AAI Holds Global Forum on Corporate Control of Food!
Participants in the Agribusiness Accountability Initiative (AAI) network met with colleagues from around the globe June 27-30 to explore collaborative responses to the political and economic power of transnational agro-food companies. The four-day workshop, held in London, UK, included presentations by academics, economists, and activists on the underlying issues affecting the current global food system and on current campaign and advocacy work to address corporate control of food production, manufacture, and distribution.
The workshop also challenged participants in the growing international network of academics, activists and food system experts from farm, labor, environment, consumer, church and development organizations to think about the possibilities for broader international collaboration and how groups could work together on more effective responses. At least three global working groups emerged with plans to work together on both long term and near term events and strategies.
For information about the Global Forum contact us!
Whether in their own names or through joint ventures, strategic alliances and subsidiary arrangements, most of the major transnational agro-food companies now operate globally. Complex corporate relationships shift often through mergers, acquisitions and partnership agreements, and can be difficult for outside observers to untangle. Nonetheless, it is obvious that corporate oligopoly power now shapes the food system on every continent, and that North American and European firms are aggressively consolidating their holds on all phases of the global food chain. These firms lobby development agencies, banks and governments in poor countries to promote export-oriented agriculture instead of growing food for local consumption, supposedly because it will generate currency to pay their foreign debt. The same companies then sell subsidized grain from the U.S. and Europe to those countries, further hindering local production and thereby increasing poor countries' dependence on volatile international food supplies.
This process of eliminating local production systems may make good business sense to a transnational company, but it has disastrous consequences for social stability, rural development and poverty alleviation. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen made clear, the solution to the problem of hunger lies in viable local food systems based on secure land rights and other entitlements, not simply in the introduction of food aid or “dumped” grain.
Fortunately, however, there are activists, academics and food system experts around the world who realize that there is too much at stake -- from the safety and quality of the food we eat, to the livelihoods of those who produce it, to the integrity of the political system that oversees it -- to allow ourselves the luxury of surrender! Farmers, labor unions, lawyers, environmentalists, government watchdog groups, responsible investors and consumer organizations around the world have been working for years to hold transnational food companies accountable for the negative consequences of their oligopoly power.
This global responses section of the AAI website surveys a range of efforts by citizen groups in different continents to address the consequences of corporate concentration in the global food system. Use the tabs at the left side of this page to see how various groups in different regions of the world are working to challenge corporate control of the food system and promote more sustainable alternatives.
