Power, Food and Agriculture:
Implications for Farmers,
Consumers and Communities
University of Missouri
College of Agriculture, Food & Natural Resources
Division of Applied Social Sciences Working Paper

Mary K. Hendrickson
University of Missouri

Philip H. Howard

Michigan State University

Douglas H. Constance

Sam Houston State University
Paper posted November 1, 2017

Division of Applied Social Sciences
215 Gentry Hall
Columbia, MO 65211
http://dass.missouri.edu/

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3066005

 Abstract:
One of the most pressing concerns about the industrialization of agriculture and food is the
consolidation and concentration of markets for agricultural inputs, agricultural commodities food
processing and groceries. In essence a small minority of actors globally exercise great control
over food system decisions. This means that because of increased consolidation of these markets
globally – from the United States to China to Brazil, from South Africa to the United Kingdom –
the vast majority of farmers, consumers and communities are left out of key decisions about how
we farm and what we eat. Transnational agrifood firms are motivated by profits and power in
the marketplace, leaving other social, economic and ecological goals behind. This creates an
agroecological crisis in the face of climate uncertainty but one that is rooted in social and
economic organization. In this chapter we detail the current economic organization of
agriculture, and briefly describe its negative impacts on farmers, communities and ecology. We
conclude by articulating stories of farmer-led resistance that imagine a new food system.

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3066005

 Introduction
The system by which most relatively affluent global consumers obtain their food is
globalized and industrialized in the same fashion as the rest of the global capitalist system. An
increasingly smaller number of actors within global supply chains make many of the decisions
about the food we eat, from where and how it is grown to how we will obtain it. While this
system has produced and marketed a great many tasty and diverse calories for those who can
afford to participate, the costs of this system have been borne by farmers, food workers, rural
communities and the ecology in which we are all embedded. In the way it is shaped and
organized, the food system is very much like other industries, but food (and water) is unlike
other consumer goods. Everyone on the planet needs to eat nutritious foods every day to live a
healthy and productive life. Thus, we believe food should not be treated like other commodities,
and the people who produce food, along with a stable agroecosystem, should be protected as
critical to society.
The purpose of this chapter is to show how a minority of global actors make many of the
decisions about what food is produced – where, how, by whom and for whom – and highlight the
implications of these decisions for farmers, consumers, communities and their environment. The
structuring of the relationship along the supply chain from farm to plate, and the globalizing of
these relationships, has frequently harmed our ecology, rural communities, and the economic
livelihoods of farmers and food workers. We explain how farmers and consumers – who often
have myriad concerns about the implications of the emerging system of food production – are
mostly shut out of systems of decision-making through the continued consolidation of critical
points of the supply chain. Instead, decisions are increasingly made by CEOs to meet the narrow
demands of shareholders of global agrifood firms, whose main concern is to increase their power

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 more than similar firms. We briefly explore some of the consequences of these decisions for
farmers, rural communities and our ecology. Still, farmers and consumers in the U.S. and
globally are not passive bystanders to consolidation and centralization trends and have organized
in multiple ways to stop, shape or opt-out of them.

Social and Economic Organization of the Food System Has Real Life Impacts
The organization of the agricultural and food system has important consequences for the
life chances of farmers, farm and food workers, communities and the environment. In the last 50
years, we have reorganized food and farming in the U.S. and across the world towards an
industrialized system that reduces food – a physiological necessity that has important cultural
and social meanings – to a commodity to be produced as cheaply as possible and sold to the
highest bidder. Even the comparative wealthy (by world standards) farmers in the U.S., Canada
and Europe end up as relatively powerless participants in food chains over which they have little
or no control. Farmers face limited choices in which inputs to use, which crops or livestock to
produce, and what markets to sell into. Meanwhile food and farm workers are some of the most
food insecure in a country where one in eight households may not know where their next meal is
coming from (Coleman-Jensen et al. 2016). That a highly industrialized and capitalized food
system can produce a great number of calories and still leave hungry people, many of them
involved in the production of food, shows that the tradeoffs farmers, workers and the
environment are making are not worth the cost to people, communities and the ecosystem in
which we are embedded. Here we review the scholarship that examines concerns and documents
impacts of a concentrated and consolidated agrifood system as a way to prepare readers to fully
understand the results section, in which we describe the structure in which farmers of all kinds
are embedded.
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 Let's start with the fact that fewer farmers are able to make a full-time living from
farming. For instance, just 40 percent of the two million farms in the U.S. list farming as the
primary occupation of the farm operator. Less than ten percent of American farms, or 185,346
farms, are classified as "commercial" by USDA, meaning that they have gross farm sales
exceeding $350,000. At first glance, this "upper 10 percent" of farm households appear to be
doing well in the current food and farming system, having a median net farm income of over
$146,000 in in 2015 and median household income nearing $200,000 or 3.5 times the median
U.S. household income (Posey 2016; USDA 2015b). Perhaps more concerning, 30 percent of
farm households listing farming as a principal occupation reported a median of just $788 in farm
income in 2015. (We should note, however, these farm households reported total household
median income just over that for all U.S. households because of the contribution of off-farm
income (USDA 2015b)).
Table 1: Principal farm operator household finances, by ERS farm typology, 2015
Item

Residence
Farms
1,215,011

Intermediate
Commercial
Farms
Farms
All Farms
Number of farms
631,942
185,346
2,032,300
Income, median dollars per household
Farm income
-2,100
788
146,466
-765
Off-farm income
82,987
55,750
40,250
67,500
Earned Income
62,500
31,789
22,500
38,270
Unearned Income
24,000
25,013
9,000
25,013
Total household income
82,925
59,102
197,980
76,735
Source: USDA Economic Research Service. Accessed at
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/DataFiles/48870/table02.xls?v=42704

These changes exact real tolls on farmers. In the early 2000s, when Midwestern
commodity agriculture was reeling from low prices, a Missouri farmer told Hendrickson that 'I
used to look around to see if any farmers were getting out of farming so I could get their land to

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 farm. Now I look around and see I have no neighbors.' As one can see in Table 1, three-fifths of
U.S. farms are residential farms where the operator does not consider farming as their primary
occupation, while about a tenth gain significant income from farming, leaving a floundering
"intermediate" set of farms. Some of these farms may be considered part of the declining
"Agriculture of the Middle" (Lyson, Stevenson, and Welsh 2008), defined as the decrease in the
number of farms in mid-sized categories (USDA uses $350,000 to $999,999 in annual
agricultural sales). Only 118,000 such farms remained in the 2012 Census of Agriculture
(USDA 2015a). While fewer than six percent of all U.S. farms, they accounted for about onefifth of all agricultural sales and farmland, and over one quarter of net farm income. Farmers of
the middle are often left out by the large commodity chains we describe in the results section, but
also find fewer other mid-range businesses to cooperate with (mid-range processing plants, midsized distributors, or mid-sized grocers) or to supply them with inputs and right-sized equipment
for planting, harvesting, storing, processing or distributing their product (Legun and Bell 2016).
Given difficult economics, farmers of the middle, or farms in USDA's "intermediate"
category, are precisely those who may feel particular pressures to farm in ways incongruent with
their values or beliefs. For instance, James and Hendrickson (2008) found evidence from
Missouri farmers to suggest that financial pressures can increase a farmer's willingness to
tolerate unethical conduct. Concentrated markets may cause farmers to feel financially
pressured, especially as they become relatively dependent within production networks organized
by transnational agrifood firms (Hendrickson, James, and Heffernan 2013). Hendrickson and
James (2005) argue that concentrated markets for inputs or agricultural products narrow the
range of choices that farmers can make about how they treat their land, animals, and workers,
and even what kind of farming they decide to enter. For instance, a farmer may want to enhance

5

 soil quality by practicing multiyear rotations with three to five different crops but is prevented
because they can't find regional markets for sunflowers or wheat rather than just soybeans and
corn (Roesch-McNally et al. 2017). Farmers may also want to practice diversified crop and
livestock farming but cannot find available markets for smaller numbers of livestock. For
example, it is essentially impossible for Midwestern farmers who want to use non-genetically
modified soybeans to access seeds and genetic materials that don't contain any GM traits, as

nearly 100 percent of soybeans now contain at least one herbicide tolerant trait (see figure 1).
Stuart and Schewe (2016) document that seed corn contracts in Michigan constrain the choices
of farmers causing them to over-apply fertilizer to maximize yield, resulting in greenhouse gas
emissions and water pollution, while Stuart (2009) found that farmers in the Central Coast of
California felt pressured by their buyers to use practices they felt were ecologically destructive
and unethical. In short, research has suggested that constrained choices can force farmers into the

6

 "kinds of decisions that they otherwise would not have chosen for ethical or other reasons"
(Hendrickson and James 2005, 283)
The decisions these farmers must make also impact their communities. Scholars have
long been interested in how the social and economic organization of food and farming impacts
farmers AND communities. Walter Goldschmidt's (1978) seminal study of California
agricultural organization in the 1940s found industrialized agriculture had adverse community
effects while smaller-scale family operated farms were associated with diverse economies and
egalitarian social structures (see for example Heffernan, 1984; Lobao 1990; and Lyson 2004). In
their meta-analysis on the relationship between agricultural structure and community well-being,
Lobao and Stofferahn (2007) found detrimental effects of industrialized farming on communities
were reported in 82 percent of 51 studies. These negative effects included greater income
inequality or poverty; decreased retail trade and diversity of retail firms; population declines; and
negative health effects of large livestock operations. Of course, it's not only farmers and rural
communities who are impacted by changes in food and farming. Howard (2016a) shows how
food retail concentration has left many urban neighborhoods without access to affordable
nutritious foods, and argues that food processing and retail concentration has resulted in fewer
good jobs and worse treatment of farm and food labor.
Along with farmers and communities, the ecology in which human society is embedded
has not been spared the negative impacts of the way we produce and consume food. The
organization of the agricultural marketplace, for instance, forces many U.S. farmers into
specialized monocultures and separates livestock from crop production both at the farm level and
at larger regional geographies (Lyson 2004). Livestock waste in these systems becomes an
environmental pollutant rather than a recyclable resource contributing to soil health and fertility.

7

 Specialized markets mean that corn and soybeans become the de facto crop rotation across large
portions of the Corn Belt, which can result in sizable soil loss. To illustrate, soil erosion in Iowa
costs its farmers $1 billion per year (Eller 2014), and also causes nutrient run-off that contributes
to the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico (one ton of eroded Midwestern soil can contain over two
pounds of nitrogen and one pound of phosphorus). 1 Soil health advocates encourage farmers to
plant cover crops (keeping the soil covered and feeding the soil food web), to reduce tillage as
much as possible, and to increase plant diversity. However, fewer farmers are on the land
farming larger acreages making the labor and timing of cover crops challenging. Few if any
markets exist for diversified crops and livestock meaning crop rotations are limited, and input
suppliers are oriented to providing seeds, chemicals and equipment for the dominant crops in
their region.
The use of herbicides and pesticides in agriculture, combined with mechanization, have
reduced the number of people needed to farm large acreage. Nature is dynamic however, and
weeds and pests have rapidly evolved resistance to widely used chemicals. The introduction of
herbicide tolerant crops has magnified this problem in the last 20 years (see list of herbicide
resistant weeds at www.weedscience.org). Row crop farmers in the Southeast and Midwest have
been scrambling in recent years to control a specific herbicide resistant pigweed (Amaranthus
palmeri), which thrives particularly well in a rapidly changing climate, and has a thick woody
stalk that causes havoc to farmers' machines. In 2015, Monsanto introduced dicamba-tolerant
soybeans and cotton as a way to control this and other resistant weeds; the problem is that
dicamba can drift when applied in anything less than perfect application conditions, causing
damage to a wide range of crops. 2 In 2016 and 2017, this damage caused considerable tension in
rural communities, often pitting neighbor against neighbor; conflict over dicamba damage was

8

 cited in the murder of an Arkansas farmer by a neighboring Missouri farmhand. 3 One can only
imagine the economic and social pressures that manifested in that confrontation, or the ethical
conflict over farming choices that may have led to the situation.
Such ecological impacts can change risk and resilience equations for farmers,
communities and consumers. Resilience is generally defined as the ability of ecosystems and
communities to decrease their vulnerability to sudden shocks, and to generate – through
relationships and processes – options for adaptive change. The industrialization and
consolidation of agriculture, occurring within a remarkable period of stable, temperate climate
(King 2008), has increased vulnerability for many farmers and communities and reduced the
range of options for adaptation from field to plate (Hendrickson 2015). With its lengthening
supply chain, the industrialization and concentration of the agrifood system results in a lack of
tight ecological and social feedback loops, compromising adaptive responses that promote
resilience (Lamine 2015). For instance, changes that that took place in the Australian dairy
sector after it was deregulated to orient itself towards competing in the global marketplace
increased competition between producers, which combined with the increasing power of
supermarkets to dictate terms, led “producers to manage a system that carries increased risk in
the physical environment and to animal health and welfare because of higher stocking rates and
production per cow” (Sinclair et al. 2014, 379). Constrained choices for how farmers can manage
their agroecosystems in relation to the structure of the markets they participate in leaves little
room to maneuver ecologically in the face of the unpredictable temperatures, extreme
precipitation events, droughts, and even wildfires occurring as the climate changes. To wit, in
2017, Kansas farmers battled wildfires that burned over 650,000 acres in March, while the first
weekend in May saw nearly 20 inches of snow. Both events killed thousands of livestock, while

9

 the latter flattened a rapidly developing wheat crop. Sustainable agricultural practices can help
mitigate damages, but it remains difficult for farmers to prepare for such calamitous weather.
The discussion above points to an industrial agrifood system in crisis regarding its
negative economic, social and ecological externalities (Constance et al. 2014a; Howard 2016a;
Magdoff et al. 2000). This crisis has accelerated steadily over the past 40 years and has now
reached a tipping point based on the realization that industrial agriculture is the major contributor
to global climate change. To complicate the scenario, by the year 2050 nine billion people will
need to be fed without expanding the agricultural land base, while reducing negative
environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions (Gardner 2009; FAO 2009) leading to
considerable debate as to the best way to achieve food security for all without destroying our
ecosystem. The current economic and social structure of the agrifood system has forced many
farmers out of farming as a full-time profession in the U.S. and decimated the number of
smallholder farmers in other countries, while those who remain face consolidated markets that
narrow the range of choices they can make about what kind of farmer they want to be and how
they want to manage land, people and animals. By limiting farmers' ability to manage their
farms as an ecosystem (also known as agroecology), this consolidated and industrialized
agriculture system has increased their vulnerability and reduced their resilience in the face of
emerging threats, such as our changing climate.

Analyzing the Social and Economic Structure of Food and Farming
Before we turn to documenting the very structure that causes the impacts we describe
above, we provide an analytical framework that situates the data in the next section. Many
different disciplines have converged around the idea that the current structure of food and
agriculture can best be thought of as a series of competing global production networks in which

10

 actors can be more or less dependent, and thus more or less powerful (Carstensen, Lianos,
Lombardi, & MacDonald, 2016; James, Hendrickson, & Howard, 2013; Wilkinson, 2006,
Hendrickson et al. 2008). A key concept is defining power in the food system, who has it, how
we can document and/or measure it, and how it is articulated in the structure that we document.
Power is a crucial element of who can make decisions in the food system, decisions which shape
the life chances of farmers and workers who produce our food, the vibrancy of the communities
in which they live, and the ecology on which future food production depends. In the past, those
of us involved in the Missouri School of Agrifood Studies (Bonanno 2009) documented the
increase in concentration in different sectors of the agrifood industry in the U.S. through a series
of concentration tables, reports, and articles (Constance et al. 2014a). We showed the four-firm
concentration ratio in major commodity markets, documented the top four firms in each sector,
and illustrated transnational agrifood firm linkages across sectors (Heffernan, Hendrickson, &
Gronski, 1999; Howard, 2009b). We hoped that by documenting the market relationships in the
agrifood system, we would help farmers, consumers and communities understand the system
they were part of in order to transform it.
Our approach is different from other scholarship in economics and law that has primarily
addressed concerns about agricultural consolidation by studying one aspect – horizontal
integration which occurs when firms in one sector (for example pork processing) consolidate into
fewer firms – at one scale, national markets (e.g. Crespi, Saitone, and Sexton 2012; Fuglie et al.
2011; MacDonald 2016). These scholars often found little reason to worry about increasing
consolidation and concentration, arguing that it increased efficiency that in turn produced
economic gains and that firms did not use their market power to increase prices or to
discriminate against producers.

11

 We admit there are weaknesses in looking only at concentration in certain commodities,
or employing monopoly-only models of the agrifood system. For instance, while firms may
organize themselves into global production networks, those networks may still compete with
each other while disadvantaging farmers and ecosystems (Hendrickson et al. 2008; Heffernan,
Hendrickson, and Gronski 1999). Current concentration and monopoly models also don't
address the issue of vertical integration and other structural issues in the food and agriculture
value chain. To remedy these problems, some scholars have worked to differentiate between
buyer and seller power, or to examine the differing levels of concentration that can harm
producers, consumers or the public good in different situations (Foer 2016; Carstensen 2008;
Carstensen et al. 2016). While this scholarship can lead to important insights and can result in
regulatory proposals, Howard (2016a, 11), following Nitzan and Bichler, (2009), proposed a
more encompassing look at capital as power – "that corporations quantify their perceived
influence through 'capitalization,'" which can be viewed as a measure of their expected future
earnings (in present dollars), discounted for perceived risks. This means that "[c]apitalism as a
system is therefore better understood as a mode of power rather than a mode of production."
Mode of production refers to the way we collectively produce what we need to survive as a
society, and the social relationships that form around it. Mode of power, in contrast, does not
assume capitalists are driven to increase production (nor consumption), but only their own power
relative to everyone else, even if it reduces wellbeing. This approach highlights the need to
understand the social, political and economic relationships that structure the agrifood system. At
the core of all these works is the desire to describe and understand the power relationships that
arise in an industrialized, highly capitalized agrifood system in order to address their negative
impacts.

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 Methods
The Missouri School method is to document economic concentration in an easily
assessable format that illustrates the breadth and depth of concentration in major agricultural
commodities and in different sectors of the food system (see Figure 2). We report the market
shares in major agricultural commodities, agricultural inputs and food retailing in CR4 tables
(CR4 is the concentration ratio [CR] of the combined market share of the top four firms in each
market). We glean the data from trade journals, company annual reports, government reports,
academic journals and financial newspapers. Sources used in this chapter include trade journals
and newspapers such as Successful Farming, Farm Futures, European Seed, Reuters, and
Fortune; government reports from USDA's Economic Research Service and Grain Inspection
Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA), as well as United Nations agencies such as

Livestock and crop
farmers

Seeds & Breeds

Agrichemicals

Fertilizer

Processors &
Grain Traders

Food
Manufacturers

Grocers
Restaurants

Figure 2: Agrifood system supply chain
illustrating different sectors of the market which
are highly concentrated. The exception is
farmers, where approximately 800,000 farmers
face concentrated markets for inputs and their
agricultural products. The results section starts
with the consolidation among farms, then moves
to inputs (see left) before documenting
concentration in chain (see above).

Equipment

Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Committee on Trade and Development
(UNCTAD); non-profit research briefs where we have examined and agree with the methods
13

 used including from ETC Group, Food and Water Watch and Oxfam; and academic journals in
law, economics, policy and sociology.
We are particularly interested in the top four firms in a specific market for two reasons.
First, when four firms control more than forty percent of a market the oligopolistic/oligopsonistic
structure can confer market power to those firms (Breimyer 1965; Connor et al. 1984; Heffernan
2000; Hendrickson and James 2005). Second, the theory of small group behavior indicates that
actors in small groups generally inform their own actions through observation of other actors,
rather than openly discussing actions with others (Olson 1965). As noted above, CR4 is a rather
simplistic monopoly model, which we recognize provides an imperfect assessment of power
relationships within a particular commodity (James, Hendrickson and Howard 2013). The utility
of the CR4 tables is the snapshot of the dominant players in and across particular commodities
that helps farmers and community members understand the wide reach of corporate actors.
Because we are interested in consolidation and concentration issues across the food system, one
of our major contributions is the identification of the top firms by name to document the progress
of cross-commodity integration. Reading company reports, trade journals and financial
newspapers also allows us to glean information about potential strategies that different actors
pursue, as well as industry insights into the implications of those strategies.

Results: The Structure of the Food and Farming System
In the following pages, we attempt to provide a snapshot of different markets across the
food chain (see Figure 2), which starts with the inputs farmers use to produce agricultural
commodities, the commodity markets into which they sell, and the food processing and food
retailing sectors that have driven a large number of changes in the marketplace in the last 25
years. We describe each link of the agrifood chain, the way markets have changed and the
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 implications of those changes. But first, we want to provide a snapshot of what has happened to
farmers in the last 50 years.
We have lost one-third of the farms that existed in 1964, and half of the remaining two
million farms produce less than $10,000 in annual sales (USDA 2012). Using the median size of
crop acres or number of animals, MacDonald (2016) shows increasing consolidation at the farm
level in the United States, where median farm size in cropland more than doubled between 1982
and 2012, and increased even more rapidly in livestock (see Table 2). Illustrating that the
"Agriculture of the Middle" is declining and perhaps facing extinction, he documents that "the
number of farms with milk cows or hogs fell by about 70%, while those with fed cattle
[steers/heifers for market] or contracts for broiler production fell by 30%" (ibid, 5).
Table 2: Structural Change in U.S. Livestock Production
Item
1987
Midpoint farm sizes
Broilers (annual sales/removals)
300,000
Cattle feeding (annual sales/removals)
17,532
Hogs (annual sales/removals)
1,200
Milk cows (herd size)
80
Number of farms with
Contract broiler production
22,000
Cattle feeding
112,109
Hogs
243,398
Milk cows
202,068
Source: MacDonald 2016 p. 5

2012
680,000
38,369
40,000
900
15,830
77,120
63,246
64,098

The trends toward large-scale farms in the US (mirrored in Canada) have been on the
leading edge of global shifts, suggesting what may happen to farms elsewhere that begin to
industrialize with global capitalist markets. Lowder, Skoet, and Raney (2016,27) show that
"[f]rom 1960 to 2000, average farm size decreased in most low- and lower-middle-income
countries and in South Asia as a whole. It decreased from 1960 to 1990 in Latin America and the
Caribbean as a whole, before increasing from 1990 to 2000. Average farm size increased from
15

 1960 to 2000 in some upper-middle-income countries and in nearly all high-income
countries…." Oya (2013) reminds us, however, that farm scale does not neatly define or
describe the relations of production, rather we need to understand global agrifood commodity
relationships, or as we conceive of it - the mode of power - that is shaping how people can
participate in the food system.

Concentration in the Markets for Inputs Required to Raise Crops and Livestock
Fewer and larger farms signifies that farmers are replacing management and inputs
produced on the farm with capital-intensive inputs from off the farm in many sectors of
agriculture, especially in the production of pork, poultry, dairy, and row crops and within large
vegetable, fruit and nursery operations. When this happens, consolidation in the input markets
becomes a serious concern to the farmers who remain. In the past two decades, mergers of
enormous firms have occurred in the farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds and agrichemical sectors.
Of increasing concern is ownership in the digital age, including data, codes and programming
upon which commercial farmers have come to rely; even smaller scale row-crop farms use GPS
systems to manage soil fertility, irrigation, and especially yield data, while farmers with recently
purchased tractors or combines cannot legally fix the machines themselves (Carolan 2017).
Since the late 1990s, the seed industry has consolidated rapidly both in the U.S. and
globally. The introduction of Round-up Ready seeds in the mid-1990s spurred rapid
consolidation among seed companies and convergence between seed and chemical companies
(Howard 2009b). Essentially, a chemical company, Monsanto, became the dominant seed firm
with the acquisition of more than 50 seed firms (see Table 3). Fuglie et al. (2011) estimated a
concentration ratio for the top four firms (CR4) of 54 percent of global commercial seed market,
with certain segments even more concentrated (for example, the global vegetable seed market

16

 has a CR4 of 70 percent, while in the late 2000s the CR4 for the U.S. cottonseed, corn seed, and
soybean seed were all over 50 percent, see Figure 3). In the last two years, major mergers
between the largest seed and chemical companies have been proposed or approved. Bayer has
sought to merge with Monsanto, while the Dow-DuPont merger is nearly complete. If the
mergers are approved, the new firms would control half of the global commercial seeds market
(see Table 3). Lianos, Katalevsky, and Ivanov (2016, 1) argue that "[r]ecent merger activity in
this sector … illustrates its rapid transformation from an already concentrated industry to a tight
oligopoly on a global scale."
Much of the concentration in seeds has been spurred by proprietary agricultural
biotechnology that makes it illegal for farmers to save seed and also promotes tight coordination

Figure 1: USDA seed market data prior to 2016 merger announcements. (MacDonald 2017)

between seed and chemical companies, especially regarding herbicide resistant traits. In the
1990s and 2000s firms that had traditionally focused on agrochemicals, like Syngenta, Monsanto
and DuPont, moved into the seed industry (UNCTAD 2006). In the agrochemical sector, ETC
Group (2013) notes that six global firms (Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer, Dow, and
17

 BASF) 4 controlled three-quarters of all private sector plant breeding research, nearly three-fifths
of the commercial seed market and over three-quarters of global agrochemical sales. ChemChina
acquired Syngenta, which was the third largest global seed company and largest agrochemical
company with over one-fifth of the global market in 2011 (ETC Group 2013). If the announced
large mergers in the seed and agrochemical arena proceed without required divestures, three
firms would sell 70 percent of agrichemicals globally based on their 2011 sales (see Table 3
which uses figures compiled by ETC Group 2013).
Table 3: Global Seed & Agrichemical Companies
Seed Company & Global
Concentration Ratio of
Rank on Global Seed Sales Global Proprietary Seed
Market (Current)
Monsanto (1)
DuPont (2)
Syngenta (3)
Vilmorin (4)
WinField (5)
KWS (6)
Bayer CropScience (7)
Dow Agrosciences (8)
Agrichemical Company &
Global Rank

Merger
Partner

Bayer (7)
Dow (8)
CR4 – 54%

CR8 – 63%
Concentration Ratio of
Global Agrichemical
Market (Current)

Syngenta (1)
Bayer CropScience (2)
BASF (3)
Dow Agrosciences (4)
CR4 – 62%
Monsanto (5)
DuPont (6)
ChemChina (7)
Nufarm (8)
CR8 – 87%
Sources: ETC Group (2013), Fuglie et al (2011)

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Monsanto (1)
DuPont (8)
Merger
Partner

ChemChina
(7)
Monsanto (5)
DuPont (6)
Dow (4)
Syngenta (1)

Percent of Global
Proprietary Seed Market
of Combined Firm
(Estimated)
29%
18%
9%
5%

Percent of Global
Agrichemical Market of
Combined Firm
(Estimated)
29%
25%
12%
16%

 No one can explain better than farmers what is happening. In 2010, a number of farmers
testified at workshops on agricultural competition organized by the U.S. Departments of Justice
and Agriculture. In Iowa, Todd Leak from North Dakota gave a farmer's view of the changes we
documented above:
"I farm 2,000 acres with my brother in central Grand Forks County, North
Dakota. I'm a soybean farmer for 30 years, and maybe about a decade ago [in
2000], I was free to choose from about a hundred different varieties of non-GMO
soybeans…Today there's about 123 varieties of GMO soybeans that I have to
choose from and about 12 non-GMO. Of those 12 non-GMO varieties, 6 of those
are for the specialty food grade … market … 6 that remained to me were
developed in the 1980s and 1990s and their disease packages, their host resistance
are far less than the GMO varieties, and their yield is only about 70 percent of the
GMO varieties, and that is not because of the GMOs. GMOs do not increase
yield. There is no yield gene trait. The issue is that all of the research, all of the
breeding, is going into proprietary genetically modified varieties …I am therefore
forced as a farmer to have to go to the seed companies, these few seed companies
that are left, to purchase my seed." (U.S. Departments of Justice and Agriculture
2010, 126-127)

Many – but not all – farmers at the Iowa hearing agreed. Fred Bower, a Minnesota farmer and
seed dealer, lamented the decrease in the number of seed companies from 50 when he started
farming in the 1970s to four in 2010. He complained that he was "not being treated properly as
far as price. When the amount of seed dealers goes down, the competition decreases, and they
kind of run the show of what they want to say is the price. It was way better to have more seed
companies involved than to have fewer seed companies at the present time and pay through the
nose." (U.S. Departments of Justice and Agriculture 2010, 132) An Indiana farmer pleaded that
"I need a choice of seed. I'm down to planting three varieties of public soybeans." (U.S.
Departments of Justice and Agriculture 2010, 139)
As farmer Leak's testimony indicated, it is difficult to disentangle seeds, chemicals and
agriculture biotechnology. Moss (2016,11) reported that "[i]n 2009, the 'Big 6' biotechnology

19

 firms (Monsanto, DuPont-Pioneer, Syngenta, Dow, Bayer, and BASF) held greater than 95% of
trait acres for corn, soybeans, and cotton in the U.S., with Monsanto alone accounting for 90% of
those acres." A recent article in Successful Farming, highlights new linkages that will arise with
the proposed merger between Bayer-Monsanto:
"Monsanto is largely in the seeds and traits business, while Bayer concentrates on
chemicals. …74% of Monsanto’s 2016 sales came from seeds and traits, with the
remaining 26% coming from crop protection chemicals. Bayer’s flipped the other way. It
derived 85% of its 2016 sales from crop protection chemicals, with just 15% coming
from seeds and traits. Little overlap exists between the companies in the global seed and
traits space for corn and soybeans. Monsanto’s 36% market share in corn would not
change if the firms combined. In soybeans, Monsanto’s current 27% market share would
rise to just 28% if the Bayer Monsanto merger went through." (Gullickson 2017, n.p.)
Because access to genetically modified traits is so important in the current seed market, the Big 6
firms have engaged in a number of cross licensing agreements for traits that Howard (2015)
convincingly argues increase consolidation in the sector and raise already high barriers to entry
(for a history of how these agreements have developed see Howard 2016a). There is also the
much despised patent enforcement at the farm level. A 2008 Vanity Fair article detailed
Monsanto tactics aimed at enforcing patents that included videotaping and photographing
farmers, and infiltrating community meetings to the point where their investigators were termed
the "seed police" (Bartlett and Steele 2008, n.p.).
As we see in Table 4, livestock genetics are also highly concentrated, especially for
poultry and swine production that takes place in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).
Research on nearly all of global poultry genetics and close to two-thirds of cattle and swine
genetics is controlled by four firms (ETC Group 2013;see also Gura 2007). Concentration in
both seed and livestock genetics raises a number of important issues alongside the fact that
farmers must now use more capital to access genetics while also having fewer choices about
what kinds of seeds or breeds to use. Genetic concentration is a growing concern, especially in
20

 terms of disappearing livestock breeds (FAO 2015), which means animals may be more
susceptible to evolving pathogens (Howard 2016a) or could also be less resilient in the face of
climate change (Hendrickson 2015).

Table 4: Concentration in Livestock Genetics
Turkeys
Laying hens
Broilers

Swine

EW Group

EW Group

EW Group

Genus

Hendrix Genetics

Hendrix Genetics

Tyson

Hendrix Genetics

Groupe Grimaud

Groupe Grimaud
Smithfield/WH Group

CR2 99%

CR2 94%

CR3 95%

Four firms control 2/3 of
research & development

Source: Adapted from Howard (2016a) based on data from ETC Group (2013).
While improved genetics in seeds and breeds certainly increased agricultural productivity
(yield), about half the gains made in the 20th century owes to inorganic fertilizers, particularly for
critical crop nutrients such as nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P) and potassium (K), also commonly
referred to as potash (Aziz et al. 2015). Maintaining and enhancing soil fertility has been one of
the key struggles of human civilization; Montgomery (2012) argues that many great civilizations
have collapsed due to the exhaustion of soils. Europe's vigorous imperialistic search for external
sources of N was solved by the development of synthetic N (Foster and Magdoff 2000), while
industrial mining techniques facilitated trade in P and K. These 20th century developments led to
the capital-intensive fertilizer industry that has long been controlled by sprawling transnational
firms, or even cartels of large vertically integrated firms, with substantial support from national
governments. Global fertilizer companies such as Yara, Potash Corp, Agrium, Mosaic, OCP
(Morocco) and a Russia-based potash cabal dominate the market (Taylor and Moss 2013). In
2016, Potash Corp and Agrium announced merger plans to create the largest fertilizer company
in the world. Taylor and Moss (2013) argue that global fertilizer producers have been able to act

21

 "in a coordinated fashion" on price, but that buyer power on the part of markets in places like
India and China have potentially curtailed those actions. The U.S. and Canada have legally
sanctioned export cartels in fertilizers, primarily in the phosphorus industry, where Taylor and
Moss (2013) identify a duopoly, Potash Corp and Mosaic called PhosChem, that controls 52
percent of the world's phosphorus (P) trade. PotashCorp, Agrium and Mosaic also cooperated in
a legally sanctioned export cartel, Canpotex, which accounted for 61 percent of the world potash
trade.
Farmers have also seen the farm machinery sector consolidate rapidly in the past two to
three decades, in North America and globally, with a few large firms dominating machinery
markets across the world. As discussed above, mechanization has spurred specialization and
centralization in U.S. agriculture, resulting in high capital costs for farmers raising commodity
crops or livestock. John Deere is the largest domestic and global agricultural machinery firm,
followed by CNH Industrial (a merger of Fiat and CNH Global) and AGCO, which includes
many iconic brands such as Massey-Ferguson, Gleaner and White. In 2011, 10 global firms had
sales greater than $1 billion, accounting for over one-third of the global market. In just 15 years
between 1994 and 2009, the four largest machinery manufactures increased their market share
from 28 to 50 percent of global sales (Fuglie et al. 2011).
Concerns about consolidation in the agricultural machinery market arise in two different
arenas. One regards digital information in terms of who captures it, who uses it and who owns it.
Precision agriculture, developed with the aid of GPS systems, has been an important tool for
farmers to monitor their soil fertility, crop yields and input use. Nearly three-quarters of U.S.
corn acres employ precision agriculture practices (Carolan 2017). Arguably precision agriculture
has significant ecological benefits, particularly in the reduction of fertilizer and pesticide use –

22

 up to 30-40 percent according to some analysts (Burger 2016). Such reductions in input factors
potentially jeopardize the business models that the Big 6 seed/chemical firms rely on, hence their
interest in acquiring farm management software and digital companies. Farmers worry because
precision agriculture relies on the transmission of substantial amounts of data from tractors,
harvesters, sprayers in crop production, and from electronic tags, feeding equipment and milking
equipment in livestock production. Farmers have concerns about the ownership of this data, as
well as the value of such large amounts of data to powerful market actors. Brian Marshall, a
member of the American Farm Bureau Federation, testified before the U.S. Congress that
"[v]irtually every company says it will never share, sell or use the data in a market-distorting
way - but we would rather verify than trust" (Plume 2014, n.p.). Plume also writes that large
companies are trying to figure out how to position themselves for the future, when more farmers
will participate in data sharing. Monsanto's ownership of Climate Corporation, which
specializes in collecting and analyzing soil and weather data to allow farmers to make "datadriven" decisions, was considered a key enticement for Bayer's offer to buy Monsanto, as Bayer
has lagged behind in developing data platforms. 5 As Monsanto's CEO, Hugh Grant, says, "The
company of the future won’t just be selling seeds and chemicals, but seeds and chemicals and
data as a service" (Murray 2016, n.p.).
A second concern regards innovation, which has long been a source of pride for farmers
who adapted their machinery to improve its fit with their needs. One only needs to read
magazines like Farm Show or Successful Farming to find multiple examples of farmers
"hacking" machinery and sharing their insights with other farmers. In a rare case, the U.S.
Department of Justice blocked a proposed merger of Deere and Precision Planting (Monsanto)
because the merger would hamper farmer innovation in retrofitting their planting toolbars. Still

23

 the top two precision planter manufacturers control over 80 percent of the high-speed precision
planting equipment market (U.S. Department of Justice, 2016). Some analysts speculate that as
combined seed/chemical firms struggle to increase power faster than other firms, they will be
vulnerable to takeover by machinery firms. Thus, we could potentially see greater levels of
bundling of input packages, comparable to when chemical firms took over the seed industry. As
long-time agricultural concentration observer Pat Mooney (2017, 4) writes, "At least since the
new millennium, the dominant farm machinery companies have invested heavily in satellite and
sensor information and Big Data management. With this data, the machinery companies stand to
know more about the inputs and outcomes of every field than any other company and even the
farmer. Machinery companies have the “box” in which the other input companies have to put
their seeds, pesticides and fertilizers."

Beyond the Farm Gate: Where Can Farmers Sell their Products?
While farmers are facing decreased choice in which inputs to use, they also face just a
few processors or grain traders through which to market their agricultural products. Globally,
Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus are often referred to as the
ABCDs of the global grain trade because of their dominant position in moving grain between
nations (Murphy, Burch, and Clapp 2012; Howard 2016a). In the U.S. grain sector four or fewer
firms control nearly all of cane sugar processing, over four-fifths of the wet corn milling, beet
sugar processing, and soybean crushing markets (Adjemian et al. 2016). For flour milling, just
one joint venture, Ardent Mills (co-owned by Cargill, ConAgra and CHS), controls
approximately one-third of the market, leaving farmers in some parts of the country few options
to sell their wheat (Howard 2016b).

24

 The same situation exists in the livestock sector as demonstrated in Table 5. Farmers rely
on the same dominant firms across the entire protein (chicken, pork and beef) sector, including
Tyson Foods, JBS, and Smithfield (held by WH Group from China). While we report primarily
U.S. data, the rise of just a few firms dominating the protein sector is a global phenomenon.
Table 5: Concentration in the US Protein Sector
Commodity & CR4^
Firm Rankings
1. Tyson Foods**
Broilers (51% CR4)*
2. Pilgrim's (owned by JBS)
3. Sanderson Farms Inc.
4. Perdue

*Note that JBS and Tyson each have more than double the market share of either Sanderson Farms or Perdue.

Turkeys (57% CR4)*

Steer & Heifer Slaughter (85% CR4)*

1.
2.
3.
4.
1.
2.
3.
4.

Butterball**
Jennie-O
Cargill
Farbest Foods
Tyson**
JBS
Cargill
National Beef

*Note that the top three firms have three-fourths of the market.

Pork Slaughter (66% CR4)*

1.Smithfield/WH Group***
2.JBS
3.Tyson
4. Hormel

^CR4 refers to the percent of the market controlled by the top four firms.
*Source: USDA GIPSA 2016
** Sources: Watts Poultry USA March 2017; Tyson Factbook
***Sources: National Hog Farmer

Take the case of Tyson Foods. After rising to dominance as the largest poultry company
in the United States through aggressive mergers and acquisitions during the 1980s, Tyson began
to diffuse this “Southern Model” (Constance 2008) of poultry production into Mexico in 1988
through a joint venture with Mexican and Japanese companies. By 2003 it was the second largest
poultry firm in Mexico. During this same time, the company acquired, or developed joint
ventures with, numerous companies around the world, most importantly obtaining Iowa Beef

25

 Packers (IBP) in 2001, which allowed it to become the largest meat packer in the world with
major holdings in beef and pork added to its poultry (broilers and turkey) portfolio. Tyson
perfected its global expansion model in Mexico and during the late 2000s, expanded aggressively
into the emerging markets in Brazil, India, China and other countries globally (Constance et al.
2010).
Brazil's JBS followed Tyson’s model with several acquisitions starting in the early 2000s
to become the largest meat company and beef packer in the world. These purchases included,
among several others, the assets of Swift Foods (beef) in the U.S., Australia, and Latin America;
Cargill’s pork operations in the U.S.; and Pilgrim’s Pride (poultry) in the U.S. and Mexico. JBS
benefitted from substantial investments from Brazilian government-owned banks, but was forced
to sell some operations in summer 2017 after admitting to corruption in Brazil (Howard 2017).
Interestingly, this government support gave JBS an advantage over Tyson in Latin America, and
as a result, Tyson sold its Mexico and Brazil divisions to JBS in 2014.
Smithfield, facing credit issues after the financial crisis in 2007-2008, was acquired by
WH Group, a Chinese firm that has significant ties to the Chinese government (Howard 2017).
WH/Smithfield is the world's largest pork producer, with 1.1 million sows in production
worldwide, including holdings in the U.S., Mexico, Poland and Romania, 6 and it is rapidly
expanding its poultry operations in China. WH Group has announced its intention to acquire
more international competitors, with the goal of becoming the world’s largest packaged meat
firm (Sito 2016). At the time of this writing, WH Group is seeking to acquire beef and poultry
assets in Europe and North America, partially because these regions' cheap grain and strong
demand for meat increase profitability (Polansek and Zhu 2017). Howard (2017) argues that
these global meatpackers, notably WH Group, JBS and Tyson Foods, have increased

26

 significantly in size over the last decade, partly due to government subsidies, especially in the
first two cases. Their global scope also allows these firms to circumvent national regulations,
such as import bans or higher tax rates, via the use of subsidiaries in other countries (Degan and
Wong 2012).
Consolidation in the livestock sector has been accompanied by increased use of contracts
and forward contracting, 7 with a transparently negotiated cash market all but disappearing.
According to USDA's GIPSA (2016), nearly three-fifths of the steers and heifers slaughtered for
our dinner plates were procured using a formula pricing system that references an exogenous
price (either based on a dwindling cash market or cattle futures), with only 30 percent of total
steers and heifers procured moving through the cash market, which is half what it was in 2007.
In the past, cash markets have been valued by farmers as they were established in places where
several buyers might bid on a single group of cattle or hogs and the farmer had the choice of
whether or not to accept that price. Today cash markets are residual markets. To illustrate, an
Iowa farmer, Eric Nelson, had this to say in the 2010 workshops: "The fewer competitors,
particularly in my cattle operation, it's not unusual in a week's time that we're down to 15 and 20
minutes cash market per week compared to a grain producer maybe has 1,500 minutes a week in
order to make grain sales, and it's because there are only a handful of end users in the cattle
market" (U.S. Departments of Justice and Agriculture 2010, 62).
The situation is worse in pork production, where only two percent of hogs are marketed
through negotiated cash markets, with the remainder of hog production procured through
formula pricing and marketing agreements (GIPSA 2016). The latter two forms often relied on
the cash market as the basis for their own formulas for paying producers. The disappearance of
the cash market indicates the hog sector has moved into very similar marketing arrangements as

27

 have existed in broilers, eggs and turkeys for several decades (Breimyer 1965). These
arrangements do not use a transparent marketplace to negotiate the actual price per pound or
animal; instead, broiler integrators use a complicated and purposefully opaque formula to pay
their growers. Thirty-five large hog producers now own two-thirds of U.S. sows, with the top
four firms owning 1.74 million sows or about 30 percent of the total. 8 Economists sometimes
refer to these as "thin" markets, or markets where there are "few purchasers, low trading volume
and low liquidity" (Adjemian. et al. 2016, 2). Adjemian et al. (2016) argue that small producers
are often left out in thinning markets because of the costs of using contracts, as well as the
economies of scale that favor larger producers, even though they find no impact on prices
received by producers in thinning markets. The structure of these end markets is reflected in
what's happened on farms (see Table 2), where less than 10 percent of farms with hogs and pigs
produced 50 percent of all hogs and pigs sales, with similar numbers for dairy and poultry
(Adjemian et al. 2016). While farmers may not have the data scholars do, they know the
problems. During hearings on competition in agriculture, farmers "charged that the thinning of
spot markets reduces market transparency, denies producers opportunities, reduces their
bargaining power, and yields prices not accurately reflecting underlying supply and demand”
(U.S. Department of Justice 2012, 12).

Retailers Drive Changes
Consolidation in commodity processing has been matched by increasing concentration in
food retailing, where food retailers have been accused by farmers and workers of exerting market
power to force lower prices back through the system to the farm gate (U.S. Department of Justice
2012). In the decade after Wal-Mart started selling groceries in the late 1980s, traditional
grocers like Kroger acquired regional firms to become truly national, coast to coast retailers

28

 (Howard 2016a;Hendrickson et al. 2001). Today, the top four food retailers sell Americans over
60 percent of their groceries. 9 Through the 1990s, traditional grocery retailers like Kroger or
Safeway dominated the particular metro markets in which they operated, but Wal-Mart's entry
into food retailing prompted national and international mergers (Howard 2016a). Wal-Mart also
brought a different business model to groceries, focusing on supply chain efficiencies and
negotiating with suppliers for the lowest price. As the firm gained power in the grocery market,
they exerted pressure on suppliers, which in turn motivated mergers among suppliers. For
example, Tyson acquired IBP to supply the whole protein case (everything from chicken legs to
pork chops to hamburger) to Wal-Mart (Hendrickson et al. 2001). Many food manufacturers,
especially in the packaged food space, might derive at least 20 percent of their net sales from
Wal-Mart stores. 10 Food and Water Watch (2013, 2) summed up the grocery landscape this way:
"The top companies controlled an average of 63.3 percent of the sales of 100 types of
groceries….In 32 of the grocery categories, four or fewer companies controlled at least 75
percent of the sales. In six categories, the top companies had more than 90 percent of the sales,
including baby formula and microwave dinners…. Retailers exert leverage by picking and
choosing their suppliers, but suppliers rely on a few retailers for the bulk of their sales."
In the summer of 2017, a new disruption in food retail emerged with Amazon's
acquisition of Whole Foods. Kowitt (2017) suggests that the $800 billion grocery business and
its suppliers may be in for a new round of cost-cutting reminiscent of what happened to
publishers and bookstores as Amazon built its book business. The new parent firm immediately
dropped Whole Foods prices on organic rotisserie chicken, bananas, apples and avocados by
approximately 30 percent, for example. Cost cutting in the food industry has often (if not
exclusively) been borne by farmers, workers and small businesses.

29

 Finally, we should mention that the last decade has seen large changes in the locations of
where Americans actually nourish themselves. USDA's Economic Research Service reports that
by 2013, the percentage of dollars spent on food away from home matched those spent for food
to be consumed at home. 11 Concentration in the restaurant and food service market can also be a
concern for farmers and other suppliers. Howard (2016a) reports that four firms have over 40
percent of the fast food market (McDonald's, Yum! Brands, Doctor's Associates, Inc. [Subway],
and Wendy's). Two distributors, Sysco and U.S. Foods dominate food distribution to food
services such as restaurants, hospitals and hotels/hospitality concerns. 12 One firm, 7-Eleven, has
nearly one-quarter of the U.S. convenience store market (Howard 2016a). For farmers, the
consolidation in food distribution, retailing and restaurants means there are fewer players for the
firms which buy farm gate products to sell to – essentially the very firms who have power over
farmers find themselves in a less powerful position vis-à-vis food distributors or grocers. Why
does this matter? Market power exercised at the retail level extracts concessions from the food
processor, which in turn extracts concessions from the farmer who has no one (outside of the
farm ecology or farmworkers) to extract concessions from. More practically, farmers providing
alternative produce, meat, or dairy items can find themselves in a catch-22; too small to supply a
firm like U.S. Foods even when customers would like to order from them yet too large to direct
market.
In summary, the industrialization and consolidation of agriculture has meant that farmers
specialize in certain crops or in single animal production; specialization has meant significant
capitalization. Markets for seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and farm machinery have consolidated
both in North America and globally in the last two decades constraining the choices farmers have
of which seed varieties, animal genetics, soil fertility practices or pest and weed management

30

 strategies to use. Knowledge and information in managing farms (i.e. precision agriculture or
genetically-modified seeds) has also commodified during this time, becoming a significant
source of power for transnational firms. Farmers face limited choice of where to sell their
products as major commodity markets, especially in grains and livestock, are consolidated.
Finally, large grocers exert power over suppliers in consolidated food retail market.

Discussion: Resisting and Reshaping the Agrifood System
While it may seem the structural conditions in the agrifood industry that we have
described are insurmountable, in reality they are created and shaped by human actors. The
"Emancipatory Question" then becomes "what kind of agrifood system might decrease injustice
and inequality" and how do we achieve it (Constance 2009, 9)? In this section, we showcase how
farmers in North America and across the globe, along with workers and consumers, have fought
back against the changes we described above, to stop them, to shape them or to go around them.
First the bad news; resistance to this highly coordinated, capitalized and industrialized
agrifood system has been fragmented and less than successful at stopping the larger trends
(Constance et al. 2014a). After four decades of anti-trust reinterpretation to a singular focus on
efficiency and price (Howard 2016a), farmers joined with allies in pressing the Obama
Administration for movement on anti-trust issues, resulting in a series of workshops exploring
competition in agriculture and food markets in 2010. 13 What began as a bang, ended with a
whimper when the final report issued by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Agriculture
claimed that "anticompetitive mergers and discussions represented only a portion of the concerns
voiced at the workshops" and that claims about "fairness, safety, promotion of foreign trade, and
environmental welfare" were outside the purview of anti-trust law (U.S. Department of Justice

31

 2012, 3). In another form of grassroots resistance, organic production and distribution systems
grew out of environmental concerns about overuse of synthetic chemicals, health concerns about
what those chemicals did to human bodies, and social concerns about small-scale farmers.
Today, however, the organic challenge has become "standardized resistance" (Howard 2009a,
2016a) with coopted certification schemes that have shoehorned a broad movement with multiple
goals into a narrowly defined set of production practices (Jaffee and Howard 2010; Guthman
2008). Other farmers and consumers have turned to community or local food systems as a way
to subvert the consolidated food system. Mount (2012) and DeLind (2011) worry that these
projects, founded on authentic relationships and democratic participation are being stripped of
their potential for radical transformation as they scale up to find efficiencies and lose sight of
original goals. Indeed this is exactly what scholars would expect in a system embedded in the
"mode of power" we described.
Still, as Howard (2016a) argues, there have been some small successes, particularly in the
areas of removing objectionable ingredients (such as extruded beef, also known as "pink slime"
or rBGH in milk), improving animal welfare practices through both market (for example,
movements toward cage-free poultry in the U.S.) and government regulation (such as banning
the use of gestation crates for sows in the European Union), and marginally improving wages
through consumer campaigns (e.g., Coalition of Immokalee Workers). It would be tempting to
stop here, acknowledging that the existing mode of power is very difficult to transform.
However, our commitment to the possibilities of transformation requires us to examine patient,
long-term struggles. In fact, following Nitzan and Bichler (2012), it may be that the allencompassing mode of power we have described in this chapter is approaching the limits to what
society will accept (e.g. the seed industry is having difficulty increasing prices to farmers,

32

 declining beer sales are forcing the two global brewers to look to non-alcoholic beverages for
growth). While Nitzan and Bichler are optimistic that at some point resistance will overcome
(agrifood) capitals' ability to continue to concentrate and the latter's power will disintegrate, this
hope remains an empirical question that has not yet been answered.

Restoring Fairness and Competition in the American Agrifood System
Against all odds, farmers continue authentic calls for justice through democratic
institutions such as the courts and government policy. In 1996, a group of cattlemen filed suit
against then IBP (later Tyson) alleging that the firm was large enough to control prices, claiming
that the firm artificially depressed prices by around five percent, thereby giving the company one
free out of every 20 cattle purchased (Harris 2004). The suit, filed under the Packers and
Stockyards Act of 1921, was given class status in 2001, and proceeded to trial in 2004 (Taylor
2007). The jury awarded a $1.3 billion verdict, even though Taylor (2007) argues the plaintiffs
generally were seeking injunctive relief to stop the practice rather than monetary damages. The
judge in the case almost immediately overturned the ruling, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused
to hear the cattlemen's appeal. At the 2009 Organization for Competitive Markets annual
meeting, the lead plaintiffs' attorney, David Domina, urged the audience to stay engaged and to
fight for new competition policies at the Congressional level because the judicial system had
shown it was unsympathetic to these claims. 14 While this is a depressing story that starkly
underscores the weak position of producers under the current mode of power in agrifood, it is
also significant that a jury – which had access to the actual financial details presented at trial –
found for the plaintiffs, legitimizing their complaint. Moreover, antitrust scholars have
redoubled their efforts to examine buyer power issues, and some expressed concern that the
judge muddled the statues and thus the legal proceedings when overturning the jury judgement

33

 (Taylor 2007). The case also helped to lay the groundwork for establishing rules to define the
ninety-year-old Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA), resulting in new provisions to amend the act
in the 2008 Farm Bill. After a long fight, a new rule went into effect in 2012 (Greene 2016).
Despite having won in both Congress (with new directions to interpret the PSA in the Farm Bill)
and the Obama Administration (new rules were promulgated and enacted), activist farm
organizations lost the battle because Congress refused to appropriate money for USDA's GIPSA
to enforce the PSA.
These so-called "GIPSA rules" were also influenced by the work of farmers and their
allies in the early 2000s, when sixteen state attorneys-general drafted a model "Producer
Protection Act," some of which was adopted in individual states (Peck, 2006; Wu and
MacDonald 2015). Along with the beef producers mentioned above, contract poultry growers
have fought long and hard to get new rules for contract growers into federal policy. In December
2016, USDA announced a set of "Farmer Fair Practices Rules" which were declared to target the
most harmful practices aimed at poultry growers, and to restore fairness within the PSA by
defining unfair practices and undue preferences. 15 While broadly supported by organizations
such as the National Farmers Union, Organization for Competitive Markets, contract poultry
growers associations, and even the American Farm Bureau, the rules are unpopular with
organizations with mixed memberships of industry and farmers and ranchers, such as the
National Pork Producers Association and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (Farm
Futures 2017). The rules were withdrawn by the Trump Administration in 2017.
While not the victory farmers were looking for, these fights demonstrate that continued
resistance can be important in shaping the playing field, building new alliances with consumers,
and planting seeds for the future. In recent years, media attention shined light on the plight of

34

 contract growers through sharp comedy on John Oliver's Last Week Tonight in 2016 and Chris
Leonard's 2014 expose of the poultry industry in The Meat Racket. On another front, economists
like Wu and MacDonald (2015, 5) acknowledge that tradeoffs between efficiency, the need to
reduce unnecessary costs of production, transportation or regulation in order to achieve more
economic gains, and distribution, which is dividing the gains fairly, may need to be addressed,
potentially by separating regulations derived from antitrust law from those derived from tort law.
Using the latter to address concerns around competition could "facilitate regulatory oversight of
policies that enhance transparency, protect property rights, and prohibit misinformation and
fraud." This could prove a promising avenue to address market power as one argument in
economics revolves around the idea that codification of protections for producers, workers,
consumers or the environment decreases efficiency and thus creates a smaller economic pie to
divide up. Wu and MacDonald (2015) suggest government enforcement of property rights or
protections against fraud or misinformation actually facilitate efficiency, thereby implying that
protections for farmers from exploitation of market power could offer wide benefits.

Building new linkages in the food system
Many of those fighting for better terms for contract growers and advocating for anti-trust
enforcement and reform are simultaneously working to create new linkages in the food system.
In North Carolina, RAFI-USA has helped farmers fight discriminatory lending practices,
predatory contracts, and financial distress while also providing support for farmers to try
alternative markets and production practices. In the 1980s, for example, Tom Trantham was
resigned to selling his beloved high-producing dairy cows before he worked with RAFI to
implement a sustainable grazing plan that reduced his costs and allowed him to access new
markets for on-farm bottled milk. 16 In Missouri, farmers working through the Missouri Rural

35

 Crisis Center waged battles against farm foreclosures caused by the 1980s Farm Crisis, fought
the "chickenization" of the hog industry through a pork check-off vote, and also founded a
producer cooperative, Patchwork Pork, to market naturally raised pork from members' farms. In
Kansas, Organization for Competitive Markets co-founder Mike Callicrate was an original
member of the Pickett vs Tyson lawsuit but went on to develop Ranch Foods Direct, a company
that includes cattle finishing, a mobile meat processing unit, a Colorado Springs retail outlet, and
a processing/slaughter facility. 17 Elizabeth Henderson of Peaceworks Organic Farm in New
York raises organic foods and distributes through a community-supported agriculture farm, but
also co-founded the Domestic Fair Trade Association and advocates for fair markets. In
Wisconsin, the Farmers Union created a food hub cooperative to market members' products to
local stores, restaurants and schools. 18 To push back against the centralization and
commodification of knowledge in farm machinery, farmers organized themselves into Farm
Hack, a global community of innovative farmers building and modifying farm implements – and
then sharing their "hacks" with others (Carolan 2017). We include these examples to show how
farmers embedded within the highly industrialized, capital-intensive systems struggle both to
reshape commodity markets while also seeking to create alternatives that can transform food
system relationships.

Ongoing farmer/peasant struggles
The concentration and industrialization of the agrifood system is not just a U.S. or
Canadian experience. Instead, smallholders around the world face many of the same constrained
choices as North American farmers, with far fewer resource (Hendrickson et al. 2008). Olivier
de Schutter, former United Nations rapporteur on the right-to-food, has called for agroecological
farming practices that would reduce the dependence of small-scale farmers on capital intensive

36

 inputs and create local and regional food markets (de Schutter 2010a). De Schutter went on to
found the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems that uses evidence-based
research to inform policy debates on food systems around the world. In 2016 and 2017, this
group released three monographs dealing with concentrated agrifood systems and impacts on
health and ecology. 19 However, the most widespread and potentially transformative movement is
that oriented to food sovereignty, which seeks to move decisions over food – from production to
consumption, from seeds to land, from market access to food safety – from the corporate realm
into the hands of farmers and eaters around the world.
Desmarais (2017, 3) says that "food sovereignty is best understood as a radical
democratic project that, on the one hand, exposes the power dynamics within the current global
food system, and on the other hand, cultivates new spaces (at all levels) for inclusive debate on a
whole set of different issues related to food, agriculture and provisioning." Originating in the
myriad peasant and farmer groups that together make up La Via Campesina 20, food sovereignty
was the rejection of the dominant food security discourse that sought to maximize food
production and enhance food access, all through a corporate neoliberal regime that focused on
markets as a solution (Wittmann, Desmarais, and Wiebe 2010). The definition of food
sovereignty remains fluid, despite the best efforts of academics. A Zimbabwean farmer,
Elizabeth Mpofu, chastises those who don't understand that the movement is simultaneously
within, against and beyond our current mode of power (neoliberal capitalism).
"We are not trying to create the perfect definition, for a dictionary or for a history book.
We are trying to build a movement to change the food system and the world. To build a
powerful movement, you need to add more allies. And as you add more allies, you have
more voices. More contributions. More issues to take into account. So your concept
grows, it evolves, it broadens. To understand what Food Sovereignty is for La Via
Campesina, yes, it is a vision of the food system we are fighting for, but, above all, it is
a banner of struggle, and ever evolving banner of struggle." 21

37

 Wittmann, Desmarais, and Wiebe (2010 p 4) point to the power of food sovereignty as forcing us
"to rethink our relationships with food, agriculture and the environment. But, perhaps the most
revolutionary aspect …is that it forces us to rethink our relationships with one another." What
this means in reality is that a farmer on an industrialized wheat farm in Saskatchewan, a member
of the National Farmers Union of Canada, can find purpose and solidarity with a peasant farmer
from Zimbabwe or an American corn producer on issues of agriculture and food trade and
agroecological production. The meeting and sharing of these disparate interests provide an
alternative view of the potential for transformation of the food system. As Desmarais (2017)
says, food sovereignty is ultimately about the return to creating community, prioritizing
relationships as best we can above the market.

Conclusion: Contested Agrifood Transitions
In this chapter we have sought to describe the current mode of power – the drive of
agrifood firms to increase their own power relative to everyone else, even if it reduces wellbeing
– that is at work in the global food system. We have detailed the consolidated and concentrated
markets that farmers face from buying inputs to selling their products, situations that exist across
the globe from the U.S. to China. Farmers face constrained choices for everything from seeds
and livestock genetics, to fertilizers and chemicals, to commodity processing. Global
behemoths, many with assistance from national governments, have come to dominate markets
for seeds, pesticides, fertilizers, genetics, livestock and grain processing, food manufacturing,
food retail and fast food. Markets have globalized with decisions about what food to produce,
where and how to produce it, who will produce it, and who will eat the resulting products
centralized in the hands of a few decision-makers located in global production networks. Such
38

 constrained choices make it difficult for farmers to use practices that protect their ecosystems,
that treat workers well, that strengthen their communities and that provide for economic
development in their region. They also make it difficult for everyone else to support these
farmers in making their preferred choices, and steer us toward locking in existing power
relations.
However, as the number of agrifood firms decreases, and the negative impacts of
capitalists’ power become more visible, new linkages between farmers and eaters, farmers of the
North and farmers of the South, environmental groups, labor activists, small food businesses,
animal welfare advocates and others are emerging. Perhaps the best way to encapsulate the
ongoing resistance to a globalized, industrialized agriculture is to examine proposed solutions to
the looming problem of making sure that all of the nine billion people expected to be on earth by
the mid-21st century will have enough of the right kind of food to eat, especially as we scrape the
bottom of the barrel of "stored, concentrated energy -- fossil fuels, rock phosphate, potash, fossil
water" and face higher energy and input costs, less freshwater and good soil, and increased
adverse weather events (Kirschemann 2015). Two competing visions of agriculture have
emerged as the path forward towards addressing this challenge: (1) food security through
sustainable intensification, and (2) food sovereignty through agro-ecology (Constance et al.
2014b; Levidow 2015).
The food security discourse began in the 1940s when the United Nations Food and
Agricultural Organization (FAO) was created to establish global food security. Although the
FAO embraced the scientific extensification and intensification of world agriculture to boost
production, it also included the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which maintained that
food was an essential right of life rather than a commodity. The Cold War subverted FAO

39

 multilateralism as the United States employed bilateral food aid to counter the spread of
communism. The FAO vision of food as a right was replaced in 1986 when the World Bank
redefined food security as the ability to buy food. In 1994 the World Trade Organization (WTO)
institutionalized this market vision of food security whereby countries grow and trade agrifood
products based on comparative advantage and people buy these foods instead of grow them. The
WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture in 2008 furthered this vision by defining the new agriculture
as system of global entrepreneurial farmers employing sustainable intensification practices
linked to agrifood transnational corporations in flexible arrangements governed by sustainability
standards (Ingram et al. 2010; McMichael 2009).
As noted in the above section, the food sovereignty movement posits a counter frame to
food security approaches. Represented by La Via Campesina, this view challenges and denies the
validity of the WTO-sanctioned food security framework based on free trade and corporate
rights. Instead, La Via Campesina builds coalitions to create agrifood self-sufficiency through
land reform, indigenous knowledge, and the regionalization of agrifood systems based on agroecological principles (Desmarais et al. 2014; Fairbairn 2012; Rosset and Martinez-Torrez 2014;
Wittman et al. 2010). These include the assumption that moderate and smaller scale agroecological farming, situated and adapted in a particular place, is more resilient to climate shocks
than industrial agriculture as well as the idea that domestic agrifood production is the better path
to agrifood sustainability than global commodity chains (de Schutter 2010b).
At their heart, these two contrasting perspectives represent alternative conceptions of
modernity (Desmarias 2007; McMichael 2014). The food security discourse separates the social
and physical sciences and casts traditional agriculturalists as primitive laggards whereas the food
sovereignty frame values interdisciplinary approaches, honors indigenous knowledge, and

40

 pursues social justice, which is the crucial fault line in agrifood studies (Allen 2008; RiveraFerre 2012). Food security proceeds from a land commodification perspective, which assumes
the problem of food supply can be solved through a high-tech repackaging of the adoption and
diffusion approaches of the productivist paradigm that has underlined the global consolidation of
the agrifood system we described in our results. In contrast, food sovereignty views land through
a multifunctional lens, employing a full-cost accounting approach that internalizes the
unsustainable externalities. It embraces a rights-based rather than market-centered framework
where rights are defined in collective rather than individual terms (McMichael 2014). The food
sovereignty perspective proposes a repossession of the land in the face of the continuing
enclosures based on accumulation through dispossession. The intellectual property rights/copy
right framework advanced by the WTO is countered by a copy-left and open-source framework
advanced by La Via Campesina. The battle between La Via Campesina and the GMO seed TNCs
over seed sovereignty is a crucial example of the conflicting paradigms (Kloppenburg 2010).
The tension between the food security and the food sovereignty visions aligns directly
with the two proposed transition paths to a sustainable global agrifood system. The food security
path is based on neo-productivist solutions that have resulted in the concentrated agrifood system
we described, diffused globally from Europe and North America around the world, as the new
paradigm to meet the challenge of feeding the world with sustainable intensification (Almas and
Campbell 2012; Levidow 2015; Marsden 2013). The food sovereignty path is based on
agroecology and a social justice framework. The food security path is patterned on utilitarian
assumptions about agrifood science and rurality. The greater good for the most people outweighs
the negative impacts on the few. The agroecology path employs rights-based rhetoric grounded
in a social justice agenda (Thompson 2010). The food security path includes incremental, green

41

 reforms to the existing system, while the food sovereignty path pushes for transformative change
to the system (Constance et al. 2014b; Holt-Gimenez and Shattuck 2011). With little evidence,
the neo-productivists promise their hi-tech green solution can feed the world, while the low-tech
agroecology approach cannot. The agroecologists warn that sustainable intensification is an
oxymoron at least, and more probably a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing.’
In the end, it is likely that the industrialized agrifood system – even dressed up through
sustainable intensification – will have to change if we want to continue to feed human society in
ways that acknowledge our indisputable connection with, and impact on, Earth's ecosystem. The
question is, can those visionary farmers and allies work fast enough for us all? Will the capitalist
mode of power have sabotaged more democratic, socially just and ecologically sustainable
alternatives to the extent that we will lack the resilience needed to build a better food system?

1

Based on USDA Natural Resource Conservation Services studies. See
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/ne/newsroom/releases/?cid=NRCSEPRD386010
2
See blog posts from the University of Missouri Integrated Pest Management Program at
https://ipm.missouri.edu/IPCM/2017/7/Ag_Industry_Do_we_have_a_problem_yet/.
3
See http://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532879755/a-pesticide-a-pigweed-and-a-farmers-murder.
4
ETC Group (2013) notes BASF is not a strong contender in the seed market itself, but maintains a great deal of
seed research and is in partnership with the other five firms in new ventures.
5
https://agfundernews.com/big-ag-turns-digital-ag-growth-ex-senior-dupont-exec-joins-farmers-edge-board.html
6
See Successful Farming's Pork Powerhouses: Accessed on July 31, 2017 at http://www.agriculture.com/pdf/porkpowerhouses-2016.
7
"A production contract usually specifies in detail the production inputs to be supplied by the contractor, the quality
and quantity of the particular commodity involved, the production practices to be used, and the manner in which
compensation is to be paid to the producer." ((Kunkel and Peterson 2015) Forward contracting is an agreement to
purchase livestock in advance of slaughter, where the base price is established by reference to prices on the Chicago
Mercantile Exchange. See https://www.ams.usda.gov/market-news/livestock-poultry-and-grain-cattle-terms.
8
Annual report on the pork industry by Successful Farming. Available http://www.agriculture.com/livestock/porkpowerhouses/pork-powerhouses-2016-glut-of-pigs.
9
Statement by Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food and Water Watch on June 26, 2017 regarding
Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods. https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/news/amazon%E2%80%99sacquisition-whole-foods-higher-prices-fewer-choices-consumers-and-more-profits
10
CNBC : https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/16/amazon-whole-foods-pair-up-signals-power-shift-for-the-foodindustry.html
11
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-expenditures/interactive-chart-food-expenditures/

42

 12

Bloomberg Government Disclosure, "US Foods Holding Corp at Deutsche Bank Global Consumer Conference –
Final." June 14, 2017.
13
More information on these workshops, including full transcripts of each workshop, can be found at
https://www.justice.gov/atr/events/public-workshops-agriculture-and-antitrust-enforcement-issues-our-21st-centuryeconomy-10.
14
See http://www.dominalaw.com/documents/Domina-Speech-Annual-OCM-Meeting-8-09.pdf.
15
USDA announces Farmer Fair Practices Rule: https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2016/12/14/usdaannounces-farmer-fair-practices-rules-clarifications-industry
16
See more about Tom Trantham's farm at http://www.sare.org/Learning-Center/Multimedia/Videos-from-theField/Sustainable-12-Aprils-Dairy-Grazing.
17
See more at http://ranchfoodsdirect.com/.
18
See more at http://www.wifoodhub.com/about-wfhc/.
19
See http://www.ipes-food.org/ for more information. In 2016, the group released "Unravelling the Food-Health
Nexus" and "From Uniformity to Diversity", and in 2017 "Too Big to Feed". One author, Howard, is a member of
this group.
20
La Via Campesina is an international peasants movement representing over 200 million peasant farmers in 79
countries belonging to 164 different organizations. Their 2017 declaration says "We, the peasants, rural workers,
landless, indigenous peoples, pastoralists, artisanal fisherfolk, rural women and other peoples who work in the
countryside around the world, declare that we feed our people and build the movement to change the world
(emphasis in original)." https://viacampesina.org/en/
21
https://www.iss.nl/fileadmin/ASSETS/iss/Documents/Conference_presentations/ElizabethMpofu-ISS25_January_2014.pdf

43

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