Concentrated Corporate Power in Food Systems and Why it Matters

In this talk, political economist Jennifer Clapp explores growing corporate concentration that has become a dominant trend in food systems, with a special focus on the farm inputs sector. The talk highlights the complex drivers of concentration as it has unfolded over the past century, as well as the types of power that concentration confers to the dominant firms in the Agrifood sector. The social and ecological impacts of corporate power, and the kinds of policy responses that are required to address them, are also considered.

Presentation Transcript

Today I’m going to be talking about some of my more recent research on corporate actors, corporate power and food systems, and drawing ideas from my latest book called the Titans of industrial Agriculture. I’ll be talking about the food system broadly, but with specific examples from that book. And that book is focused on what we call the agricultural inputs industry. It’s focused on the industries that produce farm machinery that produce, fertilizer, pesticides, and seeds. And I know it may sound a little specific and a little bit nerdy, but it is the foundation of the food system and how we grow food in the modern era. And the book tries to uncover how we got from a situation where those inputs to farming, which weren’t even commodities 200 years ago, are now controlled just a handful of very large transnational corporations.

So the book is really about how we got from there to here, and it is a mix of, of historical and contemporary analysis. I organized my thoughts and how I’ll present to you today around three key questions. The first being: how did the agricultural inputs industry become dominated by a small number of massive firms? I have to admit, I was quite obsessed with this question, but at least it gave me a central core through throughout writing the book. The second question also driving why I was doing this work. What are the social environmental implications of public concentration in the sector? And then finally, what are the lessons for contemporary policy debates on food systems transformation?

So today we have an understanding in the policy world that we need to transform food systems. They are causing enormous environmental consequences, and they also are generating inequities. And we have this agreement that we need to transform, but there’s a disagreement about how we get there. And so, this work is really trying to contribute to that broader debate by showing, in my view, I’ll give way my argument at the beginning and I’ll return to that. But we need to pay more attention to corporate power and food systems if we want to have food systems transformation that it is just and sustainable.

In terms of my first question, how did the, this industry become dominated by a small number of massive firms? And I really like this cartoon because it illustrates what I want to say, which is that it was mergers and acquisitions in the sector that has played a very large role in how we got to such a small number of, of companies dominating today. But it is a complicated story. It’s not that in the past we had hundreds of firms and then we just gradually, eventually, ended up with just a few mean maybe that some of the story, but the concentration started way earlier than even I had recognized when I started.

In a way, like what that’s all about. But I want to explain that I got quite interested in asking these questions around 2014, 2015 when we started to see some big, massive changes in the sector. This was a time when there was a bunch of mergers going on in this space. But there were a bunch of mergers that was going on at this time. The first one was in late 2015 when Dow and DuPont announced that they were going to merge. So, these are two of the oldest and biggest chemical companies in the United States. The merger resulted in bringing these two firms together and then they divided it into three. And one of those three is this new form that we call Corteva that focuses specifically on agricultural chemicals and agricultural seeds. And I’ll talk about that in a minute. But that was the first merger.

That was the first thing to happen. Then very few months later, early 2016, we heard that Chem China, one of the biggest chemical companies in China wanted to acquire Syngenta, which is another multinational corporation that focuses on agricultural chemicals and did a little bit in the industry. And then that company, once they merged, actually got bought by another Chinese company called Sino Chem, which is the biggest chemical company in China and the biggest in the world. So, already we’re seeing this reconfiguration that was going on. Then a little while later we heard that Bayer was acquiring Monsanto and so now Monsanto, which you probably are familiar with because they have a bit of a notorious history with Agent Orange, etc., but they are now part of Bayer. Monsanto’s product line is now Bayer’s product line. So, these mergers were going on and before these mergers happen, we used to talk about the big six companies, but now we talk about the big four, sometimes big three.

So, what was also going on at this time is when these mergers happened, regulators have to approve them. And when they did approve these mergers, they actually told some of these companies they had to sell off some of their assets so that the mergers go through and not be as competitive. And so, the other major player that was part of the big six, which is BASF, stood ready to buy out all those assets. So, they were buying up some of the seed and chemical assets from bay and from the other. So, it got bigger, and it also became more diversified in this process. And then at the same time, in 2016, there was a massive merger in the fertilizer sector where you might not know these companies because we don’t all know the names of the companies fertilizer producers. But there was a big company called Agrium and a company called PotashCorp, which used to be actually a public corporation in Canada. These are both Canadian firms and they merged to form a new company called Nutrien, which is one of the biggest fertilizer companies now in North America.

So, as this was all going on, at the same time there was starting to be the series of smaller acquisitions. These were the big ones, but the farm machinery companies and some of the fertilizer companies and some of the seed and chemical companies were also buying up startup companies in software and in genomics. And so, this was the beginning of sort of digital agriculture and gene editing. And there was a ton of acquisitions going on in security. and I’ll talk a bit more about that later. But when I started into this project, I wanted to understand what was going on here. I initially was just going to look at seeds and chemicals, but I realized, wait a minute, this is going on everywhere in the sector and I want to understand it.

And that took me on to a very long journey, resulting in a book. It’s a bit too long because it covers all these sectors, but I think there’s value in looking at them side by side. So that’s sort of where I was coming from. And then in terms of what things look like in terms of seeds and pesticides, there’s this group of four companies that are quite dominant. They control globally about 60% of the world’s seed market and about 70% of the world’s pesticide market. And on fertilizers, this one’s a bit more complicated because it’s more regionally concentrated. We don’t have good data internationally, but just these four companies can dominate: Yara, Nutrien, CF Industries and Mosaic. These might not be household names to you. And then in terms of farm machinery, another four companies dominate, John Deere, CNH Industrial, Kubota, and AgCo. Again, some of those might not be household names, but those four companies control about 50% of the global.

But in terms of like what this looks like at the domestic level – I should stress here too, like these figures I’m giving are significant because most economists would say that if the top four companies control more than 40% of a market, you’re more likely to face distortions in that market. The risks of bad behavior simply get higher because of that level of concentration. And so, we’re seeing those levels in many, many parts of the Ag system, especially here in agricultural inputs. And if we look domestically, it’s a bit of a busy slide, but I try to find all the data that I could show in these domestic markets. And as you’ll see in the top row is concentration in the seed industry. And in particular, with these last ones, there’s something like 15 countries in the world for which the top four companies selling seeds in those markets has more than 80% of the market. So extreme levels of concentration, in many parts of the world, and similar with fertilizer. So here, you know, we can see in the US for example, which is where I could get the best data, the top four firms control 100% of the potash fertilizer market, 90% of the phosphorous fertilizer market, and about 75% of the nitrogen market. And in the US and Canada alone, one company, that’s just John Deere, controls 60% of the heavy-duty tractor market.

So, these companies are very dominant in these markets, and we need to understand should we be worried about this? And how did it happen? What does it mean and why does it matter? So, part of what inspired me to do this longer, deeper look into these questions was reading a pamphlet by Louis Brandeis, and he wrote in 1914 – this nice pamphlet, you can find it online, called Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It.

And I was interested in it because of my interest in the role of financial actors more generally in these questions of corporate concentration. And a quote from that publication. Brandeis said, “Size we are told is not a crime, but size may at least become noxious by reason of the means through which it was obtained, or the uses to which it is.” And so for Brandeis, he was really concerned about corporate power. He was especially concerned that corporations were getting big because he was writing at the time to gild an age, you know, and we talk about the Robber Barons and capitalism out of control. There was huge inequality and this really bothered him. And he saw mergers and acquisitions as a way that firms were getting big, that were giving them benefits that they didn’t necessarily deserve. It was through finance. It wasn’t through natural or what you might call organic growth. And he was also worried that too much concentration of wealth, you know, in whatever sector was a threat to democracy.

And I know that sounds really familiar to what we’re experiencing in the world today. And it was also happening over a hundred years ago. And so, what Brandeis called on people – if we want to understand that concentration and its consequences, we need to know how it was developed in the first place. So, he called on colleges to do that kind of work, and I found that really inspirational and nobody had done this with farm, you know, the farm input sector. And so that’s what I set out to do. And I was lucky, Norbert mentioned I had a fellowship. I had two years with no other obligation except research, and it was during the pandemic. So, I just kind of lost myself as research, which was kind of nice.

In terms of this question of how did these firms came to dominate, I just wanted to show you some of these nice images that I came across in the course of my research. Some of these companies you might have heard of before, maybe some of them you haven’t. But all of them are connected to the dominant firms that we have today.

So for example, the McCormick Harvesting Company. Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the, you know the reaper back in the 1830s, John Deere, that’s the same company we talked about today. Nancy Harris was a Canadian farm machinery company now part of AgCo. Funk Brothers Seed, it was a seed company, Illinois. And they got bought out by. And then they ended up, in these big chemical company Pioneer Seeds. They became part of, they’re now part of Corteva and the Dow Chemical and F.S. Royster fertilizers.

So, these were some of the biggest companies a hundred years ago. And they were already big. That’s what I found really, really interesting. And of course, in my research, this bigness and the input sector has actually been around for a really long time. And so, we need to understand how we got there.

What I do is I talk about three interrelated kind of forces that combine in ways that gave us this ‘bigness’ of how these companies ended up eating each other out quite quickly. And the first is related to market dynamics. And the first of those is economies of scale. Because what we often hear from companies themselves about how they got so big in the first place. How’d you get so powerful? They’d be like, oh, we benefit from the economies of scale. It’s good to be big because if you’re big, you’re more efficient, you can produce more product at a lower marginal cost per unit. And you know, we sort of deserve to have that bigness because we work hard to get there. That’s often a common argument.

And of course, there’s some element to that. That that is relevant because these economies of scale do matter. This is the McCormick Paper Works in 1902, right at the time that it merged with seven other companies that were producing farm machinery in the US to form a new company called International Harvester. And in 1902, around this time, I guess it was within a few years, that company controlled 85% of the Western market. So far more concentrated than even is the case today. And so, it is interesting. But you can see the massive size of this outfit. And this was I think it was the third largest employer in the US. So, a massive company. But interestingly, it doesn’t exist anymore. It got bought out, so we can talk about that.

Also, these companies were able to get big through mergers and acquisitions that they mentioned, partly because they had privileged access to finance. So, the deal that brought us the International Harvester Company, for example, benefited from money from JD Rockefeller, and relationships with big banks in New York. That kind of privileged access to finance gave these companies that ability to buy up, and also investor pressure in markets. So there has long been pressure to merge and acquire other firms, especially when times are tough. And that was the product of the becoming the international harvester with seven other companies and a few others were added in around that time was because there had been a depression in the farm sector and there was this pressure to merge, to control the market more, to bring returns back up.

And so, these are some common economic forces that have contributed to this massive growth in size of these companies even quite early on. But those factors are still relevant today. I just wanted to give a more contemporary example, which I find really fascinating. So these two shareholders who were hedge fund guys, Nelson Powell, you’ve probably heard of him – the corporate raider guy and his hedge fund Trian Partners at Daniel Loeb and his Third Point, they each acquired enough shares of Dow and DuPont, respectively to be able to be what we call activist shareholders. And they had enough of a percent of ownership that they could actually pushed the CEO to take action. And so, this happened interestingly, in 2015, a merger did eventually appear because they were pushing for it. And it was partly because, as you can see here, this is the corn prices started to fall after 2014. And that put pressure on these companies because it meant lower demand for their products. Their profitability was going down, they were underperforming in the S&P 500, and they were pushed to merge. So, these kinds of forces, they’re still with us. And leading to these continual agglomerations within the sector.

Technological factors are also really important, and they intertwine with the economic factors in really interesting ways. But technological change is a big force that I talk about in the book. And I put a picture here of the ammonia reactor from 1928 at the BASF plant in Oppau, Germany, which doesn’t exist anymore. But this is where they first did the Haber-Bosch process of nitrogen synthesis where they produced ammonia through chemical reaction. And that was super important in the fertilizer sector because. That technological change led to a kind of a reconfiguration of the fertilizer industry. It used to be based on guano, like bird dung, leftovers for meat packing like our and Swift, these big meat companies actually used to be producers of fertilizer. And suddenly it became more focused on this synthetic production of ammonia. And I was just reading about this facility, which had a massive chemical explosion in 1921 just after this picture was taken. Because nitrogen synthesis, it was extremely important. Because it also could be used for bomb making and war time purposes, and it explodes. But anyway, it’s kind of transformative.

Technological changes have been a big spark throughout the years in terms of leading to consolidation within the sector. So, the fertilizer, just one example, but hybridization of corn is another example of a technological change that led to consolidation or the synthesis of pesticide, that’s another one. And obviously the invention of the reaper and the steel tip plow, I mean these were all really important in leading to some of the bigness that’s been happening in sector. But of course, many of those technological inventions that protected by patents. And this is where it overlaps with government policy, and I’ll talk about that in a minute. But it gives firms with this technological edge, if they have a patent that they can have a legal monopoly with that technology for a period of time. And also technological lock-ins, these are super important. What we find generally is that there’s been a lock-in of these inputs that I’ve been talking about. So once a farmer adopted farm machinery, it made sense for them to use hybrid seeds because then they could do these larger scale operations. And once they were using the hybrid seeds, it meant made more sense for them to use fertilizer. Because you know, hybrid corn takes up more fertilizer, you can plant closer together. And then once you do that, well, you’re going to be more susceptible to pests, so you’re going to have to use pesticides.

And so, there’s this lock in of these different technologies that started to become this model of what we call today industrial agriculture. But because it was getting locked in, it gave these companies constant markets for their products, that made it was very difficult for farmers once they made a shift. There was a big shift to using mechanical harvesting equipment, but also a shift when tractors came along that were fueled with fossil fuels. And once there was a big debate, I found that so interesting in the 1920s and ‘30s. There was a big debate between do you keep your horse or do you move to a tractor? And there’s just a whole cottage industry, this question, which is fascinating. But once farmers made that choice to move to fossil fuel powered tractors, it became even harder to disentangle themselves from these kind of oligopolistic markets and larger companies at the helm.

So this is still happening today, this technological factor that’s leading to bigness, and I just wanted to cite the example of agricultural biotechnology because what happened in the 1980s and ‘90s was this technological innovation of being able to genetically modify seeds. And what the companies did, and this is so interesting, is they modified them to make them resistant to the application of herbicides. They didn’t modify them to do any number of things, but they chose to modify them to make them resistant to herbicides because it increased their sales. And this again, helped them to get bigger. But it also led to a series of mergers that are very important for the seed and chemical companies. They started to buy each other out. And instead of having separate feeding chemical companies, which is the way it used to be, now they started to be one set of companies producing both products because those products are so tightly interlinked.

These kinds of tendencies continue today. And then the third policy factor that I talk about is policy context. And I have the example here from the hybridization of corn. I like this example, I like this image, but it is a reminder that the research that brought us hybrid corn was actually almost entirely funded by the US government. The US Department of Agriculture and the land grant colleges did almost all the work for the hybridization of corn. And this is a super interesting story because once it became hybridized, it was really hard because you can’t plant hybrid corn. You can’t save the seed plan. You have to buy a new seed. And what that meant was that it became now commercially profitable for companies to dominate that sector instead of having farmers save and use their own seed.

So, it kind of created a commodity where they didn’t used to do one. And it was just a handful of companies that were largely able to benefit from this government research. And they continue to be the dominant firms almost from the get go in this sector. So, that’s quite interesting. Government support is really important and we can detect that in other industries as well.

It was very important in the fertilizer sector, as I mentioned, because fertilizer and ammonia synthesis were useful for bombs, so it was a strategic core interest, and so government supported that kind of work. They also supported the pesticides industry as well. And then obviously looking back to the previous slide, policies that protect intellectual properties. So, states that uphold these laws and policies give that limited monopoly to companies, but they’re often using that limited protection to create new innovations that allow them to lock in those technologies.

And then finally, the antitrust and competition policies. When these companies first came along, we didn’t really have very many policies, especially when we think about the origins of farm machinery in the 1830s and ‘40s. And the fertilizer industry also started around that time. The seed industry was a bit later in the synthetic pesticides, but it wasn’t until the 1890s that the US had the Sherman Act, which outlawed monopoly and then the Clayton Act in 1914, uh, which outlawed uncompetitive practices. And so, the lack of policies to prevent these kinds of mergers allowed this kind of free for all. But even so that even though the Sherman Act was passed in 1890, that merger in 1902 that created International Harvester, the lawyers working on that case said, it’s okay, we’re not monopolizing the whole market versus going take 85% of it. It should be totally fine. But there was also this deal between the President at the time and the company that he wouldn’t investigate. In just reading that stuff, I thought it sounded outlandishly. Unbelievable. Yet we’re living in this world today where I guess it be the case today too. So, these kind of policy factors – they do matter.

And I just wanted to point out in particular. One of the big issues more recently, which is that antitrust policy. Although the US did put those laws on the books and they had been rigorously enforced throughout most of the mid 20th century. But by the 1980s we started to see a relaxation of antitrust policy. And this was the rise of neoliberalism at the time. And this kind of more stepping back of the state and more reliance on the marketplace. And here’s a picture of Robert Bork with Ronald Reagan sort of one tiny example of neo policies. And Robert Bork wrote this book called The Antitrust Paradox in 1978. Bork, who himself is a polarizing figure and has an interesting history and be clear about that if you want, but he basically thought that antitrust policy was too strict in the US, that it was leading to higher prices. And he argued in this book that antitrust policy should focus only on prices. And if a merger happens and it brings prices down, that that should be allowed to happen because that benefits the consumer. But it left out a whole bunch of other stuff, like stuff that I’m going to be talking about. And there’s now a rethink of this policy. But it was really important, and this was kind of the prevailing sentiment at the time that the most recent mergers happen. So, the combination of these forces of the market forces, the technology forces, the policy forces, all combined in ways that delivered to us bigger and bigger companies that were controlling the sector.

So as I stated, what we saw was the seed and chemical companies basically becoming into Ag biotech giants. And through the mid-20th century, we also saw massive mergers in both our machinery and fertilizer industry. And I’m just going to quickly run through my graphics since I worked so hard on them. Just kind of showing the process and the mergers and acquisitions that happen.

You can see that I spent many hours late at night during the pandemic working on these, but I wanted to understand how we have this today and where did it come from. So, this is the farm machinery sector. Fertilizers, that’s a complicated one because there’s phosphorous, potash and nitrogen, so it’s a bit complicated. And also the pesticide and seed industry. So, I put a little plant here where they were buying seed companies, and that there’s a separate one for seed companies. But this is kind of what was happening. So, it is partly true that we had a lot of companies and they eventually became few. But it is also a process where they became few earlier than we might have thought, and that these forces are continuing to lead to that consolidation today.

And this is a graphic showing how all of those companies in the top four and all three of those areas are actually buying up the digital and gene editing companies. And these only go up to 2022. This is continuing all the time. It’s almost hard to keep track of and this is because they’re in digital farming. And now there’s actually concern that we might see all of these industries converging into one set of companies. And it might sound outlandish, but it might not. All of these companies are investing in digital farming and gene editing, which is kind of the next big input that’s connecting everything up. So, this could be the future, you know. One stop shopping for the farmer.

So why does this matter? What are the implications? And I want to say something about this image. When I found it, I was like, whoa. I thought that this was a modern image that someone had put the word power over the John Deere tractor. But it actually was a real advertisement for John Deere tractors. This is what they called the self-propelled tractors. They called it power farming. But I thought this was so apt because I’m talking about power and interested in power. So, I talk about three kinds of power that are of those same three forces I just talked about. But what happens when the firms get big is they gain the power to shape markets. So, they gain from market factors, but then they can shape those markets. They also gain the power to shape the direction of technological change. Also, in ways that can benefit them, and they gain the power to shape policy and governance. In gaining bigness, they also gained power. Power to shape the system in a way that let them stay big.

And this has been a very powerful and self-propelling kind of a force that’s been happening in the sector for many, many, many decades. I want to talk about some of the examples that help us understand how they are shaping markets, shaping technology, shaping policy governance. And I’ll focus more on the contemporary examples. Because these are the ones where they’re part of the debate about this transformation of food systems that we have to be aware of.

So, in terms of shaping markets, I just want to highlight a few examples of what I’m talking about here. And, basically what we’ve seen is in terms of market power, that’s like an economist term for when firms are able to shape policy in ways that allow them to gain excess profits. And they can do that in several ways. John Deere is a really good example of one of those ways, which was that John Deere has been dominating the market for farm machinery repairs. So as farm machinery has become more sophisticated it’s driven by software, just like any car with lots of electronics in it. John Deere has been forcing farmers who buy their equipment to sign end user license agreements that they can only repair those machines at authorized dealers or authorized repair shops. And what this means for farmers is they lose the choice. They can’t go to a third-party repair. They can’t even repair their own machinery. And this is a problem and it’s really sparked the farmers have been a big part of the right to repair movement because of these kinds of restrictive agreements that they’ve been forced to sign. It is so severe that John Deere has even said, in our defense, when you buy a tractor, you’re not actually buying the machine. You’re buying the right to use the machine. That’s the way they see it. It’s been very problematic because it’s been pushing prices for farm machinery repair and also cutting off farmers’ choices. And so, the FTC in the US is actually, this year, suing them for unfair corporate tactics. Meaning to require repair costs. And so that’s just one example of how these companies are able to shape markets by pursuing those kind of very restrictive policies that can dominate that market and drive up this policy. So that’s just one example.

Another example of this kind of shaping of markets happens during the period after Russia invaded Ukraine and food prices and fertilizer prices went crazy. You can see that in the graphic here, 2021-2022. Huge price spikes in fertilizer and the price of fertilizer as it was going up farmers were really upset. Of course, the companies were saying it’s not our fault. The prices are going up because our input costs have gone up. Supply chains are disrupted and there was a lot of that going on. But you can see in the graphic here, and I pulled this out of the S&P database, that their profits definitely did go up. But mostly companies would say, well, it’s not their overall profits that matter, it’s the marginal profits. But if you look here, the marginal profits of the companies, well, they also went up in that period of 2021, 2022. And that led many farmers to be very concerned that these companies might be profit sharing. In other words, they feared that they were simply raising the prices because they could get away with it. But similar to the arguments we’ve heard about grocery prices going up also in this period, I think the evidence here is pretty clear, pretty strong that the companies were not just making more profits because prices were higher, their costs were higher. They were making higher marginal profits, and they even bragged about it in their reports to their shareholders. Saying things like, the higher prices more than offset are higher input costs. So, this has been a big concern and the US Department of Agriculture have been looking into this.

A third example is also a way that these companies can shape the market is that the pesticide companies actually had been paying what they call rebates or loyalty payments to retailers. So that the retailers would keep generic products off the shelf and drive more sales to the name brand products from these companies. And they were actually paying the retailers slightly more money than they would gain had they been selling the generic products. But it also improved the profits of these companies because it drove up their volumes. They are now being investigated. This from 2022 when the FTC under Lina Khan in the US is a bit more aggressive and going after these cases. But perhaps we’ll see now. But they were being sued for this because they argued hundreds of millions of dollars extra that farmers had to pay for their inputs as a result of this kind of practice. And what struck me as so interesting is these kind of rebate practices they date back a century. These were being used by the farm machinery companies with steel companies way, way, way back.

And I’m not saying that concentration always leads to these kind of outcomes, but it certainly heightens the risk. That it will happen when we see these very extreme levels of concentration that these companies tend to try to shape the market and they can get away with it. Because when there’s so few companies, if one of them decides to do a practice, the others tend to follow up. Rather than try to compete with a leader, they actually follow suit. And it’s been a common pattern, um, that we’ve seen in terms of shaping market. They also shape technologies and, and I mentioned the example of the herbicide resistant seeds.

This is a picture I took off the road there, soybean plants that have been sprayed with Lysate Pioneer. They still use the Pioneer brand, but it’s only now by Diva. Um, and this kind of shaping of the technological landscape by making seeds resistant to the application of fertilizer. You can see what happened here since 1990 to 2014. A massive increase in the use of glyphosate globally as the number of farmers increased their purchase of these genetically modified seeds. It’s actually even hard now for farmers to find seeds that aren’t genetically modified. They’re kind of locked into using these chemicals, but there are huge ecological consequences. And I pulled up the US data as well because it takes us to 2018. But you can see here the increased glyphosate use and it is mostly corn and soybeans on which it’s being used. So you can see. You know, this kind of shaping of technology, and in this case, these firms, they shape it in ways that benefit their bottom line.

They’re not necessarily thinking about the public good, which is why they become very defensive about this chemical bank. Because it’s important to their business model. They’re also shaping technologies through driving installations around digital farming. Again, this is like a huge shift in change in the sector and it is super interesting, because it’s an argument that they’re saying is improving the efficiency of farming. And it’s good for dealing with environmental problems because you can more precisely spray, for example, you can spray only where the weeds are, or you can fertilize only where necessary. So, it will lead to some improvements in terms of efficiencies. But at the same time, there’s a whole host of questions that critics have been raising about them. So, for example, it’s not clear who owns the data because the way these systems work is that farmers have these total get up on their tractors with sensors and satellites. So, you know, they’re connected to the cloud, they’re set constantly sending data about their soil, the weather, the seeds, you know, etc. And then that data goes into the cloud and the firms use it to give prescriptions to farmers of like how to be, you know, more productive in terms of farming. But who owns that data?

The companies own that data. Farmers are signing away their sovereignty over their own data. And there’s also privacy issues. And there’s concern about this kind of platform power that these companies now have over these farmers. So that’s the way they’re shaping that technology. They’re doing it in ways that help their bottom line, not necessarily the farmer’s bottom line. Because again, a lot of this isn’t about getting rid of pesticides. It’s about using ideas differently, which is still selling pesticides and also with that platform power these companies are tying in. This is so interesting. They’re tying in the soil carbon credits and saying to farmers, you can get paid for doing farming that sequesters carbon, etc., but you can only benefit from that program if you sign on to the digital targeting software that they are selling you. So again, locking farmers in. And some of these soil carbon credit contracts are like 20 years that farmers get locked into. So again, there’s shaping technology, but it raises a whole bunch of issues for environment and for the agency of farmers.

And I just mentioned as well, they’re shaping gene editing. This is another interesting area where originally this CRISPR technology was seen as very democratizing and open because it was being made freely available to researchers, but not for the commercial use. So, what happened was that Corteva has basically amassed almost all the patents for crop drones using these technologies. And so they end up operating as a gatekeeper for everybody else. And by shaping the ability to use this technology in a commercial setting, they’re in that cutting off opportunities for others to benefit from that technology. And of course, there’s a whole host of other issues that people have raised about this technology. It’s not perfect. There can be off target events. We don’t really know what happens when we release modified genes into the environment. But they’re making this a big part of their strategy.

The third area where they are using their power and affecting outcomes is through their shaping of policy and governance. And there are a number of strategies firms have used to shape policy and governance. One of them is lobbying. That’s like an obvious thing we always think about when we think about corporate influence. And indeed, here’s a picture of the top CEOs in 2016, people called in front of a senate hearing to talk about that industry consolidation. It looks like they’re really trying hard here to make sure that they’re allowed to merge and acquire one another, which they were eventually. But these companies like the Ag, Big Ag spends, they’re the top 10 spenders in the US in terms of lobby spending to government. They’re giving money to political candidates. They’re paying huge amounts of lobbyists to go visit policy makers all the time. Most of those lobbyists used to work for the company at some point or another. This kind of environment in which these lobbyists are trying to basically get that your policymakers to pass laws and policies that benefit them in the bottom line.

What I find super interesting is that Bayer actually now has a political transparency report, which is kind of an interesting idea thin. They’re actually disclosing because they have to disclose what they, in the US and Canada, kind of their lobby activities, and they actually put a map here about where they’re spending most of their money. But in total, they spent over 50 million euro, which I calculated as 54 million US in one year on these kinds of issues. And this is just the European Union part of the report, where they’re basically very clear that they want to influence policy on both the use of like glyphosate and herbicides. And on gene editing, they’re trying to get weaker rules and regulations in editing because the EU is more inclined to treat them like GMOs, and they want them to not be treated like GMOs. They’re also doing other kinds of strategies as well. You might have heard about. Monsanto has secretly funded academic studies on glyphosate to show that it’s safe. They actually contracted academics to write the, write the reports, put the names on them, and they ended up getting published in a real journal, Critical Reviews of Toxicology or something like that. And then most studies got used in the policy making process when the chemical was reregistered for you. So, again, I’m not saying this always happens, but it happened in this case and we only know about it because there was a court case about, about cancer as a result of, and this was part of the discovery process and the company had to release all of these materials, including internal emails that talked about how they wrote and edited these studies that others spied on to. And those professors didn’t even acknowledge the connect even though they were paid. And they’re also shaping public discourse all the time. I found this recent report that they’ve been complaining for 30 or 40 years that the cost of regulation is just too high. And again, they’re putting this out as public, uh, information to get their ideas into the arena where policy making gets made.

And finally, they’re also engaging in things like public private partnerships. And this is just an example of the, um, crop life. If you haven’t heard of CropLife, it’s. Sounds like a really nice thing. CropLife. It’s a lobby group for the pesticide companies and they have global operations. They have US operations, Canadian, European, you know, et cetera. But CropLife International made a partnership with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and this upset a lot of activists who can seem quite upset from this image they produced. Because the partnership was about managing pesticides, not reducing pesticide use. And again, this has been something the FAO had previously committed to and it looked like they were backtracking.

So, these public private partnerships are another example of the ways in which these corporations can influence policy governance. Once they get big, they have more access to these policy making settings as we saw in the 2021 Food Systems Summit.

So, this is a summary that, and I use this image in the book, but to show the risks. As I said, it is not that, that these are linear relationships that always happen, but there’s enough examples of them happening over the last 200 years that I think we can say there’s a risk. And it is a pattern that we’ve seen this higher level of concentration leading to these kinds of power. That can lead to outputs that then have real material significance for the food system. It can reinforce inequalities, undermine democratic participation, externalized, environmental costs, locking technologies, fewer opportunities for entrepreneurs, farmers losing autonomy, and also higher costs. So, these kind of impacts have been happening in the food system and I guess part of the reason I was working on this topic is a bit of a frustration that the Food Systems Summit that I mentioned that happened in 2021, they didn’t even have corporate power on their research agenda. In fact, civil society demanded that they include corporate power as a stream of inquiry. They refused and civil society boycotted that meeting. So, as I was working on the book, it was in this context of we need to pay more attention to this issue. And the history shows how important that is. And I’m happy to say that I was actually contacted last week because several UN organizations now want to do a work program on corporate power. So that’s good. Also, I just want to quickly say that these costs that I’ve just outlined were direct costs, but the wider cost of the industrial agricultural model are hard to disentangle from this process of corporate concentration. They came at the same time and they’re connected to the rise of these technologies.

I put up some bold books here because I just wanted to illustrate that the critiques of this industrial agriculture are really bold. They dig back at least a century. So, for example, there was The Dust Bowl and the decimation of soils from plowing. There were books about farmers are always poor because and in that case the book was about corporate concentration about how the soil is damaged from pesticides and fertilizers. And, of course, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

And usually when we teach in environment, we start here with Rachel Carson. But these books are from the 1930s and 1940s. There’s been a long critique and that includes. People being displaced from the land as a result of mechanization in the first place. The United States and Canada were like the prime areas where indigenous peoples were basically pushed off land as Army moved west and it moved west because of that machinery and those chemicals, etc., being available.

Also, a lot of that concern around soil damage and fertility loss, biodiversity loss from hybridization. This was actually like a commission in the US government in the 1930s to protect seed biodiversity because of seed hybridization. So immediately there was concern because those seeds came on the market in the 1920s. Not even a decade later, there was concern about these issues.

Of course, the toxic pollution and pests becoming resistant to chemicals. We can add now that we can understand more climate change, that’s a huge consequence not just to the fossil fuel use and machinery, but also the fossil energy for nitrogen fertilizers and the use of nitrogen fertilizers leading to nitrous oxides, which are more potent than greenhouse gases.

So, there’s a whole host of these kinds of consequences. And new farmers are lacking access to resources. Lacking access to land, for example, because land consolidation was a big product of mechanization. So, it’s hard to say, oh, these handful of companies are responsible for all that, but it’s hard to actually disentangle them because these processes are very, very connected.

And you know, even the displacement of farmers from land that happened in the 1930s for the rise of tractors, that disadvantage Black farmers who were, for example, sharecroppers or renters or poor farmers who didn’t have enough money to own their own land in the first place. Once farmers got tractors, they basically kicked people off the land. And so, this was a huge issue, and this was actually discussed in US policy documents in the 1940s of these social consequences. There’s a report called Technology on the Farm, and it goes through all these kinds of consequences. But it was remarkable we’re not almost a hundred years later talking about that.

So, I just wanted to stress these concerns have been around for a long time. They’ve been recognized, but the voices that are raising those critiques haven’t always been heard.

I want to talk about the lessons or policy debates. This is a picture from the Committee of World Food Security where I was a member of an expert panel that was informing government on these issues. And food systems transformation is their big concern in this policy context. I’d like to point out the kinds of policies that I think are really important to tackle corporate power sector to address the kind of problems that, that I mentioned.

One is simply stronger policies to make economies more competitive. To move away from this kind of highly concentrated sector that is lacking competition. We need policies that actually prevent those mergers from happening, but in some cases, they might actually need to break up companies that are already dominating and continually causing these kinds of problems.

Antitrust, I think, also needs to be stronger, moving away from just looking at the price impacts, looking at activities. But also impacts to innovation. These are kind of a wider view of antitrust, but that’s the view that Louis Brandeis had when he was so instrumentally pushing for antitrust in the US over a hundred years ago. He wasn’t just thinking about prices, he was thinking about opportunities for people to engage in livelihoods that were meaningful. And so, this is super important that we have a stronger antitrust and also cooperation across different countries because, um. These, these decisions about mergers, they actually happen in all countries.

It’s not like there’s a global decision, there’s not one decision. The decision is as many countries as possible in which those companies are operating. So there needs to be more coordination. I also strongly advocate for more public research into alternative agricultural food system model like agroecology. So, agroecology is a model of farming that doesn’t rely on synthetic pesticides and fertilizers and modified seeds in big scale farm machinery. It’s more using nature to solve the problems that those technologies were trying to address. So, intercropping, and natural crop management, etc., And those kind of farming models, as you can see with like intercropping going on in this picture, it’s hard to have a big farm machinery come in and do the harvesting in these kinds of situations. So, it might be more labor intensive, but it’s also more ecologically sound and it creates meaningful livelihoods for people.

And what really struck me in doing the research that I was doing was that the state, like the government and the US and including in Canada, played a huge role in bringing us the industrial agricultural model. They can, again, play a huge role in bringing us an agroecological model because it is vital if we want to have a sustainable plan. So that’s a second big area. And the third one that I talk about is the need to basically address the corporate capture of the food system governance.

This is an image from the Granger Movement, which is the right to food organization that I really like. This cartoon that they did, because it was in response to the back of the Food Systems Summit wasn’t going address worker power, so they wanted to make an image that showed why it wasn’t. But this really needs to happen, that we need to have stronger rules of conflicts of interest. We need to have stronger rules on corporate lobbying and shine to light more on the kind of practices that have been undermining. So, coming to an end here, and I just have to explain this image, I love this image. This is a poster from the Granger movement and the Granger movement was in the 1870s, 1860s-1870s in the US and it emerged as a pushback against corporate power, especially the farm machinery companies at the time who were the equivalent of big tech today. Four and five Americans were farmers at the time, and they really felt they were being ripped off by the machinery companies. They called for different model, but their different model wasn’t what we’re talking about today. Their different model was they wanted to make their own farm machinery and make it more affordable. And they tried that, but it actually failed, which I think is interesting.

We need to learn from those failures. But anyway, I like the image. But the key takeaways that I would argue that corporate power in the sector has very deep roots and it reveals important insights about patterns of control and sustainability of food systems over centuries. I think that’s important for us to remember that it is always been there. In terms of industrial agriculture, I would also say a big takeaway is that examining this interaction of market technology and policy factors gives us a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic. Because it’s tempting just to say it’s all capitalism or just to say these companies are evil. But actually, I think we need to get inside of what’s going on and disaggregate it and look at it. And that’s really what I tried to do in the book is to see what these specific kinds of dynamics are and how do they interact. And finally, my big takeaway is that food systems transformation requires us to tackle corporate power. We need to have that conversation, and I’m delighted that there seems to be growing interest in this issue even in the global context. And with that, I will say thank you.

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