Grain in the seventeenth century was a sufficiently valuable commodity to command a reasonable price, but as the food policy experts Tim Lang and Michael Heasman argued in their book Food Wars, in modern agribusiness, farming itself is ‘becoming irrelevant’.68 Basic foodstuffs such as grain and potatoes have become ‘commodified’, their intrinsic market value so low that farmers are often paid less than cost in order to produce them. Prices are set by retailers, whose decisions bear little or no relation to the products they are selling, often with devastating results. For instance, Wal-Mart’s decision in 2002 to slash the cost of its bananas by a third (a pure sales gimmick, since bananas are known to sell in equal quantities whatever their shelf price) created an immediate worldwide slump in banana prices. Other retailers were forced to follow suit, putting a squeeze on suppliers, who passed on their losses to their Caribbean and Costa Rican growers, who ended up being paid less than the legal minimum to produce the fruit.69 It is not just farmers in the developing world who are going to the wall either. When we pay 70–80p for a litre of milk in Britain, most of us assume that farmers are getting more than the 18p many are in fact paid – representing a loss of 3p per litre for the average farmer.70 When you consider that an extra 3–4p per litre would keep British dairy farmers in business, it makes no sense at all.
Food manufacturers are affected too. Another Wal-Mart sales gimmick described by Charles Fishman in his book The Wal-Mart Effect involved the selling of gallon (yes, gallon) jars of pickles for the absurdly low price of $2.97.71 The bargain was so compelling that despite the fact that very few ordinary people have much use for a gallon of vinegary cucumbers (which, once the jar is opened, quickly go mouldy), the jars were soon flying off the shelves at the rate of 200,000 a week. The gimmick nearly sent Wal-Mart’s pickle supplier, Vlasic, to the wall. For two and a half years, despite sales volumes beyond their wildest dreams, the company was forced to expand, while making virtually no profit. As Fishman pointed out, the entire pickles market was a phantom, benefiting neither customer nor producer. The phenomenal scale of modern food conglomerates gives them the power to create their own reality.
The Revolving Door
Our competitors are our friends. Our customers are the enemy.
James Randall, former president of grain
company Archer Daniels Midland72
The modern food industry has provided us with what our ancestors always craved: cheap and plentiful food. Now that we’ve got it, few of us worry about how it gets to us. But the companies who supply our food have an extraordinary hold over us; one that should have us very worried indeed. Farming may be ‘becoming irrelevant’, but we still need to eat. So when it turns out, for instance, that 81 per cent of all American beef is in the hands of just four giant processing companies, who between them raise half the cattle in the USA, where does that leave the American burger-eater?73 Consolidation within the food industry isn’t limited to the US either: 85 per cent of the global tea market is controlled by just three companies, and a mere five control 90 per cent of global trade in grain.74 Adam Smith must be turning in his grave.
At a global level, there is no such thing as free trade in food. Instead, an ever more powerful oligopoly of companies are slicing up the cake between them. Anti-competitive practice is endemic in the food industry: a recent report by Action Aid found that 85 per cent of all fines imposed for price-fixing were paid by agrifood companies. But fining transnational corporations for fixing cartels is about as effective as fining footballers for swearing. Paying fines is just one of the hazards of doing business. Wal-Mart’s recent track record with the judiciary reads like a serial offender bent on collecting ASBOs: the company has a varied portfolio of lawsuits that includes the biggest in history, concerning the underpayment of 1.6 million female staff.75 Companies like Wal-Mart behave as though they were above the law, and as long as their profits exceed their fines as comfortably as they do now, they might as well be.
In Britain and America, the supply of food has effectively passed beyond government control. Transnational corporations are relied upon to carry out this most vital of roles. In 2002, George Bush caused outrage when he announced that the US Senate would be paying a whopping $174 billion in subsidies to US farmers over the next 10 years, most of whom are not exactly the sort of folksy homesteaders of Little House on the Prairie. In truth, US agribusiness has a powerful role in government, and in shaping global food policy too. When Dan Amstutz, a former vice-president of Cargill, did a stint at the US Trade Office, he is credited with having helped draft the proposal that was subsequently adopted as the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture.76 No wonder US agribusiness is consistently blamed for the failure to reach international trade agreements on food and farming. It is basically operating in a system of its own making.
The ‘revolving door’ between government and the food industry is less obvious in Britain, because we no longer have a powerful farming lobby in this country. However, that doesn’t mean that those links don’t exist. In his book Captive State, the journalist George Monbiot listed the policy decisions that the British Retail Consortium (BRC) has helped shape in the past few years, including the decision not to tax supermarkets for out-of-town car-parking; permission to use 41-tonne lorries on British roads; and amendments to the Competition Bill that allowed, in his words, ‘“vertical agreements” of the kind that superstores strike with their suppliers’.77 In 1998, the Director General of the BRC, Ann Robinson, confirmed the cosy nature of the relationship, commenting that ‘BRC is no longer an organisation that simply reacts to Government proposed legislation or White Papers, but sets out to help shape them … the intention is to work in a non-confrontational way so we are involved at the beginning of any legislative process’.78 It seems farming isn’t the only dog the tail is wagging.
No great surprise, then, that the biggest EU farm subsidies in Britain, far from going to the small producers who most need the help, go instead to the sorts of food manufacturers that one might have thought could fend for themselves. In 2005, the food journalist Felicity Lawrence revealed that the sugar company Tate & Lyle had received £227 million in export subsidies the previous year, while Nestlé was paid to export milk – presumably their $60 billion food sales were in need of a boost.79 The result of such export subsidies is that world commodity markets are undermined. A recent report by Oxfam estimated that EU sugar ‘dumping’ had lowered world prices by 17 per cent, preventing countries such as Mozambique, where sugar production is the largest source of employment, from developing their own industry.80 The same goes for milk: according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), subsidised powdered milk from the EU in 2002, exported at 60 per cent of the international price, put the Jamaican dairy industry out of business.81 In a bizarre twist of logic, it seems that milk and sugar – two of the most profitable urban foodstuffs in history – are now being used against the very people who could most benefit from supplying them.
Western countries are constantly accused of sabotaging world trade talks in order to protect outdated farming policies. But whatever agreements are reached at such talks (or not, as the case may be), the real powerbrokers in the negotiations are not governments, but agrifood corporations. That’s not to say that national governments have no power – far from it. It is just that most choose not to use it. As long as the food industry carries on delivering plenty of cheap food, it suits the British government to let it be. Like the eighteenth-century Parisian grain police, the government pretends to control the food supply, while all it really does is provide a legal veneer for the abusive market practices that keep food nice and cheap.
Food Security
It might seem alarmist, even tasteless, to mention food security in the West when we appear to be enjoying the greatest era of abundance in history. Food security is something we tend to associate with the developing world, and considering how many people worldwide face starvation every day, worrying about our own
food supply seems almost obscene. Yet the two phenomena are directly connected. Both are the products of a global food system gone mad, that no longer bears any relation to the people it evolved to serve. The modern food industry is a law unto itself: a transnational cartel with its own rules of engagement, more political clout than governments, and bank accounts to match. In the end, control of food is power, and over the past hundred years or so, it has been passing steadily out of the hands of nation states (to say nothing of cities, farmers and consumers) and into the paws of an elite group of global corporations.
On the face of it, the modern food industry seems to have solved the problem of food supply. Far from waiting anxiously at the quayside to see whether our ship will come in, there is now so much food swilling about in Western cities that most of us are more likely to die of obesity than hunger. Supermarkets ply us with BOGOF (buy one get one free) offers, and when we get our food home, it never seems to go off. What could possibly go wrong?
The short answer is: just about everything. The ‘quick and easy transmission of food’ may not seem like a matter of life and death today, but it still is, arguably more than ever. The cities we live in were shaped by modern food distribution systems; without them, our cities wouldn’t even exist. We are as dependent on food conglomerates as ancient city-dwellers were on their king or emperor (or, in the case of London, a myriad of small suppliers), yet unlike them, we have no direct relationship with those who feed us – apart, that is, from when we hand over our cash at the till. Supermarkets supply us with 80 per cent of our food in Britain, but theirs is a business prerogative, not a political one. They take no responsibility for feeding us: if we can’t pay, they aren’t interested.
Contrary to appearances, we live as much on a knife-edge now as did the inhabitants of ancient Rome or Ancien Régime Paris. Cities in the past did their best to keep stocks of grain in reserve in case of sudden attack; yet the efficiencies of modern food distribution mean that we keep very little in reserve. Much of the food you and I will be eating next week hasn’t even arrived in the country yet. Our food is delivered ‘just in time’ from all over the world: hardly the sort of system designed to withstand a sudden crisis. The fuel tax protest led by British lorry drivers in 2000 showed how quickly the slick, split-second operation that delivers our food can break down – and how quickly our sophisticated, take-it-or-leave-it attitude to food can break down with it. On that occasion, panic buying of food began within hours.
Perhaps surprisingly for an island nation, we have never been overly worried about food security in Britain – apart from when German U-boats showed us how vulnerable we were. After the Second World War, the government vowed never to be reliant on food imports again, but ‘never’ can be a short time in politics. Britain produced just 62 per cent of its own food in 2005, with the figure falling steadily.82 Yet in the same year, the Minister for the Environment, Elliot Morley, was quoted as saying that ‘in an increasingly globalised world, the pursuit of self-sufficiency for its own sake is no longer necessary or desirable’.83 So that’s fine, apparently.
Of course the economic logic for abandoning local food production in Britain is obvious, so long as international freight costs remain artificially low. Quite what will happen when the oil starts to run out is anyone’s guess, but one thing is certain: the way our food is produced and delivered will change beyond recognition. Even George Bush Jr recently recognised that oil and food weren’t quite the inexhaustible commodities Americans like to imagine them to be. In a speech delivered in April 2006, he announced a new initiative to increase US production of the biofuel ethanol from corn. But in the same speech, he also acknowledged that the new fuel wouldn’t provide any easy answers: ‘Ethanol is good for the whole country,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got to recognise there’s a limit to how much corn we can use for oil. After all, we’ve got to eat some; and animals have got to eat.’84
Deficiencies of Scale
Even forgetting politics for a moment (never easy to do when talking about food), the scale of modern food production has security implications that affect us all. In the name of ‘efficiency’, we are streamlining nature itself, reducing the variety of foods worldwide to dangerous levels. Never mind Ashmead’s Kernel; what about bananas? Almost all commercial bananas in the world today are of just one variety, Cavendish, yet 50 years ago, the variety didn’t exist. It had to be bred specially when worldwide stocks of the previous commercial banana, Gros Michel, were wiped out by the Black Sigatoka fungus, the banana equivalent of Dutch elm disease. Luckily, a wild banana resistant to the disease (Cavendish’s ancestor) was found in a remote forest in India; but should a similar pandemic occur today, we could be in serious trouble. In 2006, the FAO expressed alarm at the rate at which wild banana species – which are chiefly found in India – were being lost through the destruction of natural habitat.85 The FAO urged a worldwide exploration of small-scale producers who still grow non-commercial species, in order to gather the remaining gene pool before it is lost. The future of commercial banana production may well depend on peasant farmers who have never heard of the five companies (Chiquita, Del Monte and the rest) who between them control 80 per cent of global trade.86
The loss of genetic variety is not just occurring in the exotic plants and animals of the rainforest either; it is also occurring in those we breed to eat. Over 90 per cent of milk in America now comes from a single breed of cattle, and over 90 per cent of commercial eggs from a single strain of hen. According to the FAO, 30 per cent of 4,500 livestock species worldwide are at a high risk of extinction.87 In terms of food security, whichever way you look at it, that is not a very sensible approach. It’s the genetic equivalent of putting all our eggs in one basket. As the meat-producer Fred Duncan put it: ‘We’re dependent on very few varieties of grain that are effectively our store of food. Most beef and dairy cows are fed on grain; all pigs and chickens are fed on grain. If there were a disease, there could be a massive problem. That’s a doom-watch scenario.’88
The scale of modern food supply systems creates other vulnerabilities too. In his farewell speech in 2004, the US Health Secretary Tommy Thompson admitted that ‘I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.’89 After 11th September 2001, the US government is taking the threat very seriously indeed, setting up a federal bio- and agro-defence facility to deal with the problem. There is little doubt that the physical concentration of the American food chain makes it uniquely vulnerable to attack. Research carried out at Stanford University suggested that contamination with botulinum toxin of one of the 50,000-gallon milk silos that feed American consumers could kill 250,000 before the contamination was even discovered.90 Another possible target could be the state of Kansas, where 80 per cent of US beef is reared in vast feed lots that contain tens of thousands of cattle at a time. Farmers there are so worried about the threat to their herds that they have formed an ‘Agro Guard’, a kind of neighbourhood watch for farmers, to protect them.91
In the pre-industrial world, the surest way to attack a city was to lay siege to it: to surround it and wait for the food to run out. In the post-industrial world, the situation is reversed. As cities become increasingly amorphous, their sources of food are becoming more concentrated. It is a tendency with far-reaching consequences, not just for those who supply our food, but for the very future of urban dwelling.
The irony of the modern food industry is that it has made the very thing it promised to make easier – the feeding of cities – infinitely more complex. We depend just as much on our gas-guzzling, chilled plug-in, ‘just-in-time’ food deliveries as ancient Romans did on foreign conquests, shipping and slaves – and our food system is no more secure, ethical or sustainable than Rome’s was. In both cases, the problem is one of scale. Rome was the monster of its day, stretching ancient food supply systems to breaking point. The same is true of the way we live now. Industrial supply chains are what sustain us as
urban beings, yet we behave as though they were no big deal. Which no doubt suits those who supply our food just fine.
Chapter 3
Market and Supermarket
The shopping centre which can do more than fulfil practical shopping needs, the one that will afford an opportunity for cultural, social, civic and recreational activities will reap the greatest benefits.
Victor Gruen1
The Palazzo della Ragione, Padua. Town hall and market together at the heart of the city.
Borough Market, London
Friday lunchtime, on a cold, wet day in February. Opposite Southwark Cathedral, an assortment of white vans, cardboard boxes and debris shelters under a dripping railway viaduct. Trains rumble overhead, sending shock waves through the brickwork, pigeons peck distractedly at the ground. This is London at its gloomiest, but not all here is gloom. Stretched between two iron columns is a green banner that reads Borough Food Market – Knowledge, Service, Traceability – Handy for all your food shopping. Beneath it, a clutch of food stalls, awnings aglow with fairy lights, burst with an improbable range of produce: organic pork and wild rabbit, stuffed olives and ‘urban honey’, rustic bread and round yellow cheeses the size of car tyres. The place is heaving. Herds of tourists in rainproof jackets jostle with City types in pinstriped suits and cashmere overcoats. ‘Let the Feasting Begin!’ roars one of the latter to his two companions, who, to judge from their startled looks, are new to this latest form of urban grazing. ‘Just Wander and Eat, Wander and Eat Some More!’ adds Gargantua, before plunging off into the fray.
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives Page 12
