents of blind children against Du Pont, the judge who is hearing the case in West Virginia dismissed the scientific evidence of the independent testing agency as unsound just before the lawsuit began [8].

The health impact of chemicals on the consumer may only now be coming more evident. Research published in May 2001 by doctors from Imperial College School of Medicine under the leadership of Dr. Simon Taylor-Robinson reported a 15-fold increase in cancer of the bile duct between 1968 and 1996. Since the function of the liver is to detoxify the blood, the toxins which are removed hit the bile duct. While the study does not point the finger at any source the huge increase in chemicals in agriculture and food production over the past 30 years must be a primary suspect. The use of organochlorines in pesticides and the increase in the use of food additives and preservatives has taken its toll [9].

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US calculated that between 1970 and 1999 food-borne diseases in the US increased by a factor of 10. According to the US Food and Drug Administration (FD) at least 53 pesticides which are considered to be cancer-causing, are present in many of our staple foods. Farmers are more at risk from handling toxic chemicals than ever before. A study by the US National Cancer Institute found that farmers who handle herbicides are six times more likely to develop non-Hodgkin's lymphoma than the ordinary population [10].

When St. Barnaba's First and Middle School in Drakes Broughton, Worcestershire in England banned food that contained any one of 27 colourings and preservatives in June 2002 there was a dramatic change in the behaviour and concentration of many of the pupils. "The teachers noticed that children who usually found it difficult to concentrate were much calmer and more able to get on with their work"[11]. The experience at St. Barnaba's confirms the findings of a study by the Food Commission, an independent watchdog, which found that food additives could lead to hyperactivity and tantrums in a quarter of children exposed to them. It analysed the effects of five different additives on 277 three-year-olds from the Isle of Wight. The children were given a drink containing the artificial colourings tartrazine (E102), sunset yellow (E110), carmoisine (E124) and the preservative sodium benzoate (E211)[12].

There is also an increasing concern about bacteriological contamination with salmonella enteritidis which can cause diarrhoea and other complications. Intensive animal husbandry has increased the incidence of this disease. In 1994 Professor Richard Lacey, a microbiologist are Leeds University, published a book called Hard to Swallow: A Brief History of Food. In the book Professor Lacey estimated that one in 5,000 eggs in the UK is contaminated with salmonella [13].

The over-use of drugs and growth hormones in animal feed is one of the factors that has contributed to the increase in resistance of many bacteria to many types of antibiotics. Antibiotics are often included in animal feed in order to increase the weight of the animal. The situation is so serious at the moment there is now a real fear how infective E. coli 0157:H7 is and the inability of current antibiotics to deal with it.

According to National Geographic, May 19, 2002 our fish, cattle and chickens are raised in giant 'factory' farms where animals are packed into tight quarters. There was one picture of 100,000 cattle in a single feedlot in Colorado. Such large-scale agriculture keeps prices low but it also raises the risk of faecal contamination, disease and distress for the animals[14]. This needs to be changed and animals ought to be allowed to roam freely in the fields as happens in traditional agriculture in almost every part of the world.

Junk Food and Unhealthy diet

Agribusiness is very much linked to the consumption of junk food which has a high fat, salt and sugar content. This has led to an epidemic of obesity in many First World countries. In Britain one in five adults is obese while two-thirds and of men and half of women are overweight. Obesity causes a variety is illnesses from heart disease to diabetes. It is one factor in 31,000 deaths each year and the cost to the economy is over £2 billion[15]. In 1999, Eric Schlosser, an investigative journalist with the Atlantic Monthly, published a book entitled Fast Food Nation. Not surprisingly Schlosser found that fast foods are bad for one's health. But the bad news do not stop there. The taste one associates with french fries, sauteed onions or hamburgers does not come from the onions, potatoes or beef but from artificial, food flavouring. Much of it is supplied by factories in New Jersey such as International Flavors and Fragrance, the world's biggest flavour company [16].

In the light of the above it is no surprise that in recent years a number of court cases have involved McDonald's, the largest fast food chain. While the company won the famous "McLibel" trial the revelations about practice in the restaurants during the two-and-a-half-year legal action humiliated McDonald's. Schlosser revealed in his book that McDonald's was using beef tallow to make its french fries in different parts of the world. As a result a member of the Jainist religion, Hitesh Shah, brought a case against McDonald's claiming that they had been mislead and, by eating the french fries, had transgressed a precept of their faith which prohibited them from eating beef. Early in 2002 McDonald's settled by agreeing to pay $10 million to Hindu, vegetarian and other groups whose educational activities are closely linked to the concerns of Hindu and Jain consumers[17].

Also in November 2002 it emerged that eight children in New York were suing McDonald's for failing to tell them that their daily diet of Big Macs and french fries would make the obese and in some case make them diabetic [18].

A diet of French fries is not very healthy for another reason. A study by the Swedish National Food Administration found that a cancer causing chemical - acrylamide - is formed when starchy foods like potatoes are exposed to high temperatures. Potato crisps and chips fall into this category so the Food Safety Authority in Ireland has warned consumers to cut down on such foods [19].

Massive Soil Erosion.

Another consequence of agribusiness is the extraordinary increase in soil erosion around the world. Poor land management, overgrazing, chemical agriculture, monocropping, deforestation and human population pressures have caused soil erosion and desertification on an unprecedented scale. The United Nations Environment Programme has estimated that since 1945 an estimated 108 million acres of productive land has been lost to agriculture each year. This adds up to 4.85 billion acres or around 35 per cent of the earth's fertile land ( [1] ). The UN estimates that of the world's 5,200 million hectares of agriculturally used dryland, 69 percent is degraded or subjected to desertification. In Africa the figure runs as high as 73 percent and in Asia 70 percent.

Professor David Pimentel and his team at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York estimates that world-wide. about 75 billion tonnes of topsoil are lost each year at the cost of $400 billion. Most of this damage, unfortunately, is in the Third World where between 30 and 40 tonnes per hectare are eroded each year. Even in the US, 17 tonnes of topsoil per hectare are eroded with each cropping 4. Topsoil is precious; without it no crops will grow and pasture land will not be fertile. No machine can readily create topsoil. It builds up slowly and takes between 200 and 1,000 years for 2.5 cm of topsoil to build up. Erosion impoverishes the topsoil that remains. The soil loses nutrients and its capacity to retain water.

About 3500 million hectares, an area the size of North and South America, are affected by desertification. Each year at least another six million hectares are irretrievably lost to desertification, and a further 21 million hectares are so degraded that crop production is severely affected. On April 18^th 2001 scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado reported a huge dust storm in northern China. Dust from that storm reached areas as far as Canada and Arizona and obscured the foothills of the Rockies. During the past decade similar storms have wreaked havoc on crop land and range land in China's north western area. China's neighbours, Japan and Korea, are worried about the effect of these dust storms on their countries and are interested in working with the Chinese to combat the problem. The reason for the storms is that human pressure on the land in north-western China is excessive. The land cannot support the human and livestock population in the area. Officials estimate that 900 square miles of land is going into desert each year. This is in an area where the grass once grew as high as a horse's belly[20].

Control of Agriculture and Food Retailing Concentrated in Fewer and Fewer Hands.

In the US the control of food growing, processing, distribution and retailing has been concentrated in the hands of a few companies who now exercise a monopoly. According the Geoffrey Lawrence in his book Capitalism and the Countryside, by the mi-1970s 20 corporations controlled poultry production in the US. 2 oil companies had reorganised beef-lots away from the 1,000-10,000 acre lots of the Midwest to 100,000 cattle lots in Texas. Three corporations - United Brands, Purex and Dud Antle (a subsidiary of Dow Chemical) dominated lettuce production in California. 25 of the giant supermarket chains accounted for over half of all the US retail food sales.

The situation in Britain is similar. Five chain stores control 80 percent of grocery sales in Britain. This control which amounts to a cartel has been pushing down prices to farmers in recent years. Writing in The Guardian, Felicity Lawrence gave a good example of how this works. She describes the plight of a farmer in East Anglia who grows peas. In 2002 he sold his produce to a processor for 17 pence per kilo. This is 8 pence less than he received five years ago. The processor charges 18 pence per kilo to clean, freeze and pack the peas. If the farmer and processor query these prices they are told that the retailer can buy the peas much cheaper from an overseas supplier. The quality of course will not be the same. The supermarket sells on these peas to the consumer for 98 pence per kilo. This is an enormous profit on a single kilo of peas.

The retailers are also attempting to push small and medium suppliers out of business in the name of rationalisation. Early in 2002 a leading supermarket called together its poultry suppliers and flatly stated that they wished to reduce the number to three. The lucky farmers had to reduce their costs and allow the supermarket to pay "costs plus". This means the cost of production plus a margin of profit agreed by the supermarket. So much for the free-market [21].

Social and Environmental effects of Agribusiness

The social effects of agribusiness have decimated rural communities. During the 1980s almost 100,000 farmers abandoned agriculture each year. The knock-on impact on the rural economies was huge. When agribusiness moves into rural communities the profits that they make are not re-invested in the rural community. They are siphoned off to the urban world or exported to the "mother" country. A study by Walter Goldschmit in California's Central Valley found that in the area where family farms predominated the people in the surrounding rural towns had a higher standard of living, better community facilities, public services and amenities like parks and stores that in towns where corporate agriculture held sway.

In Third World countries like the Philippines there has been a huge shift from food production to growing cash crops. Almost half the agricultural land is used to grow luxury crops like pineapples for First World consumers. When profit is the driving force in agriculture more land in a place like Central America will be devoted to growing carnations, since companies make 50 times more profit from this activity than from growing food. In many of these countries the farms run by large transnational agribusiness corporations are called 'stolen fields'.

Environmental Impact

The World woke up to the environmental impact of modern agriculture when Rachel Carson published her book, Silent Spring. In this book she documented the impact of petrochemicals on the land, rivers, bird life and insect life. Pressures to increase productivity and output have ensured that farmers are forced to employ techniques which are incompatible with environmental safety. Everyone agrees that petrochemical agriculture does improve output over a short period, but it achieves this at the expense of the social and fabric and the environment. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) produced mountains of butter and lakes of wine. Pesticides are a short term solution. The enormous insects’ gene pool and their short reproductive cycles enable them to become resistant to even powerful chemicals in a short period of time. They also kill pests indiscriminately, even those insects that are beneficial to the farmer [22].

The dairy sector has also been radically changed in recent years. In 1970 the best dairy cows produced about 3,000 litres of milk per year. Today, thanks to breeding technologies and growth hormones, monster milkers produce 8,000 litres per year. In the United States a genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) is injected into the dairy cows every 14 days for 200 days of a cow's 335 lactation cycle. This increases milk production but it takes a huge toll on the animals. Whereas in the 1970s many cows lived for 10 years, the new super-milkers only survive for five years.

Farmers also have to rely heavily on drugs to keep cows, with weakened immune systems, free from infection. According to Pascal Oltenacau of Cornell University, American and European dairy cows now need 100 drug treatments a year compared with 49 three decades ago to stay healthy[23].

Will Industrial Agriculture Feed the World?

Proponents of corporate agriculture claim, that without agribusiness many more people would be hungry. I will address this 'feed-the-world' argument a number of times in this book especially during my discussion of genetically engineered food. Here I will address one claim that big farms are more efficient than small farms. As Steven Gorelick points out in correspondence with Sean Richard (Ecologist 2001[24] the greater efficiency for larger farms refers to production per unit of labour. Since small farms are more labour-intensive than larger mechanized farms they are less productive in that narrow sense. Studies, however, by Peter Rosset of Food First has shown that smaller farms are between 200 and 1,000 percent more productive than larger farms if one focuses on comparable units of land. Gorelick also points out the hidden social and ecological costs of agribusiness.

Studies at the University of Essex have recently concluded the largest every survey of sustainable agricultural improvements in poor countries. The researchers found that on average improved sustainable farming methods has yielded a 93 percent increase in per-hectare food production. In Cuba, for example urban organic gardens only produced 4,000 tonnes of food in 1994. This grew to over 700,000 in a mere five year period both because of the rise in the number of gardens but also in the productivity of the gardens[25]

Government Policies must Support Organic Food.

Claims and counter-claims about whether organic food is better for your health have been around for a long time. Conventional, petro-chemical agriculture has always claimed that its products are as nutritious and good for your health as foods produced in an organic way. Regulators and government agencies have usually concurred. For example, John Krebs, the head of the British Food Standards Agency has claimed that organic food is no better than food produced conventionally. However, John Paterson who works as a biochemist at Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary has criticised Kerbs for making such claims “on the basis of very little information”. He and his team at the University of Strathclyde have found that organic vegetable soups contain almost six times as much salicylic acid as food produced in a non-organic way. This acid is responsible for the anti-inflammatory action of aspirin. It also helps to prevent hardening of the arteries and bowel cancer [26]. Rev. Paul Cawthorne of Shropshire in a letter published in Green Christians, Spring 2002, wrote that we ought to be aware of the variety of commercial and political forces ranged against organic food. These grounds use studies from right wing think-tanks like American Hudson Institute and the Australia Institute of Public Affairs to discredit organic food and promote genetically engineered food [27].

Extinction

Agribusiness is also contributing to the huge loss of biodiversity in the world in recent years because it opts for monoculture. When one thinks of the enormous amounts of food grown around the world annually it comes as a shock to realise that global agriculture depends on such a narrow species and genetic base. Of the 200,000 species of wild plants only a few thousand are used by humans and only a few hundred have been domesticated. More worrying still, three quarters of the world’s food is derived from a mere seven species – potatoes, rice, wheat, maize, barley, cassava and sorghum. Nearly half of the world’s protein intake as food comes from rice, wheat and maize.

The genetic diversity within each of these crucial crops which, for example, will produce tall stalks in one situation and short ones in another, has been eroded as native habitats have been destroyed as industrial agriculture has opted for mono-cultured, high yield crops. Varieties with genes that protected crops from pests and adverse weather conditions are lost. The loss of such Farmers Varieties or landraces as they are called is a biological disaster. When a crop with a uniform genetic structure succumbs to a disease which happened to corn in the United States in the 1970s, researchers had to go back to the landraces to find varieties with genes that protect the crop against such a disease.

As more and more of these Farmers's Varieties are lost because of the aggressive corporate marketing for ‘super’ genetically uniform crops, our global staple crops become more and more vulnerable to pests, disease and differing weather conditions. For example India until a few decades ago cultivated over 30,000 varieties of rice. Now it is on the threshold of opting for one so-called 'super' variety. In the process, centuries of botanical knowledge and breeding, our worldwide food insurance policy for the future, is being lost. The corn failure in the US did not lead to hunger and starvation. In Ireland in the 1840s the failure of the potato crop did lead to a disaster. Over a million people lost their lives and many fled to Britain, the US and Australia to avoid the famine cause by the failure of a single genetic strain of a food crop.

Many of the international centres in which seeds are being stored and preserved like the International Rice Research Center in Los Banos outside Manila are suffering because of government budget cuts However, the place to preserve biodiversity is not in university laboratories or research centres but by planting the crops in different environments. Seed banks can only survive for a decade or so. We need to get these traditional varieties back into the land[28].

Genetically Engineered Foods

The Green Revolution provided the Agribusiness corporation with a golden opportunity to benefit from and control agriculture. This control is poised to increase dramatically with the introduction of genetically engineered seeds. Instead of promoting this dangerous technology government ought to be promoting more sustainable forms of agriculture.

The challenge of meeting food security could easily be addressed by organic agriculture. As the Prince of Wales said in his Reith lecture in May 2000 "if a fraction of the money currently being invested in developing genetically manipulated crops were applied to understanding and improving traditional systems of agriculture, which has stood the all-important test of time, the results would be remarkable " [29].

[1]. Hawken, Paul, 1993, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, HarperCollins, New York, page 22-23.