- Corporation: n. "that inglorious device for obtaining
individual profit without individual responsibility." - Ambrose Bierce,
The Devil's Dictionary, Neale Publishing Co: 1911
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- 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
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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 www.ea1.com/CARP/
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- Organic Consumers Association http://www.purefood.org
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