Nerve 13 - Cereal Power

Cereal Power

“When we get up from the breakfast table each morning, much of what we have eaten – cereals, bread, coffee, sugar and so on – has passed through the hands of my company.” Chief Executive of the Cargill Corporation (1)

Heading north from Liverpool city centre along the bottom dock road, you will be forced inland because what used to be a through road is closed off. This road became part of the Port of Liverpool Terminal after the Liverpool docks dispute ended in 1996, mainly because of the dockers’ success in restricting traffic into the Terminal. On the left, near to where the road is blocked now, the grain silos of Cargill tower up. Go anywhere near here when a Cargill ship is about to berth, and you will get a welcome of SAS proportions, with police helicopter, dinghy and vans descending on you demanding to know your business.

Cargill command this sort of security because they are the largest privately owned corporation in the world. Their income is equivalent to that of the nine largest sub-Saharan African countries.(2)

They are one of four massive companies involved in ‘agribusiness’ – a term used to describe the activities of giant corporations who control the entire food chain from field to table.

Tax dodgers

Cargill use elaborate methods to avoid paying taxes. When they ship grain or soya from one country to another, the cargo takes one route while the paperwork for it goes another, passing through off-shore tax havens. They are then reunited at the destination port. This is perfectly legal, but it deprives income both from countries where the crops are grown, and the countries where they end up. Cargill are not alone in this tax dodging. It is a common practice amongst transnational companies:
“…the burden of tax has been shifted away from companies in the last thirty years … on to the consumer and to workers. Governments in poorer producing countries are deprived of the revenue they need for development and governments in richer countries find their tax base for services eroded.”(18)

The Green Revolution

No, not a change from the old unsustainable way of living to a more eco-friendly lifestyle, but a move away from a system of mixed cultivation to one of monoculture and the single mass-produced crop.
Plant breeders developed high yielding varieties (HYVs) of plant strains to replace lower yielding indigenous plants. Because, unlike the old strains, these hybrids aren’t adapted to the climatic conditions of the area, they need vast amounts of fertiliser, water and pesticides to grow successfully: fertiliser and pesticides provided by the big companies.
Farmers have become dependent on these companies, for their seed, for the chemicals to make them grow, for the farming machinery to plant and harvest, and for the outlet to sell their produce. This is a vicious circle for the farmers who have no choice but to get tied into the system.(19)

Of these four Cargill are twice the size of their nearest rival, ADM (Archer Dean Midland). They have 160,000 employees in 67 countries (3) and in 2007 had revenues of $88 billion.(4)

Their subsidiary, Sun Valley, produces half of all chicken products used by McDonald’s in Europe, and it is a leading supplier of chicken to UK supermarkets.(5)

In the last three years, as food prices have soared by 83% and 100 million more people starve, Cargill’s profits have risen to record levels, going up by 86% in just nine months.(6)

As you would expect, Cargill have a vested interest in upholding globalisation and ‘free trade’. They even helped the US government to draft their policy on agriculture for the World Trade Organisation (WTO).(7) The WTO’s purpose is: “to establish free trade so that corporations can do what they want and go where they want without anything or anyone standing in their way. There will be no barbed wire fences or border police blocking the path of transnational corporations.”(8) Cargill’s rise to world dominance and control of our food mirrors that of the US, and began after the Second World War when the people of Europe were exhausted and starving, and industries and governments were bankrupt. As part of the Marshall Plan, implemented by the US as a counter to social revolution, vast amounts of grain were shipped in.(9)

As the economies of European countries recovered, the US extended this ‘aid’ to other ‘friendly’ nations around the world. Countries needing aid were made to ‘expand free enterprise’, and open up their markets to foreign imports. This exploitation was called, laughably, ‘Food for Peace’, and the US directly financed companies such as Cargill to administer and transport the ‘aid’.

The US Government still paid out vast sums in farming subsidies, most of it to the giants of ‘agribusiness’, leading to a massive overproduction of food, with surpluses flooding the world market. Many countries have been forced to abandon their traditional farming methods and change to the monoculture methods promoted by the US. This is the so-called ‘Green Revolution’, which in fact is an “extractive industry, a mining of the soil; an exploitation of an ancient storehouse of fertility using industrial tools – hybrid seeds, pesticides and fertiliser… which frequently play havoc with natural ecosystems, causing widespread pollution and disease.”(10)

There have been revolts against Cargill’s promotion of intensive farming and pursuance of ‘free trade’. In 1992 Indian farmers attacked a Cargill seed plant, to protest against crop failure. This brought the response from Cargill Chief Executive: “We bring Indian farmers smart technologies which prevent bees from usurping the pollen.”

Ecofeminist activist Vandana Shiva said about this stealing of livelihoods: “When giant corporations view small peasants and bees as thieves, and through trade rules and new technologies seek the right to exterminate them, humanity has reached a dangerous threshold. Sustainability, sharing and survival is being outlawed in the name of market competitiveness.”(11)

There has also been a concerted campaign by Greenpeace against Cargill’s destruction of the environment. In Liverpool they have halted Cargill’s GM soya mill on Gladstone dock.(12) Their main focus though, is in the Amazon, where Cargill account for 60 per cent of Brazil’s soya exports.(13) Here Cargill have been linked to the use of slave labour, illegal land grabbing and massive deforestation.(14)

Painting by John O'Neill Cargill have built an illegal Amazon terminal through which to ship their Brazilian soya, most of which ends up in Liverpool or Amsterdam. This terminal was the scene of an action by the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise in May 2006.

The tentacles of this mega-corporation reach into every facet of our daily lives. Having helped undermine developing countries' agricultural base by importing subsidised crops, they are now involved in switching precious food to be made into biofuels, pushing an extra 100 million people into starvation. In a further twist to this grotesque waste of food, they also promote bioplastics or 'plastic crops' as they are known. Made from mainly genetically modified corn drenched in pesticides, this type of plastic is marketed under the name NatureWorks!(15)

“The earth has enough for everyone’s needs, but not for some people’s greed.”(16)

“In the world of capitalist business, the use of power has one primary objective: the accumulation of capital, and with it, more power. Cargill Incorporated is a shining example of a corporation successfully using power to accumulate capital, all the while shaping the global future of agriculture and eating practices of people around the world”.(17)

Notes

In John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World, 2002, p23
John Pilger, Hidden Agendas, 1998, p72
Cargill website
Felicity Lawrence, Eat Your Heart Out, p32
Ibid, p47
Indymedia (According to the UN World Food Programme)
Mark Curtis, Web of Deceit, p212
Gill Hubbard and David Miller, Arguments Against G8, p10
Susan George, A Fate Worse Than Debt, 1989, p193
Graham Harvey, We Want Real Food, 2006, p75, p171, p192
Vandana Shiva, Feeding Frenzy, Guardian, 17.05.2000
The NERVE Resistance Calendar has more on Greenpeace’s actions at Cargill’s grain silos in Liverpool
Felicity Lawrence, Eat Your Heart Out, p261
Greenpeace, Eating up the Amazon, 2006
New Internationalist, 415, Sept 2008
Mahatma Gandhi
Brewster Kneen, Invisible Giant, (Corp-Watch)
Felicity Lawrence, Eat Your Heart Out, p278
For a full explanation of the Green Revolution see: Susan George, A Fate Worse Than Debt, 1989

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