A host of powerful forces are whirling emphatically this year, impacting our farms and food. Each human being on Earth has a stake in how it all settles out.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, May 10 2021 (IPS) - Producers and consumers seem helpless as food all over the world comes under fast growing corporate control. Such changes have also been worsening environmental collapse, social dislocation and the human condition.
Longer term perspective
The recent joint report – by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and the ETC Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration – is ominous, to say the least.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
A Long Food Movement, principally authored by Pat Mooney with a team including IPES-Food Director Nick Jacobs, analyses how food systems are likely to evolve over the next quarter century with technological and other changes.
Yves here. Many of you have probably noticed some of the many signs of increasing corporate buyouts in the agriculture industry. I knew Japanese companies in the bubble years that were acquiring chicken farms and processors in Vietnam and hedgies in the 1990s who were buying agricultural land in Africa and South America. In more recent years, China has been buying food producer in Africa. Corporate interests have been hoovering up potable water sources in the US and many other major countries. And these examples only scratch the surface.
This post describes how this trend, along with increased techno-monitoring, is set to increase, but efforts are underway to stem this tide.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Apr 27 2021 (IPS) - Producers and consumers seem helpless as food all over the world comes under fast growing corporate control. Such changes have also been worsening environmental collapse, social dislocation and the human condition.
Longer term perspective
The recent joint report – by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and the ETC Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration – is ominous, to say the least.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
A Long Food Movement, principally authored by Pat Mooney with a team including IPES-Food Director Nick Jacobs, analyses how food systems are likely to evolve over the next quarter century with technological and other changes.
by Colin Todhunter / April 21st, 2021
We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agrifood chain. The high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a certain type of agriculture and food production on the world.
Of course, those involved in this portray what they are doing as some kind of humanitarian endeavour – saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, helping farmers or feeding the world. This is how many of them probably do genuinely regard their role inside their corporate echo chamber. But what they are really doing is repackaging the dispossessive strategies of imperialism as ‘feeding the world’.