[00:00:00] Speaker A: The ecosystem has collapsed again. Frogs.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: We need more frogs.
[00:00:17] Speaker C: Good planets are hard to find now. Temperate zones and tropic climbs, and not through currents and thriving seas.
Winds blowing through breathing trees, strong ozone, safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: Hello, Case Squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly Case Good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. Big Agriculture is big and it appears to be getting bigger as the leading companies in four critical sectors, equipment, seeds, fertilizers and chemicals consolidate in order to dominate their markets and the farmers who buy their products. My guest today is Dr. Jennifer Clapp, who has just published Titans of Industrial Agriculture, How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and and why It Matters. Clapp is Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. Her other recent books include Food 3rd Edition and Speculative Financialization, Food and Agriculture. She's a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Swedish Royal Academy of Agriculture and Forestry, as well as a member of the international panel of experts on sustainable food systems.
Professor Jennifer Clapp, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:02:01] Speaker D: Thank you. Great to be here today.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Before we begin, I just want to say your new book, I find your new book to be a remarkable piece of work.
I read it with really, with great interest. You've been working in the global, on global food issues for a really long time now. And I was wondering, how did you get started on that particular topic?
[00:02:23] Speaker D: Wow, that's a big question. I've always been interested in food, just from a personal level. I like to cook, I like to eat. And I also had some really inspirational professors in graduate school who opened my eyes to some of the big political economy issues around food and hunger in the world. And I brought my background and interest in economics and the global economy into the food area and realized it's just. Yeah, one could spend one's entire career looking at the various issues happening in, in the global political economy of food. Because there's just so much, so much going on.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: Maybe you can provide a short summary of, of this long book. How long did it take you to do the research and writing? And I mean, when did you start on this particular book too?
[00:03:13] Speaker D: Yeah, it's a great question. Well, there were some big mergers and acquisitions happening kind of at the end of 2015, early 2016, and I was extremely interested in what was going on, but I was in the Middle of writing a different book on financialization in the food system. And so I really had to finish that other work before I could pick up the work on corporate power. And in there I had a concussion which kind of set me back some months, which was unfortunate. But I'm healed now and it was really around 2019 to 2024 that it took me to write the book. So really a good five years and I had a two year research fellowship in the middle of that, which enabled me to put all of my effort into writing the book. And that was during the pandemic years. So I was able to finish it because it is a big piece of work.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Maybe you can summarize the book.
[00:04:05] Speaker D: Basically the idea of the book, what I'm trying to convey is that concentration in the sector around farm inputs and here we're talking about farm machinery, seeds, chemicals and fertilizers. It's a story that's really complicated. It's not simple. So the companies are often saying themselves they got really big just because they're good at what they do, they're more efficient, they're more clever, they're better. But what I try to show in the book is that actually there's a complicated set of factors that lead to bigness and it's something that we should be aware of if we want to address it. So one of those things is that to some extent these companies benefit from economies of scale that let them get really big. But also they benefit from privileged access to finance and they also benefit from technological changes that have encouraged consolidation. They've been, in other words, at the right place at the right time. And also they have benefited from government policy and support. So it's not a simple story that they're just better. They actually have had a lot of advantages that let those firms get really big. And then I argue that once they get really big, they can exercise different kinds of power that enable them to stay big. So they get the power to shape markets, they get the power to shape techn technological trajectories and they get the power to shape policy and governance. So it's the very things that let them get big. They actually get so big that they can kind of control those factors. And I argue that this process in the farm inputs industry has basically delivered us a kind of industrial form of agriculture that has had huge social and ecological consequences. And that we have to understand that process which took place from the 1840s to today as one of an.
There's been an entanglement, let's say of the corporations that brought us, the big corporations that brought us industrial agriculture and industrial agriculture itself. Actually, it's really hard to separate them out. So I argue in the book that this process has continued to today and that if we want to address the kind of ecological and social problems associated with industrial agriculture, because there's a lot of talk right now about this need to transform food systems to make them more equitable and sustainable, that we have to tackle the elephant in the room, which is corporate power. So that in a nutshell is the argument of the book.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Well, that's a, that's a good nutshell for our listeners. It might be useful to define political economy.
You know, it's a term which has come to mean something different than its more classical usage. So how do you use that term, political economy?
[00:06:50] Speaker D: How do I use it? I. Well, I think, I think of political economy as really about the study of power in the economic realm. The sort of who gets what, why and with what effect.
Bringing together our understanding of what's going on in global marketplace, you know, investment finance and trade and understanding the politics of how, how things shake out really. And I think this current moment where we're seeing, you know, ructions and gyrations on the global marketplace, it's very political. It's hard to explain it simply with.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Yes, it's almost purely political. Yes, those who, economists who try to explain it are having a really difficult time.
I want to take on a bit of history here. I know for example, that in the machinery sector, which we may come back to later, back in the 1819th century, there were, there were dozens if not hundreds of companies making machines. And the, the usual process was that companies would go bankrupt and get bought up by other which would get larger and larger. That's what Rockefeller did to, to build Standard Oil. But it sounds like more recently the issue is less bankrupt companies and more on the side of speculation and, and shareholder value, you know, rather than. And so companies have to get big in order to sustain their sector of the market. I don't know if I've put words in your mouth, but I mean, is that a, an accurate description?
[00:08:28] Speaker D: Yeah, to some extent for sure. We've seen this rise of shareholder value as being primary in terms of investors mindset and they want constantly to expand share value so that they get big bigger returns. But to some extent there's sometimes also responding to dips in the market that might push for specific mergers happening at a specific time. So for example, When Dow and Dupont merged in 2015, that was after About a year of depressed commodity prices. These companies had seen reduced sales of their. Their pesticide products in particular, especially in Latin America. And that led to declining share values. And so then they pushed, certain activist investors pushed for a merger to happen in order to basically improve the market share of that company that resulted, but also to drive up returns. So there's a bit of, you know, shifting going on in terms of the rise of financialization driving some of these mergers and acquisitions today. But it is, and to some extent, responding to some changes in the marketplace itself.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of people think that agriculture, both big and small, is in crisis. Big farmers have to get bigger in order to remain competitive. But many large farms can't stay in business because, you know, they're. They're. They end up being very marginal in terms of. Of profits. And small farmers struggle to remain in. In operation and avoid getting swallowed up. And then there are billions of people who still engage in subsistence agriculture on really tiny plots of land. And amidst all of this, at least in the United States, farmers are aging out. So is agriculture in crisis?
[00:10:16] Speaker D: Yeah, it's a great question, and I do think agriculture is in crisis. The crises, you know, the issues that you just mentioned, and I would say that these problems have been, in a way generated by and exacerbated by the rise, the rising dominance of industrial agriculture, not just in North America, but also we're seeing this spread globally into the Global South. And we see a situation where farm farmers are in crisis because they've found themselves squeezed in a way between purchasing inputs from a concentrated set of companies, which, when those companies are concentrated, they can charge more, and farmers lose some autonomy in terms of how they farm. And then on the other end, they're selling their products to a different set of companies, but they're also highly concentrated. And so they don't have a lot of bargaining power in terms of how much they can get for the crops that they sell. So they've called this kind of. This price cost squeeze, you know, that farmers are caught in the middle of these very dominant actors, and they're losing power in the system. And that's a problem for their sustainability of their livelihoods. And we can add to that the. The crisis, the ecological crisis associated with industrial agriculture as well, where industrial agriculture, or agriculture in general, but a lot of it being industrial, is responsible for around a third of greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
We've seen about 75% loss of agricultural biodiversity in the course of a century. And of course, there's growing pollution from rising use of chemicals. And so there are huge ecological challenges associated with this model as well. So I think the crisis is both in terms of farmer livelihoods, autonomy and equity in the food system, as well as ecological.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: You talk about industrial farming, which implies industrial farms. How big are these farms? Who controls them and, you know, what do they grow?
[00:12:10] Speaker D: Yeah, so when I'm talking about industrial farms in the book, and a lot of the examples from the book are coming from North America because that was the sort of the birthplace of this large scale industrial agriculture. But these farms can be multiple, thousands of acres.
Really, really big, big farms that are producing industrial style crops like soybean and maize and wheat and canola. And these are the kinds of crops that are often basically considered ingredients that go into other kinds of products as well, like processed foods, but also into biofuels and animal feed. And so this sort of really giant farms producing these kind of crops using machinery and, you know, specialized modified seeds, using lots of herbicides and fertilizers like these, like maize, for example, is one of the biggest fertilizer using crops there is. These are kind of the industrial crops on these really giant farms. And the US is an interesting case too, because the average farm size is still around 450 acres or so. But that really, that really shrouds what's really going on in there because most of the food is actually produced by the really giant farms. And then there are these hobby farms that are smaller and.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I know. I just, I want to mention that I think in California, the Average size is 240 acres, but the vast majority of farms are less than 50 acres.
And I think that that follows across the country, across North America.
You're listening to Sustainability Now, I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz, and my guest today is Dr. Jennifer Clapper, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. And we're talking about her new book, Titans of Industrial Agriculture. And we were just talking about industrial farming.
The, the, the paradox. Well, and this has been going on for a long time, is that bigger these farms get, the more they produce and the more that depresses prices of the grains.
Right. Which then puts them in this sort of economic bind, this, this cost price bind.
So is that inevitable that, you know, over. I mean, it's overproduction, basically. And that's why we put, you know, corn into ethanol, for example, and try to export. Well, we used to, we used to try to export food. I don't know what's happening now with that.
[00:14:57] Speaker D: Right. And that's a long standing problem that came with the industrial of ag industrialization of agriculture itself. I mean, even by, you know, with the advent of tractors in the early 20th century, within a few decades, there was massive overproduction. And this presaged the, you know, during the Great Depression, there was this huge overproduction because farmers were trying to produce more to increase their incomes and the more they produce, and that led to falling prices. And it was exacerbated by the Great Depression. And Henry Wallace, who, the Secretary of Agriculture who subsequently became vice president under Roosevelt, he put in policies to try and rectify that problem by reducing the amount of land that farmers could actually farm on. And the irony of that policy was that it encouraged farmers to adopt hybrid seeds because they wanted to grow more on the land that they could harvest. And so that, that led to, to higher production because hybrid seeds could be planted more closely together and then they could get more out of the land. But that required more chemicals and machinery as well. So it was kind of a. It kind of locked farmers into a certain kind of system. But the, but the basic problem of overproduction has remained. And the United States has taken measures over the course of the last century, various measures to try and address that problem. One being food aid, which they implemented policies in the 1950s to basically try and give that food away. But actually they mostly sold it at a discount because, you know, they wouldn't want to give anything away for free except in emergency situations. But there have been all these different ways in which there's. We've seen the US Government as an example, trying to find an escape valve for the extra production.
[00:16:47] Speaker B: So there are four sectors in the agricultural services business. Right. As you mentioned already, seeds, fertilizer, machinery and chemicals. Tell us something about each one of those and how they fit into agriculture and farming.
[00:17:06] Speaker D: Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. And I sort of talk about these in the book in kind of a certain order because it's sort of the way the order in which they were developed and the order in which it kind of led to this interconnection of the different technologies into what I would call a locked in, kind of a farming model. So farm machinery that began really in the 1840s with Cyrus McCormick, Invention of the. The reaper. He's the most famous reaper inventor. But there were others, several others. In fact, he wasn't necessarily the first.
[00:17:40] Speaker B: Also. The Grim Reaper.
[00:17:41] Speaker D: Yeah, the Grim Reaper, yeah. And he developed these machines and, you know, got patent protection and was able to produce them. But that gave way in the early 20th century to tractors, self propelled machinery that could pull plows, and plows came around also. Plows have been around for thousands of years. But the steel tip plow developed by John deere in the 1830s and 40s was also really important because it was important in the US context that it, the steel was so nice and polished that it would allow the soil not to stick to the plow. And that was a big game changer for many farmers. But that, you know, when we talk about farm machinery, it's kind of those are the big machineries that we're talking about. But there's other implements, farm implements that could either be pulled by a horse or subsequently pulled by a tractor for seeding, spraying, you know, all the kinds of stuff you see when you drive through the countryside and see farm machinery. So that's one big sector. And I would sort of put that first because it had really big consequences.
[00:18:43] Speaker B: So I have a question about that. So, I mean, there's this sort of relentless trend to automate. Right. In order to reduce labor inputs and labor costs, which is again, a, A, a problem that we've seen for certainly since the advent of capitalism.
I just wanted to mention that. I don't know if I have a question about it, but.
[00:19:03] Speaker D: Okay, yeah, yes, it has been about saving labor and it's, it's important that this technology was originally took off in North America because North America had a relative labor shortage compared to Europe.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:18] Speaker D: So there was this need, perceived need to, to really save labor in that, in that respect.
And then the next sector, fertilizer, this obviously similar timing. But it was around the 1840s that there was this scientific work. Justus von Liebig publishes this work about what plants need to grow effectively. And he talks about nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. And he presents them as the kind of nutrients that can be brought to the farm from off the farm to help plants. Previously there was this humus theory of soil fertility, which was all about the soil structure and manure and other kinds of natural wastes were seen to be providing fertility needed for plants. And he was like, well, you can also bring in stuff from outside. And that gave rise to things like the guano trade because there was this recognition that bird dung from the Chincha Islands of Peru was high in nitrogen. And there was also the use of leftover animal bits from the livestock industry, also rich in nitrogen, bones rich in phosphorus and potassium.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: Yeah, you have that story about mining bones in, in France. Yes, in order to make fertilizer, which is pretty gruesome, but let me just.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: Read the paragraph from the book about that. Phosphorus rich bone based fertilizer or bone.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: Meal was also used from the early.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: 1800S, with animal bones typically ground into a powder or burned to ash to enable easier absorption of their nutrients into the soil. There are even widespread reports noted in the press at the time that the bones of fallen soldiers were raided from European battlefields in the 1810s, including at Leipzig and Waterloo, and shipped to Britain to be ground for sale as agricultural fertilizer. For example, an 1822 London observer article noted, it is certainly a singular fact that Great Britain should have sent out multitudes of soldiers to fight the battles of this country upon the continent of Europe and should then import the bones as an article of commerce to fatten her soil.
[00:21:31] Speaker D: It is gruesome anyway. Yeah. So fertilizer, then there was this big game changing technological development in the early 20th century which was the capacity to synthetically create nitrogen through the various processes. It wasn't just the Haber Bosch process, but others as well that created ammonia, that was synthetic form of nitrogen used for fertilizer production. That was a big game changer in that sector as well. Then there's seed, the seed sector, which basically evolved from the mid-1800s as well, but became more of a. Because farmers were able to save seeds from crops and replant them on their own fields, pick the best ones. You know, this was very common. But by the late 1800s there was an emerging seed industry for, you know, farming in North America. And then that. And then that really took off after the hybridization of seeds, corn in particular after the 1920s. And then finally pesticides. That's sort of a story again. We forget sometimes because we think about DDT as one of the early pesticides and synthetic chemicals as the rise of that industry. And of course that was really important, important in the 1930s. But there was earlier pesticide industry as well, which was using other kinds of chemicals and plant extracts and stuff like that that was controlling pests.
So these different parts of this big input sector, the machinery, fertilizer, seeds and pesticides, they are developed in a way that integrates them on farms. Because once a farmer adopts farm machinery, then to make economic sense of being a huge amount of money for a tractor, you're going to want to. Or a reaper, you're going to want to have more land so that you can actually produce more to pay for that machinery. And so once farmers have more land and they're using it more intensively, they tend to need more fertilizer to support the plants because they're depleting the soil by, by planting.
Then they want to use seeds that are uniform, genetically uniform, so that the machinery works better and more efficiently. And then once that sort of monoculture kind of production is going on, then those crops are more likely to be affected by pests and that brings in the pesticides. So once you kind of adopt one piece of the puzzle, you kind of have to go with the rest of the, the rest of the package because it's really hard to adopt just one of those four things. They usually go together. And that's where I would argue that that's a bit of a lock in. Once farmers made the decision to go for tractors, especially in the 20th century, all the rest of it tended to follow.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: That sounds fairly deterministic. Do you, is it, is it, is it that deterministic?
[00:24:30] Speaker D: I think there's a degree of determinism in there, and that's been, I would say that's been established in the literature. There was a huge, there was, interestingly, a huge debate at the time in the 1920s and 30s about whether to stick with horses or go to tractors. And there were all of these, you know, costs and benefits that different analysts were looking at. But when we look back at the process, we see that farm machinery adoption really did encourage the use of all these other infrastructure inputs.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: I, I wanted to, to go back to a couple of things that you, you mentioned, and that is the, the, the processes to capture nitrogen for fertilizer and pesticides. I mean, both of them also had military applications.
And I don't know how important those were in terms of driving those two sectors.
Do you know?
[00:25:27] Speaker D: Yeah, well, it's part of my argument about government support in both of those sectors because the US Government was deeply interested in figuring out how to synthesize nitrogen because nitrogen was really important for bomb making. And there was this dependence on Chile for nitrates that were used to make bombs. And they didn't want to be dependent on imports for the raw materials for making munitions, basically. And so figuring out this sort of million dollar question of how to synthesize nitrogen was extremely important. And so a lot of government money went into supporting the development of those technologies. So for sure, I would say that was the military uses of nitrogen were important in propelling that fertilizer industry.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: And after the war, I assumed that those factories were privatized and continue to produce vast quantities of the stuff.
[00:26:24] Speaker D: That's right. And the US Government actually handed over research and facilities to the industry themselves. They lobbied very heavily to get those facilities in the, in the US and of course, you know, some of this work was going on in Europe as well. But at the end of the war, there was basically this demand for their processes to be an, to be handed over and was delivered to the corporations.
[00:26:49] Speaker B: And with pesticides, yeah, that's, I mean.
[00:26:52] Speaker D: Maybe a slightly different story. But the pesticides, like the rise of synthetic pesticides, especially like ddt in the 1930s, this was a compound that had previously been discovered by a graduate student and then rediscovered in the 1930s. There was this sense that it was this perfect chemical because it didn't have immediate acute effects. And, but they didn't recognize, you know, things like bioaccumulation and the other kinds of problems associated with these synthetic pesticides. But they were also immediately used in the war effort because this was right at the beginning of the Second World War to deal with things like typhus and lice and, you know, other kinds of pests that were bothering the troops. And there was US Government contracts with companies to produce these chemicals. And in fact, they gave specific licenses from the developers, which was the forerunner of cba Geige, to, you know, firms like dupont and Dow and etcetera, to produce them. And so they were able to produce these even though they didn't have the patent for that chemical themselves. And that gave them a big leg up in the marketplace.
[00:28:06] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Professor Jennifer Clapp from the University of Waterloo, who has been doing work on food and corporate domination of the ag sector for a long time and has just published Titans of Industrial Agriculture. I got that right.
And, and we're talking about the, the big four industrial sectors which have come to dominate farming pretty much around the world.
I, you know, I thought maybe one of the things in the book is that you have these genealogies of, of mergers, which I found fascinating. And one of the other things that I found really interesting was I hadn't really heard of this sort of contemporary corporate, you know, the results, the names of these big companies. I wonder if you might just tell us about a few, because you can't actually tell what they specialize in.
[00:29:09] Speaker D: You mean the company names? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, interestingly, some of the current firms. Well, I would say all of the current firms have this genealogy and ancestry that goes back to some of the really original firms, even though the names have changed. So John Deere, who was the, you know, who brought us the steel tip plow in the 1840s. Like that company is still called Deere and Company, so still keeps that name. But other companies in farm machinery, for example, many people might not have heard of them. You might see these farm machinery dealerships if you're driving in the countryside, but they come from some of those earlier firms. So there used to be a firm called Case. There used to be a firm called New Holland and now that's Case New Holland, you know, CNH Industrial. Right. It brings together plus tons of other firms that, that used to be around. There's another called Agco, which is now the parent company that owns some of the firms earlier firms like Alice Gleaner and the Massey Corporation and Massey Ferguson, Massey Harris, etc. And then there's Kubota, which is a Japanese firm and that has a newer origin story in the 1970s, but coming from big, big corporate background. So those are the big firms in farm machinery. But having said that, in North America, for example, Deere alone controls something like 60% of the heavy tractor market.
So just one company has this huge dominance in that sector. But together those four firms control around half of the global market in farm machinery.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: Yeah. One of the things that you mentioned is that when you buy a John Deere tractor, or whatever the company is called, you're not allowed to get it repaired outside of dealerships. Right, right. That you're basically sort of, well, sort of like with cars, you're pretty much stuck or the warranty becomes void, but.
[00:31:05] Speaker D: Right, right, yeah. And that's actually a product of the fact that the machinery itself has become so sophisticated with embedded with electronics and software, just like in the automobile sector. And the company Deere and the other companies do this to some extent as well. They don't want others to repair it because they don't want them to get access to the codes that are, you know, the electronic software that's driving the machinery. And so they've gone as far as saying you don't really own the machine, you own the right to use the machine and you've got to repair it with us. And that's caused a big push for the right to repair movement because farmers have always fixed their own machines and waiting, as we've all waited at some point for some software expert on the phone for hours. You know, this is not really a pleasant activity for farmers in a field who want to get their crops out. They don't have hours or days to wait for this kind of repair. Plus if it's controlled by the company itself, they can charge more for the repairs. So that's been a big issue. And actually Deere itself has been sued by the Department of Justice over this issue Just, just at the beginning of.
[00:32:16] Speaker B: This year when Biden was still in office, I imagine. I, I can't imagine that particular case will be continued at this point.
[00:32:25] Speaker D: Yeah, that's, that's, that's an important point.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: I, I got my, when I came to California, I got a job at Lawrence Berkeley lab. And the reason I was hired, I was told, was because I did crude repairs on my car.
So, you know, I learned a little bit about wrenches and things like that. And you can't do that anymore.
You know, young men, young women basically can't fix their cars anymore. It's the same thing with, with tractors.
[00:32:55] Speaker D: Exactly. And it, Farmers used to keep their machinery for, you know, 30, 40 years.
[00:33:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:01] Speaker D: And there was actually a bit of a resurgence in the, in the secondhand market when farmers realized they couldn't fix their own machines. But of course then they're giving up on some of the latest, you know, bells and whistles.
[00:33:14] Speaker B: The air conditioned cab. Right?
[00:33:16] Speaker D: Yeah, exactly.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: With wi fi capacity.
[00:33:19] Speaker D: Right.
[00:33:20] Speaker B: So you make the point that large corporations get large due to three types of power. I mean, you mentioned this earlier, but I'd like to go into it a little more detail. The power to shape markets, the power to shape technology, and the power to shape policy and governance.
Maybe you can say some more about that. Because the power to shape markets is a sort of an interesting, an interesting thing. How does that, you know, how, how do these three things relate to each other?
[00:33:48] Speaker D: Yeah, it's a great question. So they, the way I see it or the way I sort of argue in the book is that when the, when there's a highly concentrated market, say for example, and most economists would say if the top four firms in a sector control more than 40% of a market, it starts to in a way get distorted. It can change the dynamics of the market. And when the top four have over 60%, which is the case in pesticides and seeds, for example, this leads to, you know, more, even more tendency towards distortion. And what that means is that when there's a very concentrated market, the firms at the top have more capacity to do things that can shape the outcomes in the marketplace. So the example we just talked about with deer, preventing farmers from repairing their own machinery, that's an example of shaping the marketplace. But another example is that the big chemical companies producing Herbicides did this scheme where they actually paid loyalty payments to dealers that were selling herbicides in a way that they said, we're going to pay you more than you would actually get if you were selling generic herbicides at a much lower price. And then we'll get you to keep those generics off the shelf. And the com. The retailers went for that loyalty payment because it was slightly better for them than selling generics. But it shaped the market that farmers were facing. They could only buy the brand name herbicides even though some of them were off of patent. And so they could have bought generic and saved a lot of money, but it was really difficult for them. So that kind of behavior is a way of shaping markets. And another example is with the fertilizer industry. And this happened right after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And there was a lot of disruption in global supply markets, especially for fertilizers. And in that period, these fertilizer, the big top fertilizer companies, they were very concentrated in North America. They're super concentrated. Just a couple Companies dominating, know 75% of the market. They saw huge profits and not just net profits, but profit margins. So they were actually charging more than their increased costs and, and re raking in huge amounts of money. And that's seen by many farmers as being a kind of a profiteering taking advantage of a market turmoil to raise prices. And so those are different ways in which once corporations get really big and they're in markets that are super concentrated, they can actually shape the market in ways that works, basically works to their benefit. And that's called by economists, market power. But I argue in the book that market power is deeply connected to these other kinds of power and it's hard to separate them. But once they have that market power, they can do things like, you know, if there's only four companies on the, in the farm machinery sector and they all move in the direction of trying to sell digital agriculture technologies, selling platforms and software to farmers. I mean, this sort of becomes the model that everyone has to follow because that's the product that they're selling. They're not investing in other kinds of research and development that don't make them money basically. So they're moving in directions that basically raises their profits. So another example of that is the decision to focus agricultural biotechnology on seeds that are resistant to herbicide spraying. And in doing so, they could increase the market for herbicide sales in addition to seed sales and present it as a really beneficial outcome for farmers. But what we've seen in the last 30 years of GMOs on the market is a huge rise in herbicide use, especially glyphosate. And so they're shaping not just the market environment or the technological environment, but also the ecological environment as a result of their decisions. So I call that technology power, that power to shape the trajectory of the sector. And then the third kind of power I talk about that they can get from market power and concentration is that when there's fewer big companies, they tend to have more weight in shaping policy. They have, you know, there's fewer voices, it's easier to coordinate. They don't even have to spend as much on lobbying if they're the only ones in the deal, in the landscape. And so they can get the ERA policymakers and basically be unified in their voices about reducing regulation, reducing regulatory hurdles, and reducing their costs. So together, these kinds of power, I see them as very entwined with one another and they're connected to, derived from, but also a little bit different from market power, but they reinforce one another.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that used to be called monopoly capitalism. Yes, right, that. And, and it's true of, of many industrial and electronic and, and tech, you know, sectors as well. Right. I mean, if you look at the, the, the big tech platforms, you know, again, they've used many of these and are using many of these kinds of techniques and approaches to try and keep control.
You mentioned the environmental and social impacts of this corporate domination. Can you tell us more about that?
[00:39:20] Speaker D: Yeah, it's a really important question. And when I was writing the book, it really became apparent to me that we can't separate these social and ecological consequences of corporate concentration and dominance. You know, from the story of their dominance. They're, they're almost one in the same story. And what we've, what we've seen over time, for example, is the. I would date the beginning of the industrialization of agriculture to the 1840s, when we saw the rise of reaper technology and plows, et cetera, and that led to larger land holdings. So we already discussed that as farmers adopted the machinery, they tended to want to have larger farms. Well, what did that mean? I mean, one of the first things it meant was the expansion westward to basically take over new farmland. That meant the displacement of indigenous peoples from their lands in North America. And also as that continued, especially after the end of the Civil war in the 1860s, what we saw and the, and the increased adoption of this machinery led to the displacement of black farmers also from lands in North America, especially if they weren't Owners of lands. There were many black farmers who were freed slaves and then they were renting land or were sharecroppers. They also got displaced as machinery expanded. And so we have a lot of this kind of social inequality deriving from this expansion of industrial agriculture. But then there are also these other impacts like soil depletion occurring because of the use of machinery. And as machinery has gotten heavier and heavier, it's led to compaction, it's led to loss of soil structure damage. We saw that with a dust bowl, for example.
Also fertility loss from over, like using the same crop in the same field over and over and over again instead of giving soil time to rest as had previously been the case. We saw huge agrobiodiversity loss, climate change, massive energy use. There's just an enormous story about the use of fossil fuels on farms, toxic pollution from pesticides, and. And we have to add to that the loss of autonomy and agency on the part of farmers increasingly as they are losing the ability to make the kinds of decisions they might want to make. And now, even with the rise of digital agriculture, and they're signing onto these platforms for, you know, these software platforms for digital farming, they don't even know if they own their own data. It's sort of being handed over to the corporations. And of course, higher costs also associated with this kind of concentration. And there's a big discussion right now about how corporate concentration is undermining democracy. It's basically harming the ability of people to have a say in how the system works. So this. Yeah, like, how much time do you have? We could talk about these problems all day long, but I think it's important to connect them to the corporate dominance in the sector. They're not just things that just happen to happen, and they're an unfortunate consequence of technological change. They're actually part of the business model of these corporations.
[00:42:35] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm Ronnie Lipchitz, your host. My guest today is Dr. Jennifer Clapp, who has just published Titans of Industrial Agriculture, a book about corporate domination of farming in the United States and indeed around the world.
Jennifer, I have. I have only a couple of more things I wanted to ask you.
One of the common arguments made by supporters of big agriculture is that only with growing productivity can we feed the 10 billion. There is this mythical, you know, 10 billion in the middle or the end of the century, which is a Malthusian argument very popular in the 60s and 70s.
If we don't grow more grain, people will starve. Well, people Keep starving, even though there's plenty of food available and most of the world still grows its own food. So this seems very paradoxical. You know, what's going on here.
[00:43:31] Speaker D: Yeah, it's a great question and I'm glad you raised this because it's a really powerful narrative that's been driving a lot of the justification for the expansion of Big Ag is this idea that we need to produce more and more and more food to address hunger around the world. And we've been hearing those warnings for a really long time and corporations have used them explicitly when they announced the most recent mergers, for example, they pulled that narrative out of the playbook. But what it's important to recognize, and as you said, the number of people experiencing chronic hunger in the world is huge. It's over 800 million people. And over the last five years, and particularly particular that number has only grown. And we've, we're moving in exactly the wrong direction in terms of meeting SDG2, which is to end, end hunger and promote more sustainable food production. Yet at the same time we produce enough calories to feed everyone around the world. And yeah, industrial agriculture has played a role in making that happen. But half of that production is going to biofuels and animal feed. So it's not even entering the human food system. And the rest of it is not particularly well distributed. And that links to not just this low yields in parts of the Global south, which is an issue that I think does need some attention. But part of the reason for that lower production in the Global south is that this overproduction in the Global north has led to lower prices for food sold on global markets that's out competed traditional production in developing countries and wiped out farmers livelihoods. And that has created dependence in places like Sub Saharan Africa and in other countries. And so we see this import dependence and there's this narrative that goes with it to say, well, those people in those parts of the world can't produce enough of their own food, we need to produce it for them. That's not the case. The case is that we need to support farmers in the Global south to produce their own food and not be so reliant on this cheap overproduced food coming from the Global North. That would be a huge step forward. Now these companies are often making the argument that that's exactly what they're trying to support. And of course they would like to expand their markets by selling gene edited seeds and pesticides to the Global South. But that's not necessarily the best way to move forward because of all of these costs that we've just been talking about. Do we really want to make those costs a global phenomenon? It would be very problematic to say the least.
[00:46:13] Speaker B: Well, toward the end of the book you talk about alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture and especially agroecology. So my, you know, last question basically is do you think agroecology is a viable, can be made viable on a wide enough scale and what will keep it from coming to be dominated by big corporations? And we've seen this in the organic sector, you know, that bigger, bigger and bigger companies are growing organically and pushing smaller organic farmers out of business. So how can we avoid that? Can agroecology do the trick? And how can we avoid it being overcome by big corporations?
[00:46:58] Speaker D: Right, And I think those are the million dollar questions right now that a lot of researchers are putting their efforts towards. And I think it's really important this, there's been a burst of research around agroecology in recent years. And I think, I mean in agroecology, just for listeners, it's, it's a set of practices for agriculture, but it's also a science about using nature's own processes to fertilize plants and deal with pesticides and to, you know, intercrop plants and so that they are able to produce more. And this can be done in a way that is generating enough food, some, some scholars say to feed the world if we had magical transformation to agroecological farms.
But it doesn't work that well on these giant kinds of farms and we already have highly unequal land holdings. So it's probably, you know, going to require some use of machinery and that might continue to drive in inequities. That's something that I'm really interested in understanding more and I, I hope researchers are working on it. But I'm continuing to think about these questions. And then there's also the co optation question that you mentioned. And indeed these big corporations have been trying to glom on to terms like regenerative agriculture. And of course, as you mentioned, they've already gone into organic agriculture in a big way. There's been some concern about them trying to adopt this idea of agroecology. But the scholars working on agroecology push back on this pretty hard because they say that agroecology is not just a science and it's not just a practice. It's also a social movement. And that social movement is very much about bringing more equity and sustainability in a, in smaller scale kinds of farming. Models. And so it's, and it's, it's also maybe not going to be co opted as much because basically it's not reliant on external farm inputs. So really what are the firms going to sell? They'd have to redefine agroecology to actually make it profitable for them. But agroecology has already been defined. It's been defined by the fao, it's been defined by social movements. And in this sense it would be a big lift for them to, to recast agroecology as something they could profit from. And so I think what we're left with is, you know, I think it's agroecology, it's, it's gaining ground in policy contexts. For example, the FAO has spent time in terms of defining it. It's being discussed, there's principles to support agroecology that have been adopted by the Committee on World Food Security. It's gaining ground in some of these places. But whether governments are going to sign on to it in the face of giant corporations that have enormous lobby power is another question. So I think it's technically feasible to feed the world using agroecology. But getting there, I think we still don't really have a good roadmap for how that's going to happen. In the book, I point out some things that I think need to happen. One is that governments, I point out that governments played a big role in developing hybrid seeds, for example, and in other sectors of the agricultural inputs industries they could put more agricultural R and D dollars into the development of agroecology. So states have done this in the past as a sort of a national security rationale and that can be done again.
And I also, I also think we need more antitrust kind of policies that are reining in corporate power so that the corporations are not able to stop, stop that research and development from happening.
And we also need better policies to rein in these kind of corporate conflicts of interests and in the policy making process. So there's a, that's the issue. And I think a lot of things actually need to happen in order to clear the pathway for a smoother transition to an agroecological farming future.
[00:51:15] Speaker B: Is there anything else you'd like to add during these last couple of minutes?
[00:51:20] Speaker D: No, I would, I would just say I hope people find the book interesting.
[00:51:25] Speaker B: What are you working on now? What's your next big project?
[00:51:29] Speaker D: My next big project, I've, I've become really of course, obsessed with what's going on in terms of this global trade war right now and the implications of these gyrations in tariff policy for food security around the world. We hear a lot about what's going on with farmers in North America and Canada and in the US In Mexico. Of course, that's really important. But I think we'll need to understand better what this zigzagging tariff policy means in some of the poorest parts of the world and people's ability to access food. So that's, that's what I'm thinking about right now and spending some time diving into.
[00:52:11] Speaker B: All right. Well, Professor Jennifer Clapp, thank you for being my guest on Sustainability now.
[00:52:16] Speaker D: Thank you for having me, Ronnie. It's great to chat.
[00:52:19] Speaker B: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with Dr. Jennifer Clapp, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. She has just published Titans of Industrial Agriculture, How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and why It Matters with MIT Press. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] sustainability now, as well as Spotify, YouTube and Pocketcasts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K Squid your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next every other Sunday, Sustainability now.
[00:53:11] Speaker C: Good planets are hard to find out. Temperate zones and tropic climbs and natural currents and thriving seas blowing through breathing trees Strongholds on safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:53:37] Speaker B: Good.
