Globalised industrial agriculture is controlled by a few transnational corporations at different points in the value chain, from land, seeds and agrochemicals, to biotechnology, trading, retailing and consumer-goods companies. Hilary (2013: 120–121) summarises the global domination of transnational corporations in the food systems as follows:
Just three transnational corporations – Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta – control between them over half the world’s entire commercial seed market; all three are also ranked in the top ten list of world agro-chemical companies, which Syngenta dominates with close to 20 per cent market share, and all three are major players in the biotechnology industry. The four largest commodity traders – ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus – the ‘ABCD companies’ – enjoy significant power over world trade in grains, oilseeds and palm oil. The top ten food processing corporations control 28 per cent of the global market, with Nestlé far and away the largest single company, followed by PepsiCo and Kraft Foods. In addition, the world’s largest ten food retailers have more than doubled their share of the global market over the last decade as the major supermarket chains of Europe and the USA have sought to expand their operations … this intensity of market concentration means that a group of no more than 40 transnational corporations effectively control the global food regime from farm to fork, and have amassed spectacular profits as a result of their market domination.
To understand the food-system crisis we need to concentrate our focus not on single problems in the food system or on the inability of the food system to provide access to certain caloric levels. Such a focus ends up in technocratic problem solving inside the system. To appreciate the systemic nature of the food crisis requires a focus on the systemic logic of the transnational industrial agricultural system and how it engenders systemic food crises. The spread of this systemic dynamic, albeit uneven in the global political economy, is grounded in five contradictions.
First, it creates food injustice, or what Vandana Shiva (2013) terms ‘hunger by design’. In 1996 the Food and Agriculture Organization claimed there were about 800 000 hungry people on the planet. Today there are 1.52 billion hungry people and 2.56 billion who are food-stressed (Hilary 2013: 119). The irony of this situation is that farm workers, peasants and rural communities are some of the hungriest in the world, even though they are at the front line of food production. With dramatic increases in global food prices, first in 2006 to 2008 and then in 2010 to 2012, the poor and workers have been hit the hardest. These hikes sparked food rebellions in at least 40 countries, and demands for bread in the case of the Arab Spring revolutions. Yet in 2010 alone the world’s largest grain and agrochemical companies made profits between them of US$20 billion (Hilary 2013: 121).
Second, the industrial agricultural food system wastes large quantities of food at several points in the value chain: harvesting, handling, storage, processing, packaging and retail. In South Africa, estimates suggest that thirty-one per cent of annual food production (about 10 million tonnes of 31 million tonnes of food produced) is lost to waste in some form or another. Food waste is highest for fruit and vegetables: over fifty per cent produced is wasted along the value chain.9 Food wastage is part of a global trend and is tied to the phenomenon of cheap, unhealthy food, which is easily ‘disposed of’.
Third, this system increasingly displaces peasant farming and production, with the associated loss of indigenous knowledge systems.10 This is sometimes referred to as the ‘last great dispossession of the peasantry’. It is happening in the context of the economic liberalisation of the farming industry and when farmers are locked into being dependent on industrial fertilisers and genetically modified seeds for cash-crop production (Shiva 2013). In Mexico, South Korea and India, this system has led to widespread dispossession because of debt among farmers. In India alone, over 200 000 suicides among farmers have been reported. Another driver of dispossession is sovereign funds and foreign investors, who are buying prime agricultural land in Africa and other parts of the global South. Increasingly, the trend for land grabbing creates enclaves of export-led agricultural food production and biofuel production.
Fourth, although the transnational industrial agricultural system produces cheap food, it is mainly unhealthy food. This is not to argue a case for expensive food, but to recognise that industrial agriculture and its corollary of fast food have devastating effects on human life. Increasingly, obesity is becoming a worldwide problem along with various attendant health issues, like diabetes and heart disease. In the US obesity increased by seventy-one per cent between 1991 and 2001, and this is mirrored in various parts of the world as national studies and public discourse recognise the urgency of the crisis. However, the media and food corporations tend to claim this crisis is the result of bad choices by individuals, rather than the result of an ‘impoverished range of choices’ (Patel 2007: 273). With growing income inequality worldwide, obesity correlates with ill health among the working class and the poor.
Fifth, transnational industrial agriculture is considered to be one of the most ecologically destructive sectors in the global economy. There are several reasons for this. Oil is used in the manufacture of various agricultural inputs, such as fertilisers, and as fuel for machinery and transport vehicles. Carbon emissions are released in the value chains and particularly in the shipping of food. Cattle eructation and flatulence release immense amounts of methane into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. The quantities are significant, considering that there are about 27 billion head of livestock on the planet, which consume 750 million tonnes of fertiliser-intensive grain feed and 200 million tonnes of pesticide-intensive soybeans as feedstock (Roberts 2013: 26). Industrial agriculture is also implicated for the most intensive use of water of all sectors. The chemicals used in industrial farming pollute water systems and oceans. And, most importantly, mono-production of industrial crops kills off biodiversity and limits the capacity for organic plant varieties to adapt to climatic shifts. In short, the system is unsustainable.
Transnational industrial agriculture is destructive to human society and nature. It leads to food crises that tend to be genocidal and ecocidal, and hence it is a key historical expression of the crises of capitalist civilisation. Moreover, it is exacerbated in its links with other systemic crisis tendencies, such as financialised chaos, climate crisis, peak oil and the securitisation of democracy.
The securitisation of democracy
Modern democracy is about a people’s history of struggle to limit the power of capital and broaden modern citizenship to embrace non-property holders, women, non-whites and immigrants. It is also the story about the democratisation of the US constitution, particularly after the French Revolution (Wood 2004). In essence, modern democracy, through its advocacy of rights, freedoms and forms (representative, direct, participatory and associative), has embodied an impulse against capitalism as the expression of the will of the people. At the same time, capitalism has generally involved a formal separation between the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’; the state and market are deemed separate and distinct spheres of society, which is specific to a capitalist society. But, in practice, state intervention is crucial to realising the systemic imperatives of the market (Wood 2003). Liberal ideology has further authorised this separation, so that democracy is understood as separate from corporate power and is necessary to protect the individual from the abuse of state power; thus democracy is ‘for the people and by the people’. In the US, liberal democracy has been undergoing fundamental changes over the past few decades. In theory