[A-List] Our diet of destruction

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Huge areas of the Amazon rainforest are being cut down to satisfy global
demand for soya. But how did this crop and a handful of others come to
dominate our diet so completely? In an extract from her new book,
Felicity Lawrence investigates the faceless trading giants who really
decide what goes on our plates.

by Felicity Lawrence

The Guardian (June 16 2008)


Look at a few packets in a typical kitchen cupboard, and you will notice
a disconcerting overlap between the labels of apparently completely
different foods. A handful of ingredients, some of them barely used as
food in the west before the second world war, crop up in everything from
baby food to cat food to processed meals. The same half-dozen heavily
subsidised commodities - soya, rapeseed, palm oil, corn, sugar and rice
- are broken down into their individual parts and endlessly
reconstituted. They are sold back to us as processed food or turned into
animal feed to produce the factory meats that have conquered our diets
in the past half-century. How did such a transformation come about?

When you look back at the origins of much of today's industrialised food
system, what you see is the ebb and flow of empire. First there were the
British imperial ambitions that turned slave-produced sugar from the
colonies into the engine of emerging capitalism during the industrial
revolution. Later the prewar European powers developed and controlled
new fats such as margarines. Today we are living with the postwar
American model, a privatised form of empire that reached into every
corner of world food supply in the second half of the twentieth century.

The result has been a kind of food Fordism. We are fed a production-line
diet that is homogenised and bolted together from standard commodity
parts. The parts, many of them created out of American agricultural
surpluses, are largely controlled by an oligopoly of US-based trading
and processing companies - Cargill, ADM, Bunge - that are little known
in the UK. All three companies are now expanding in China and heavily
involved in spreading the western industrialised diet, with its
unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels and extravagant use of grains.
As the Chinese move up this processed-food chain, the diet-related
diseases that have afflicted us in the west are growing there too.

It took a journey of more than 7,000 kilometers to the heart of the
Brazilian rainforest for me to understand some of the power structures
in this food chain. It was the rise of the humble soya bean that opened
a window on the mechanics of today's structure, and the environmental
and social toll it exacts.

It is only from the air that you can absorb the vastness of the Amazon.
What happens to the rainforest that surrounds the world's largest river
system will affect every single one of us, as experts in climate change
constantly point out. A fifth of the planet's fresh water is contained
here, and the trees recycle it back into the atmosphere, from where it
drives the world's weather.

But Brazil is the new agricultural frontier, and forest clearance, much
of it for soya production, has been taking place on a scale from which
campaigners fear the forest may not recover. Greenpeace has been
tracking deforestation and agreed to take me up in its spotter plane in
2006 as it was launching its fight to stop the food industry destroying
the Amazon.

> From the window of the plane on one side I could see mile after mile of
the velvet folds of virgin forest. Where man had not ventured with
chainsaw and bulldozer, the trees were giving off water vapour like a
thousand puffs from a life-giving inhaler. But on the other side was an
enormous area recently planted with soya. It looked as though a giant
industrial lawnmower had cut a swath through the jungle, and the
luminous green trail it had created shone through a dry heat haze. "So
who is buying all that soya, and how on earth do they get it out?" I
shouted over the roar of the engine. The answer had to wait. A storm was
blowing in and we quickly turned back through the flashes of lightning
for SantarÃm, the frontier port built deep in the Amazon basin.

That night I watched from the roof of my hotel as a new storm blew great
squalls hundreds of miles up the Amazon from the Atlantic. On the
waterfront below, the baroque blue cathedral, built by the original
colonisers, the Portuguese, came and went from view in the enveloping
rain. Its twin towers and pediment still present a proud facade to
anyone coming up the river's main navigation channel, but the paint was
peeling now, the legacy of the sugar plantations and slavery fading. The
centre of gravity had shifted. A few hundred metres up the river,
Cargill has built its own monument to power, an enormous, gleaming
loading and storage facility for soya. The elevator towers of this $20
million (GBP 10.2 million) grain terminal are testaments to the new gods
of transnational trading efficiency and global economic domination. The
digging of the port here has brought Brazil's soya closer to its main
European markets.

Just as the new railroads had been vital to opening up the prairies of
North America, this newly constructed infrastructure was driving the
transformation of the Amazon and helping Brazil meet the apparently
insatiable global demand for soya. Cargill, together with ADM and Bunge,
is responsible for about two-thirds of the total financing of soya
production in Brazil. They provide the seed, fertiliser and
agrochemicals to the ranchers, and buy and store and ship the crops to
Europe. But how was the demand for all those beans created?

Bake a soya bean and - provided you have first soaked and boiled it long
enough to neutralise its toxins - you can make a dish that is cheap and
cheerful. It may be slightly indigestible still and make you fart, but
it is nevertheless useful for providing complete protein in inexpensive
vegetable form.

As a whole raw bean, soya has its commercial limitations. Crush it,
however, and the possibilities become infinite as it is separated into
its more lucrative parts. The oil can be extracted with solvents and
degummed. The lecithin can be removed from the resulting sludge to be
sold for a thousand and more food-processing purposes. Then, deodorised
and hydrogenated, the oil can be used to make, or fry, any number of
fast foods, snacks and convenience meals. The vitamin E, which has the
irritating habit of reducing shelf-life, can be stripped out and turned
to money elsewhere. So too can the soya sterols that can command a
premium as technofoods - cholesterol-lowering ingredients for
margarines, yoghurts and drinks.

Once the oil has been removed, the defatted soya bean meal, which is
full of protein, can be fed to intensively farmed chicken, cattle and
pigs to turn them into highly productive factory units - intensive dairy
cows that can deliver ever greater yields of milk, chickens that grow to
shop weight in just a few weeks, pigs and cattle that fatten faster than
they ever could on grass or forage.

The vast majority of soya is used to feed factory-farmed animals.
Chicken has a particular attraction for the livestock industry, which
refers to the birds not as flocks but as "crops", for the good reason
that they grow fast enough to produce a return in little more than a
month. For the commodity traders and processors, the livestock
revolution has represented the best way to move up what they call the
value chain. You can make a good margin on trading grain and soya,
especially if you are a powerful enough presence in the global markets.
But feed your surplus to animals - it takes about three kilograms of
protein feed to produce half a kilo of chicken protein - and you
concentrate your resources. Persuade the world to eat vast quantities of
this cheap meat, consumed preferably in a highly processed way that
divides the parts and separates out the "high value" lean meat and
treats much of the rest as waste - and you make far greater margins.

It required technological breakthroughs and government protection to
create this market, though. Soya meal was used experimentally in animal
feed in the 1930s but farmers were reluctant to use it because with its
oil still in it was regarded as indigestible to chickens and pigs. Then
researchers at ADM worked out how to heat-treat it to overcome the
problem. The oil was similarly regarded as barely fit for consumption
because it smelled so bad, until the Americans, following the tanks
advancing through Germany, acquired the technology from the defeated
enemy to get rid of the "off" flavours.

That left the way open for the US to promote the soya that suited its
agricultural conditions as part of the reconstruction of Europe in the
1950s.

The US came out of the second world war with its agricultural base
intact, but the farming lands of its European allies and of Germany had
been devastated. With millions desperately hungry, the US announced its
Marshall plan to help rebuild western Europe with financial aid. But it
had another crucial role: the removal of tariff barriers that might
hinder US access to foreign markets was made part of the new terms of
trade with the non-communist world. Of the $13 billion in financial aid
paid under the Marshall plan between 1947 and 1952, more than $3 billion
was spent by European countries on imports of US food, animal feed and
fertiliser.

As Europe recovered, soya exports to other countries were supported by
other US food aid programmes. In 1967, 86% of all US soya oil exports
were subsidised under its food aid law. Meanwhile, in the Kennedy round
of talks for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in the
mid-1960s, the US insisted that if Europe wanted to keep its
agricultural protections, it must open up its markets to more US soya
exports.

The raw ingredients for today's food system have, in other words, been
kept cheap for transnational corporations by government policy. And
where US subsidies go, western diets have a habit of following. American
exports have created whole new patterns of consumption. Demand has been
a function of price, availability and production, just as it was with
the rise of sugar consumption in the 18th century.

Between 1995 and 2005, $165 billion of American taxpayers' money was
used to support US agricultural commodities. Soya, corn, rice, wheat and
cotton accounted for ninety per cent of that money. Sugar was also
heavily subsidised. The real beneficiaries of this system of government
support have not been US farmers, who have gone out of business in their
thousands, but the mainly US-based trading giants. For subsidies have
allowed them to export grains at less than the cost of production,
making it impossible for other countries to compete, while bringing the
money from added-value markets back home. In this they mirror the
patterns of trade established between previous empires and their colonies.

These trading giants have remained shadowy in European perception,
despite their colossal footprint. Cargill, the largest privately owned
corporation in the world in most years, was said in testimony to the US
senate in 1999 to control 45% of global grain trade, including 42% of US
corn exports, a third of all soya bean exports and about twenty per cent
of wheat exports. It is also the world's largest crusher of oilseeds
such as soya and rapeseed. Since it is a private company and not obliged
to publish detailed accounts, more recent and accurate share figures are
hard to come by. It declines to comment on its market shares, but it
has, if anything, consolidated its position since then, although its
areas of concentration shift. Its revenues in 2007 were $88 billion.
Most of us eat its products in some form every day, yet many of us have
never heard of it. Nor had I before I started writing about the politics
of food, but since then it has been hard not to stumble across its
operations in every country whenever I visit a food factory, industrial
farm or fast food or supermarket supplier.

ADM (Archer Daniels Midland), another US-based grain trading
corporation, is one of the world's largest processors of soya beans,
corn, wheat and cocoa, and also has a huge portfolio of interests, from
making sweeteners and food processing ingredients to energy and animal
feed production. Its global sales in 2006/7 were $44 billion. Almost
half of them came from making animal feed, vegetable oils and
emulsifiers from oilseeds such as soya.

Two other grain and oilseed giants are part of this trading nexus that
dominates food supply. Bunge, which expanded through the late nineteenth
century as a grain trader in South America, is now a transnational with
headquarters in the US. It is the world's largest exporter of soya beans
and a major corn and oil processor. The Louis Dreyfus group, a French
family-owned private company, has vast grain, sugar, and energy trading
interests around the world and now focuses on financial aspects of
commodity trading. In the US it has joint grain ventures with ADM and
Cargill. (EU subsidies have achieved a similar position for a handful of
its corporations, mainly those processors whose power was established
before the war.)

As well as buying and selling agricultural commodities, these four
global companies control refining and crushing plants and turn those
cheap, subsidised commodities into a myriad other ingredients, from
starches to syrups to fats to animal feed. They also play the markets,
and have vastly complicated corporate structures that enable them to
shift transactions and profits from subsidiary to subsidiary.

Cargill, the behemoth, is "the undisputed ruler in the global grain
trade and extends its tentacles into every aspect of the global food
system", according to Brewster Kneen, the company's unauthorised
biographer. Cargill initially built up its power in the 1870s, in the
speculative era of the American agricultural frontier when US grain,
along with sugar, began providing the fuel for workers in an
industrialising, urbanising Britain. It began with a family of grain
traders who bought up storage facilities in the US on strategically
placed transport routes, the new railroads and the waterways of the
Great Lakes and Mississippi. There has perhaps been nothing quite like
it in terms of reach since the days of the East India Company.

Cargill rarely gives interviews, but in the words of its company
brochures: "We buy, trade, transport, blend, mill, crush, process,
refine, season, distribute around the clock around the globe". And: "We
are the flour in your bread, the wheat in your noodles, the salt on your
fries. We are the corn in your tortillas, the chocolate in your dessert,
the sweetener in your soft drink. We are the oil in your salad dressing
and the beef, pork or chicken you eat for dinner. We are the cotton in
your clothing, the backing on your carpet and the fertiliser in your field."

Cargill owns two-thirds of the company that is the world's largest
producer of fertiliser ingredients, with major factories in North
America, South America and China. Cargill's subsidiary Sun Valley
produces half of all the chicken products used by McDonald's across
Europe and is a leading supplier of chicken to UK supermarkets. Cargill
accounts for nearly half of UK and more than a third of all European
production of glucose syrups. And, as I have found on my own journeys
around today's globalised food system, it has as often as not been the
feed for your cow's milk, the emulsifier and fat in your ready meal, the
oil that fried your crisps, the soya proteins in your veggieburger ...

History shows that empires rise and fall, however, and that the fall
when it comes tends to be fast. Food empires are likely to be no
different. We are now entering a period of rapid transition. The postwar
food system, dependent on prodigious quantities of crude oil for its
production, has not only pushed us to our biological limits but is
hitting the environmental buffers. After half a century in which they
shaped the nature of global diets with the disposal of their
agricultural surplus, the Americans have done a sudden about-turn. With
the price of oil constantly breaking new records, they want their
surplus back to keep their cars on the road. The US government has
started pouring subsidies into the production of ethanol from corn.
Grain prices have been soaring. The standard commodity parts are no
longer cheap, but we are left with the legacy of the old economic order,
with diets that were created out of excess.
_____

Adapted from Eat Your Heart Out: Why the Food Business Is Bad for the
Planet and Your Health, by Felicity Lawrence, to be published by Penguin
on June 26.

guardian.co.uk  Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/16/food.biofuels


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