and is not in business to keep us healthy. In fact the increasing monopo- lisation of production, distribution ri retailing of goods, dominated by com?: nies in the US and Europe is. alorg : : the concentration of finance car::: essential component of imperia: ** CONCENTRATION & MONOPOLISATION In a series of articles :*: Lang, Professor of Food University,' shows hour tion has come about since 1. T.Lang & M. Heasma- dame tor mouns, minos a " E. Millstone & T. La"e 23
it has accelerated and is continuing to accelerate in the present period For example, market share of the top 20 food manufacturers in the US has doubled since 1967, so that now 100 firms account for 80% of value-added in the sector. There is a similar pat- tern in Europe. Nestle (Switzerlandi. Unilever (UK and Netherlandsy and Kraft (US) are the top three gioba gigantic annual tro- players with vers of 50, 48 and 33 billion dolars respectively. Six of the top :::00d producers are US companies. aith the rest in Europe. R etailing shows a similar pat- tern. The list of the top 30 is dominated by L'S company Wal-Mart with a turnover of 180 billion dollars, three times that of its nearest rival. Seven of the top 30 retailers are US companies, 17 are from Europe:. Of the rest two are each from Australia and Canada. The recent cut-throat com- petition between supermarkets in Britain, with Sainsbury losing out to Asda (Wal- Mart owned) and Tesco, is an example of this process. It is predicted that the mar- ket share of the top ten European retailers will increase from 37% to 60% by 2010 if present trends continue.? 24 T he third and key infrastructural sector is agrochemicals and here monopolisation is at its most ad- vanced. In the late 1980s twenty firms iontrolled 90% of global production; ir. the late 1990s this number was reduced io ten: now it is seven. The names are fa- miltar to those who follow the debate on genetie modification - Syngenta, Aventis, Monsanto, BASF, Dow, Bayer and DuPont - for many have diversified into the seed and biotech industries.+ In the US, the top four beef packers al- ready controlled around a quarter of the market in the 1970s. Today, just 20 feed- lots feed half the cattle in the US and these are directly connected to the four processing firms that control 81% of the beef processing either by direct owner- ship or through formal contracts. Concentration of power over the food system is now remarkable, whether one looks nationally, regionally or globally. A web of contractual relationships turns the farmer into a sub-contractor, provid- ing the labour and often some capital, but never owning the product as it moves through the supply chain. The revolution in the food supply chain during the 20th century has industrialised food on a massive scale: manufacturers and food processors have adopted post- methods of just-in-time production, made possible by the use of IT to follow food from farm and manufacturer to the supermarket check out desk. Small and me- dium sized producers and retailers have been squeezed out by increas- ing monopolisation and the power wielded by the multi-nationals that dominate food pro- duction, distribution and retailing leaves governments with neo-liberal agendas little room for manoeuvre. The profits of the global food industry has a terrifying cost for workers. It is not only producing increasingly unhealthy popula- tions in the imperialist heartlands and in those areas adopting a western diet, espe- cially amongst the working classes and the poor, but also for those who work as wage labourers within these industries, illness and poverty wages are the norm. Felicity Lawrence in her book Not On The Label charts both the horrifying processes our food is subjected to before it ends up on our supermarket shelves and plates, and the ap- palling working and living conditions and ill health experienced by the migrant work- ers who dominate these industries. TOO MUCH COFFEE A few examples will suffice. If you won- dered why so many coffee houses litter the high streets of our towns and cities -the answer is cheap coffee. After 1990, the Vietnamese Government, forced into restructuring its economy by the World Bank and the IMF, encouraged its farm- ers to move out of growing the traditional rice crops for the domestic market, into producing coffee. With the heavy use of fertilisers and pesticides, Vietnam had, by 2000. transformed itself into the sec- ond largest coffee producer after Brazil. The deforestation, over-fertilisation and widespread irrigation necessary to pro- coffee, used mostly in instant coffee or blends, is pro- ducing severe environmental and ecolog- ical problems. 'And all this to produce an oversupply of coffee, just as the Brazil- 2.- All figures from 2002. Quoted in Tim Lang, 'Food Industrialisation and Food Power: Implications for Food Governance'. in Development Policy Review, 2003, (5) pp555-568 3.- The combined European grocery turnover is predicted to grow from Euro 37.1bn in 2000, to Euro 461.7bn by 2005 and Euro 669.7bn by 2010. 4.- There are strong links between sectors with chemicals linked to both the food industries and to pharma- ceuticals. Our ill-health is their super-profits. 5.- Tim Lang, Food Industrialisation and Food Power: Implications for Food Governance', in Development Policy Review, 2003, (5) p561 6.- F. Lawrence (2004) Not On The Label: What Really Goes into the Food On Your Plate, London. Penguin =...: 7 - F
ians were also bumping up their yields by mechanising and intensifying production with a greater use of agrochemicals.' " The result was a collapse in the price of coffee beans: producers in Latin America, Uganda as well as Vietnam, who can no longer afford to send their children to school or the cost of medicines; a banking crisis and governments unable to cover their budgets for education and health - and coffee houses on every street corner in our cities. EXPENSIVE SALAD LEAVES If you thought eating salad was a healthy option, then think again. Lawrence inves- tigates the growing conditions, harvesting. processing and retailing of the humble sal- ad leaf. This is the one you can buy ready washed in a convenient, modified-atmos- phere package, ready-to-serve at your ta- ble. You need only add salad dressing. In the bag she discovers five whole leaves. eighteen tiny whole leaves and seven torn pieces of dark green leaves, all for the princely sum of ninety-nine pence. Bagged salads did not exist before 1992 Now two thirds of households buy them regularly. The value of the UK salad veg. etable market had in fact grown by 90 per cent between 1992 and 2002. By 2002 it was worth £1.25 billion - more than the total value of the sliced bread market or the breakfast cereal market. This does not mean we are eating 90 per cent more salad - volumes have grown only by 18 - just that per cent over the same period the food industry has found ways to make much more profits out of salad. Before being bagged up, these leaves are routinely washed in chlorine. According to an industry company director, 'The chlorine WHAT WOULD WE DO? level is usually maintained at a minimum of 50mg per litre - twenty times higher than in the average swimming pool? The vacuum cushioning which protects the leaves is not just any old air either. Oxygen is reduced from 21 per cent to 3 per cent and carbon dioxide levels raised accordingly. In the process nutritional levels are destroyed so that by the time we are ready-to-eat this commodity there is little Vitamin C or E or any other micronutrient left. In ordinary life after a few days lettuce leaves go limp - but the wonders of modern packing keeps them looking fresh - it is just that there is no nourishment in them any more. summer salad production During the takes place in Britain - Norfolk, Sussex, Lincolnshire. the Vale of Evesham. In late October it moves to Spain, mostly in the Murcia and Andalusia regions. Here, under acres of plastic sheeting stretched over poles. grow the salad vegetables we have come to expect all the year round But unlike the olives and almonds tradi- tionally grown in such arid areas, these crops are thirsty - so much so that, along with the tourist industry that also guz- zles water. the water table here has so re- duced that the sea infiltrates the land. The ground water is also polluted by the over- use of pesticides and chemical fertilisers. Nitrate levels are ten times higher than WHO safety levels. The National Hydro- logical Plan for the Ebro Delta (Europe's second largest wetland) was intended to carry water to this region. But in June this year, after three years of campaigning the scheme was cancelled by the newly elect- ed Socialist Party government. The big agrochemical companies are here too - Bayer, DuPont, Monsanto and Syngenta - and the use of chemicals to grow this unnatural crop on a three har- vest a year cycle has reduced the soil to From the point of view of capital cheaper foods lowers the price of labour and in- creases profits. However, poor quality, mass-produced food means less healthy workers, which is why governments in Britain and elsewhere constantly exhort us to eat better, take exercise, etc. The contradiction can be solved in the short term by the super exploitation of work- ers outside the main imperialist centres. Hence the widespread use of more vul- agricultural nerable migrant workers across Europe and beyond. exhaustion - fertilisers make things grow but at the cost of mineral depletion of the soil. To continue this form of agriculture eventually the dead soil has to be exca- vated and new earth brought in. M!GRANT WORKERS Also brought in are the migrant workers. Just as on the farmlands of Britain, in South- ern Spain migrant workers are used to work these crops. Segregated from the nearby tourists and most of the local population, over 70,000 migrant labourers live amongst the pesticides and dust in conditions more akin to the nineteenth century. The industry is dependent on cheap and docile labour in excess. We have allowed a structure to emerge that enables our shops to be resupplied at short notice by casual labourers picked up from the road- șide whatever the hour in the Costa del Sol, or collected from their Dick- housing in rural England. ensian These workers are at the mercy of pecking orders as brutal as those in the turn-of-the-century American docks. We are told this has happened because people want cheap food. The paradox is that our fresh food is not cheap any more. By the time it has been packaged and transported, and the retailers have added their margins, it is very expensive. Ninety- nine pence for a few leaves is a lot of money. But 99p for an unlimited sup- ply of servants to wash and pick over it all, hidden not as in the old days below stairs, but in remote caravans plastic hothouses - that is cheap.!" Trade unions and socialis: parties ig- nore this at their peril. Globai iapital But irade requires a global response. union solidarity on its own will not be enough: we need to challenge the glo- bal food monopolie: :: level as well. New Lit:*: peals to the food more?: late themselves will here: ==:: 30ed by something more :.... 25