Researchers around the world, civil society organizations, the AAI, and Canada's National Farmers Union (NFU) are proud to announce a new Market Share Matrix website.
The Market Share Matrix is a free, instantly-accessible website listing the names of the companies that dominate several aspects of the food system from seeds to retail. It provides an at-a-glance view of the countries and sectors where each company has a large stake. It also features regularly-updated data on market shares, sales, and concentration levels.
The Market Share Matrix website is a joint, co-operative project of researchers around the world. The project depends the seemingly small contributions of many people. It is our belief that we can aggregate those small bits of work and the result will be one of the most important agribusiness research websites in the world.
Click here to Contribute new or existing research on agribusiness market share data to the Market Share Matrix Project!
Help us find researchers/contributors! Get the word out through networks—through email lists, newsletters, mailings, and at conferences!
The Market Share Matrix will help to better understand the degree of oligopoly power in the global food system, by closely documenting the concentrated power of corporate agribusinesses along the various stages of the food system production process, and the types of companies that operate at each level:
- Agro-chemical and seed companies producing fertilizer, pesticides and other production inputs. These include global firms such as Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, Bayer and Syngenta.
- Processing companies that buy produce and livestock from farmers. Major international players include Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, ConAgra, Tyson/IBP and Smithfield Foods.
- Food manufacturing companies that create the brands and products consumers are familiar with. The world's largest such firms include several of the above-mentioned processing firms as well as Nestlé, Philip Morris (Kraft), Unilever, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and Mars.
- Food retailers, whose direct relationship with consumers gives them a privileged position relative to firms further down the production chain. In recent years, food retail firms have expanded from national to global operations, with the largest now including Walmart, Carrefour, Ahold, Kroger, Metro, Albertsson's and Tesco.
Research over the past few years confirms that horizontal integration is accelerating at all four of these levels of the food system, as fewer firms gain larger market share. The implications of this growing oligopoly power for farmers, consumers and workers are spelled out in the Impacts section of this website. However, it is also important to focus on vertical integration, as companies form strategic partnerships across the various phases of the production process. All indications suggest that global food markets will soon be controlled by a few such "clusters" of firms, dictating prices to farmers and consumers alike, and determining exactly what will be grown, where, and by whom.
This Data section of the AAI website will expand to centralize as much information as possible about these trends. If your organization would like to post your data here, please e-mail us at aai@coc.org.
