Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [37]
Sixth, the size of the major grain traders, and the wealth they are accruing as export sales mount, allow them to expand into virtually every aspect of the food industry.
Cargill has used its export bonanza to acquire even more ships and elevator space at major ports (Cargill and Continental already control half the space);21 to expand its poultry operations (Cargill already ranks fourth in the U. S.);22 to expand its animal feed operations (Cargill is already the nation’s second largest producer);23 and to enlarge its soybean and sunflower processing operations (Cargill may already be the largest soybean crusher in the world).
Cargill is also the number one cattle feeder in the country.24 Cargill’s new export profits allowed it to purchase the giant meatpacking firm Missouri Beef Packers (MBPXL) in 1978. (At that time MBPXL itself ranked 213th of the Fortune 500.) With Cargill’s huge assets behind it, it took only one year for MBPXL to push past Swift to become the country’s second largest meat packer, just behind Iowa Beef Processors—which itself was just bought by one of the country’s biggest oil companies, Occidental, as I just noted. These top two producers are now wiping out smaller competitors. Some investigators suspect that concentration in the meat industry is responsible for a significant chunk of the meat-price increases over the last ten years.25
Such increasing vertical integration means that profits, picked up at every stage from raw commodity to sales, accrue to fewer and fewer firms. Not only does this process lead to the concentration of wealth, but it also allows for more market manipulation.
Since our nation was founded, Americans have resisted such economic concentration, believing that mammoth, unaccountable economic units operating behind closed doors are antithetical to democracy. Nevertheless, economic concentration has been quickening and, in the 1980s, it is gaining speed in a “merger mania” blessed by the Reagan administration and fueled by the oil companies’ burgeoning profits.
The concentration of economic power, the dependence on unstable international markets, the unaccountability of the most powerful economic forces—all these are characteristics I learned to associate with misery in the third world. But there is a fourth important parallel that we must face—less visible but equally threatening. It is the mining of agricultural resources for short-term gain. In Part II of this book I describe this threat to our food security.
My path has taken me from years of desperation in the 1960s (desperation because I did not understand the root causes of needless suffering) to a study of the roots of third world hunger in the 1970s and, finally, a return home in the 1980s to face the crises in our own food and agriculture system—shockingly similar to systems I have seen in the third world. In this twelve-year process I began to see patterns in what before had been an overwhelming jumble. A framework for understanding began to emerge. Using this framework, I have struggled to identify paths of action that are both meaningful and satisfying. Knowing we can’t take on the whole system, where do we begin?
First let me make very clear that I am not suggesting everyone become a “food activist.” Yes, I do feel that food problems have a special ability to open doors of understanding—everyone eats and everyone likes to talk about food! But I also believe that most of the gravest problems facing our society today have common roots. Whether the issues be education, health, the legal system, or energy policy, the underlying cause is the distribution of power and wealth which determines how decisions are made and for whose benefit.
In 1980 the Institute published What Can We Do? Food