The Food We Eat

Written - August 30, 2006

Cargill is not only a small community located near Walkerton (where I lived for several years), it is the name of a powerful corporation. Cargill Inc. declared revenues of $75.2 billion dollars in 2005. If compared with the GDPs of countries, Cargill would be ranked the fifty-fifth largest economy in the world, ahead of most of Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Incredibly, the descendants of the founders of Cargill own 85% of the company. It is a private company that is not legally required to share information about its operations.

Cargill feeds billions of people worldwide. The company is the main supplier for Coca-Cola, Pepsi, McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut – the list is extensive. The problem is that Cargill does not feed people because of humanitarian idealism; it feeds people to make money – at any cost.

A summary of the strategy for Cargill’s business goes as follows: the farmer is sold Cargill seed (or chicks, etc.), and then sold Cargill fertilizer (or hormones, etc.). Exact specifications are given for the way that the product is to be grown, and then Cargill buys the product from the farmer. If the crop fails, then Cargill is not liable and the farmer is indebted to Cargill. If the crop succeeds, Cargill controls the market and dictates what price the farmer will receive, as Cargill also own the processing plants for the crop. For Cargill Inc. it is all profit and no risk, the farmer takes the risk.

Cargill is an open proponent of free markets and globalization. It also supports mono-cropping agriculture and mechanized (therefore expensive) agriculture. The corporation is a major cause of deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. In Indonesia, thousands of acres of rainforest have been burned to plant crops for Cargill.

The revenues do not stay in the economies that desperately need them; they are horded by Cargill. The company is not often held liable for its environmental abuses; the farmers it ‘employs’ bear that responsibility. In a world that is striving to eliminate world hunger and environmental destruction, it would be prudent to question why one family controls most of the world’s food.