Food First, Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins, and Cary Fowler. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977. 466 pp. $10.95.
This is one of those books you’d like everybody to read. Because hunger is everybody’s problem. And most of us don’t understand why.
The cause of hunger is not too many people, or a scarcity of arable land, or lack of technology. Our “food crisis,” according to Food First, has less to do with food itself than with who controls it. It is not a question of how much land, but the use that is made of it. The fact is, the poor of this world are engaged in feeding us and trying to feed themselves. It doesn’t work — at least not for the poor.
“The hungry are not our enemies,” the authors insist, “nor a perpetual burden. Every country in the world has the capacity to feed itself.”
The narrow focus on increasing production “has actually compounded the problem of hunger.” There are more hungry people in areas that have succeeded in high-yield production techniques than there were before; scientific researchers and economic planning experts are part of the problem, not the solution.
It was these “experts” who came up with the Green Revolution, an approach which superficially worked. For example, in Mexico, wheat yields have tripled in only 20 years and the annual production of grain in Asia (not including China) has increased by twenty million tons. The catch is that there are more hungry people in these areas today than before. Why? Because the Green Revolution was a campaign to breed “miracle seeds” and to provide those seeds with “ideal conditions” — the proper fertilizer, irrigation, and insect-and-weed killers.
But those very “ideal conditions” become the stumbling block. Only wealthy farmers or those with enough credit could afford the needed fertilizer and so on for the hybrids. They were also the only ones with enough land to risk planting seeds that are very vulnerable to disease attack and drought conditions. Yet these very farmers who don’t have to depend on their crop yield for sustenance and can take the gamble with miracle seeds often have tripled their traditional harvest varieties. Clearly the odds in this game of rice bowl roulette are stacked in favor of a privileged few. When they hit the jackpot, production statistics go up, but the majority of the people remain hungry.
In order to make farming profitable for the privileged minority, crops must be sold for export. But food that is exported cannot be eaten by those in the home country. And earnings from export agriculture rarely filter back to those who provided most of the labor in growing and harvesting the crops. Also, export agriculture leads to a shift towards crops which have monetary but little or no nutritional value such as cocoa, coffee, and cotton, so that even if it were not all exported abroad, such agricultural products would do little towards relieving hunger.
The authors build a convincing case based on their own research in underdeveloped countries, correspondence, manuscript drafts and even leaked documents from private, government and U.N. researchers around the world.
The question answer format of Food First makes the book readable, and is augmented by thirty-five pages of carefully documented notes and recommended sources for further study. With a functional indexing system, Food First becomes a single volume encyclopedia for studies of food, agriculture and hunger.
(Cary Fowler, one of the co-authors of Food First, has written regularly in THE SUN on the world food problem.)
The following chapter is excerpted from Food First with the kind permission of Ballantine Books, New York, New York.
— Alice Ammerman
Question: If underdeveloped countries are ever going to realize their food-growing potential, won’t they need agricultural assistance from more advanced countries? Perhaps it is a mistake, however, to think that this assistance should come through government channels. There is too much politics, too many chances for bureaucratic red tape, too little business sense. Isn’t what these countries need exactly what corporations have to offer: the know-how that comes out of the most successful agricultural system in the world?
Our Response: Agribusiness executives would certainly agree. If you ever weary of pessimistic assessments about world hunger, just listen to what corporate executives have to say. Hunger to them is clearly a “growth industry.”
Charles Hall, a banker who chaired a 1974 conference entitled “Feeding the World’s Hungry: The Challenge to Business,” has proclaimed that the “diminishing self-sufficiency” of the underdeveloped countries can be reversed by applying a “systems approach” in which “multinational business concerns can play an essential role.”1 According to Hall, multinational corporations “either possess or have access to the organizational and management ability, the capital and the technology, to apply such systems right now.” John H. Perkins, a bank president, described the challenge as one of bringing to the “hungry countries” the “technological revolution” that transformed “American agriculture into the most amazingly productive system on earth.”
Zeal, then, indeed missionary zeal, is not what agribusiness lacks. Even firms we would not normally think of as part of agribusiness have jumped aboard the agribusiness-has-the-solution bandwagon. At a 1974 United Nations-sponsored conference an executive from the St. Regis Paper Company expounded eloquently on how improved paper packaging could be the key to the solution to world hunger (what could he mean — that the trick is to devise a dry cereal container that will survive the Indian monsoon?).2 Another would-be savior for the world’s hungry is World Food Systems, Inc., an institutional catering service. Its president reported to the same conference that “large meal delivery system[s]” could deliver to the world’s hungry millions “a satisfying eating experience” and at the same time carry out an “on-the-job consumer market analysis.” Yes, why hadn’t anyone thought of it before? All the hungry need is an efficient catering service and a taste preference survey!
A Global Farm for the Global Supermarket
The question contends that agribusiness firms possess a unique expertise to share with the poor in underdeveloped countries. But we ask, expertise for growing what kind of food and for whom?
In Part V we discussed the mechanization and commercialization of agriculture in underdeveloped countries; in Part VI, the promotion of agriculture for export. Put the two together and we have the increasing worldwide penetration of agribusiness, the linking up of underdeveloped countries’ farms with global food markets: a Global Farm supplying a Global Supermarket.
The world’s hungry people are being thrown into ever more direct competition with the well-fed and the over-fed. The fact that something is grown near your home in abundance, or that your country’s natural and financial resources were consumed in producing it, or even that you yourself toiled to grow it will no longer mean that you will be likely to eat it. Rather, it will go to an emerging Global Supermarket where the poorest must reach for it on the same shelf as hundreds of millions of others. Every item has a price and that price, in large part, is determined by what the world’s better-off customers are willing to bid. None without money will be able to get through the check-out line. Even Fido and Felix in the United States can outbid most of the world’s hungry people. This emerging Global Supermarket will be the culmination of food “interdependence” in a world of unequals.
As much as agribusiness firms talk of producing food in underdeveloped countries, they are not talking about the basic staples — beans, corn, rice, wheat, and millet — needed by the hungry. Instead they are referring to “luxury crops”: asparagus, cucumbers, strawberries, tomatoes, pineapples, mangoes, beef, chicken, even flowers.
Furthermore, agribusiness “expertise” is not so much in producing as in marketing. They know who and where the world’s affluent shoppers are — a small group in the underdeveloped world’s urban centers such as Mexico City, Nairobi, Delhi, and Rio and a much larger group in New York, Tokyo, Zurich, and Stockholm. And agribusiness knows what they “demand.”
Del Monte is but one example of agribusiness creating a Global Farm to service a Global Supermarket. Del Monte operates farms, fisheries, and processing plants in more than two dozen countries. Board Chairman Alfred Eames, Jr., wrote glowingly in a recent annual report: “Our business isn’t just canning, it’s feeding people.” But which people? Del Monte is operating Philippine plantations to feed the banana-starved Japanese; contracting with Mexican growers to feed asparagus-cravers in France, Denmark, and Switzerland; and opening a new plantation in Kenya so that some Britishers might not go without their ration of jet-fresh pineapple. A pineapple that would bring only 8 cents on the Philippine plantation (still a significant portion of a worker’s pay) can bring $1.50 in Tokyo. No wonder that Del Monte exports 90 percent of its Philippine production. Yet the average Filipino has virtually the same inadequate calorie intake as the average Bangladeshi and serious protein-calorie undernutrition affects an estimated half of all Filipino children under four — one of the highest rates in the world.
There is nothing really new in food being grown for those who can afford to buy it. What is new is the agribusiness notion that all the world can be its Global Farm. Production of many low-nutrition crops that can fetch premium prices for the seller is being shifted out of the countries where most of the buyers live. These overseas production sites, in many countries with vast undernourished populations, are becoming mere extensions of the agricultural systems of countries such as the United States and Japan. In fact, the corporations themselves regularly refer to their farms and processing plants in underdeveloped countries as “offshore production units” — a revealing terminology.
This historic shift is occurring in our lifetime. A fundamental factor helping to create the agribusiness vision of One Global Farm has been the development of low-cost transportation technology. One Bank of America executive noted the shift of agribusiness production out of the United States: “With the welcome mat out in many underdeveloped countries and with the lure of cheap land, cheap labor and ready international markets there has been a rush to get in on the ground floor.” Moreover, tax concessions and tax havens beckon, and 360 days of sunshine can make farming easy.
The Mexican Connection
In Mexico the rush to link up with the Global Supermarket is far advanced. Traditionally, the American sunbelt and more northern greenhouses have supplied the United States with vegetables during the winter and early spring. But now agribusiness giants such as Del Monte, General Foods, and Campbell’s, as well as numerous southwest-based “food brokers” and contracting supermarket chains such as Safeway and Grand Union, are changing all that.
Take the asparagus industry. Up until a few years ago you could bet the asparagus that you ate or that was exported from the United States to Europe was grown in central California. But now a significant part of production has been shifted to Irapuato, 150 miles northwest of Mexico City.3 Since 1975, for instance, white asparagus is no longer grown in California. In Mexico, two firms control over 90 percent of asparagus production. One of them is Del Monte. In 1973, Del Monte paid American asparagus farmers 23 cents a pound for their crop; Mexican Del Monte contractors got 10 cents a pound.4 The Mexican contractors pay the seasonal workers a mere 23 cents an hour.5 Since labor costs account for up to 70 percent of the cost of growing vegetables, Del Monte translates cheap labor into bigger profit margins.6
Mexican soil and labor are already supplying one half to two thirds of the United States market for many winter and early spring vegetables.7 The rate of increase has been been phenomenal. One way of keeping tabs on it is the USDA’s annual U.S. Foreign Agricultural Trade Statistical Report. It is yours for the asking. The report is telephone-book size; but if you can get into it, your next trip to the supermarket will put you in touch with the Global Farm. Typical of United States government publications, however, it does not name the agribusiness firms that control the imported items.
Here are a few examples of the shift in Mexico from cultivation for local consumption to production for the United States.8 Most are operations contracted and financed by American firms. From 1960 to 1974, onion imports from Mexico to the United States increased over five times to 95 million pounds. From 1960 to 1974, cucumber imports soared from under 9 million to over 173 million pounds. From 1960 to 1972, eggplant imports multiplied ten times, and squash imports multiplied forty-three times. In 1972, over a half billion pounds of tomatoes were grown in Mexico for the United States. Frozen strawberries and cantaloupe from Mexico now supply a third of United States annual consumption. (The National Bank of Mexico notes that domestic strawberry consumption depends on “what’s left over after exports.”)9 About half of all the tomatoes sold in the wintertime in the United States come from Mexico, or, more precisely, from some 50 growers in the state of Sinaloa who in 1976 sold $100 million of tomatoes to the U.S. West and Midwest.
The shift is so far advanced that Ray Goldberg, of the Harvard Business School, in his 1974 study Agribusiness Management for Developing Countries notes, “If the recent rates of growth of imports from Mexico continue, in a relatively short time Mexico will account for almost the entire winter supply of most of these fruits and vegetables.” The same study goes so far as to recommend that Mexico “seek further expansion” of vegetable exports.10
Multinational agribusiness is radically altering the availability of food for Mexico’s poor, but in the wrong direction. Only a few years ago the national production of many fruits and vegetables was sufficient to keep prices low enough for lower-income families to eat some of these local products, at least occasionally. But now luxury crops grown for the Global Supermarket often crowd out more nutritious crops for local consumption,11 taking over land that previously had grown up to twelve local food crops.12 The land that is now contracted by Del Monte once grew corn, wheat, and sunflower seeds for local consumption. (Most significantly, crops for the Global Supermarket monopolize the funds and services of government agriculture programs.) As obvious as it may sound, we must remind ourselves that land growing crops for the Global Supermarket is land the local people cannot use to grow nutritious food crops for themselves. Higher prices of basic staples due to distortion of production priorities are making even beans a luxury Mexico’s poor can no longer afford.
A Cucumber Republic?
In order to play off both U.S. and Mexican producers, agribusiness has started contracting with Central American businessmen-farmers for alternative sources for a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables. While banana exports barely increased, the volume of other fresh fruits and vegetables (such as cucumber, cantaloupe, honeydew, and okra) entering the United States from Central America rose thirteenfold between 1964 and 1972. Focusing narrowly on gross production and revenue figures without asking who benefits and who loses, agricultural economists and international aid and lending agencies have applauded this diversification into “nontraditional” fruits and vegetables. (“Nontraditional” is in contrast to the great “tradition” of bananas, coffee, and cotton.)
Enthusiasts see this sharp increase as only the beginning for Central America. According to Goldberg, such nontraditional exports could jump from 18 million pounds in 1972 to over 100 million pounds per year by 1980. They could become a new tradition! Already by 1969 over 19 percent of the total crop area of Central America was planted with nontraditional fruits and vegetables.13 If we combine this 19 percent with the 29 percent of the cropland devoted to coffee, cotton, and sugar exports14 — not to mention untold acres for banana and cattle exports — we begin to understand why so many people in these countries are undernourished.
The utter inability of the Global Farm to meet the needs of the majority of the people — the absurdity of the whole scheme — came home to us in one fact, so calmly stated in a Harvard Business School study: At least 65 percent of the fruits and vegetables produced in Central America for export is “literally dumped or, where feasible, used as animal feed”15 because it either confronts an oversupplied market in the United States or does not meet the “beauty” standards of consumers there, while at home, where it is produced, people are too poor to buy it.
Strawberry Fields Forever?
In only fifteen years whole areas of Mexico have been turned into strawberry fiefdoms by U.S.-based suppliers to the Global Market: Pet Milk, Ocean Garden, Imperial Frozen Foods, Griffin and Brand, and Better Food Sales. Already by 1970 over 150 million pounds, three-quarters frozen, were being exported to the United States annually.
For two years Dr. Ernest Feder, formerly an FAO specialist on peasants in Latin America, painstakingly investigated the strawberry industry in Mexico. He was not particularly fascinated with strawberries — in fact, he is allergic to them — but he believed the industry would show how agribusiness affects rural people in an underdeveloped country.16
Dr. Feder’s research makes clear that, first of all, we should not speak of the Mexican strawberry industry but of the U.S. strawberry industry located in Mexico. Officially, Mexican growers produce the berries and even own some of the processing facilities. The real control, however, remains with the American investors and food wholesalers. Using production contracts and credit facilities, these American firms make all the important decisions: the quantity, quality, types, and prices of inputs; how and when the crop will be cultivated; the marketing processes, including prices for the producers; the transportation and the distribution; and the returns on capital investments. U.S. marketing control is so powerful that despite efforts by the Mexican government to develop markets in Europe, all Mexican strawberries pass through American exporters even when ultimately retailed in a third country such as Canada or France.
Even more revealing of this control, all strawberry plants come from nurseries in the United States. After fifteen years of commercial strawberry growing, Mexico does not yet have its own source of high-grade strawberry seedlings based on varieties best adapted to conditions in Mexico. Only two varieties are sold to Mexican producers: and they are not necessarily those best adapted to Mexico but the ones that meet the preferences of American consumers.
Although competition among strawberry producers might appear as a war between Mexican and Californian producers, in fact the rivalry is between two American groups, with different production sites. And the only way the Mexican production site can compete with the Californian one (where inputs and careful management give high yields per worker and per acre) is by keeping production costs extremely low. First, wages must be kept miserably low. Wages average only one seventh of those in California, even taking into account the higher cost of living in the United States. Feder is convinced that the very enforcement of Mexican minimum wage laws would “tend to drive the U.S. strawberry industry located in Mexico back to the U.S. or into some other Latin American country.”
Second, the U.S. strawberry industry’s interest in Mexico is strongly linked to cheap land and water. Water is “cheap” to the investors since its cost is largely paid for by federally funded irrigation schemes.
Third, the investors, Feder observes, bring in only enough technology to keep production going without raising costs. If they were to put in the type of money that would give yields comparable to those in California, they might as well stay in the United States.
Finally, the attraction of Mexico is that land obtained cheaply can be treated cheaply. Rather than requiring careful farming and applying inputs to increase yields, more land is simply plowed. The land, according to Feder, is “plundered”: bad plants, destructive use of irrigation, bad farming, and misuse of pesticides is in many places ruining the soils. But agribusiness knows that it can just move on to new land, eventually even into another country, where the whole process can be started again.
Because such an agricultural system is not oriented to the needs of the domestic population, it is, by that very fact, thrown into competition with production centers in other countries. To compete, commercial agriculture in Mexico must maintain underdevelopment (cheap wages and land) even at serious jeopardy to the longer term future. It is a vicious circle: this maintenance of underdevelopment ensures the continuing absence of a strong domestic market that alone could orient production toward local consumption.
The Desert May Bloom . . . but for Whom?
It takes a lot of freight to fill a DC-10 cargo jet. Yet three times a week from early December until May a DC-10 takes off from Senegal loaded with green beans, melons, tomatoes, eggplant, strawberries, and paprika. Its destination? Amsterdam or Paris or Stockholm. Ironically such airlifts began just as the drought in Senegal was beginning and they dramatically increased even as it was getting worse.17
In the late 1960s, certain agribusiness firms circled Africa’s semiarid regions on their world maps. Were they concerned about hunger there? No. What they saw in the Sahel was not hunger but low-cost production sites from which they might profit, given the European demand for fresh winter produce.
In 1971, Fritz Marschall, an executive of the European affiliate of the world-ranging, California-based Bud Antle Inc., visited Senegal. Bud Antle, one of the world’s largest iceberg lettuce growers, once filed a complaint, during a farmworkers organizing drive, that led to the jailing of Cesar Chavez for picketing. Marschall was struck by the similarity of the climate of Senegal to that of southern California, where only two generations ago United States government irrigation projects had made the desert bloom. Why couldn’t Senegal, he mused, replace California as his company’s source of vegetables for the high-priced European winter market? By February of the following year Marschall had set up Bud Senegal as an affiliate of Bud Antle’s Brussels affiliate, the House of Bud.
Today, Bud Senegal operates giant garden plantations, using nothing but the latest technology. Israeli, Dutch, and American engineers have set up a drip irrigation system with miles of perforated plastic tubing. The water for this system comes over some distance from northern Senegal through pipelines installed at government expense. In order to make way for mechanized production, Bud uprooted scores of centuries-old baobob trees. To remove baobob, sometimes as much as thirty feet in diameter, required the power of two or even three Caterpillars. The local villagers explained to us the value of these unusual trees: Not only do they protect the soil, but they provide the local people with material for making everything from rope to houses.
Since the undertaking is billed as “development,” Bud has had to come up with virtually none of its own capital. Major stockholders and soft-term creditors include the Senegalese government, the House of Bud, the World Bank, and the German Development Bank. The Senegalese government also helped by removing villagers from land that was to become Bud’s plantations. Even four members of the Peace Corps are helping develop vegetable plantations for marketing through Bud.
Despite the rhetoric about development and the reality of widespread undernourishment in Senegal, all the production is geared to feeding consumers in the European Common Market. This, in spite of the fact that in 1974 alone European taxpayers spent $53 million to destroy (“withdraw from the market”) European-produced vegetables in order to keep prices up. One year green bean prices in Europe went lower than the costs of picking, packing, and air freighting Bud’s big crop in Senegal. Did that mean more food for hungry Senegalese? Hardly. As the director of Bud Holland, Paul van Pelt, admitted “since the Senegalese are not familiar with green beans and don’t eat them, we had to destroy them.”
From May to December, European tariffs make it unprofitable to export any vegetables. Does Bud Senegal let its plantations lie fallow or allow the local people to grow food for themselves during those months? Again, no. Bud’s better idea is to grow feed for livestock.
The case of Bud Senegal reminds us of the enormous productive potential of Africa’s semiarid regions that we discussed in our response to Question 14. Obviously no natural limitation of the region makes hunger inevitable.
The House of Bud is now multiplying its success with mangoes from Mali, eggplant from Martinique, and coconuts and pineapples from the Ivory Coast. Bud has achieved the multinational corporate ideal of vertical integration, controlling all stages from production through processing and transport right up to retailing.
American Foods Share Co., a multinational corporation owned by two Swedish shipping firms also has its eyes on Africa. President Robert F. Zwarthuis states “Anyone who says that ‘we go to Ethiopia in order to help those poor things’ is lying.” The company is now “trying out” countries such as the Ivory Coast, Egypt, Kenya, and Ethiopia as production sites for supplying Europe. Investments in Africa, he estimates, can expect a yield on capital two to two-and-one-half times those in Sweden.18
Zwarthuis admits that the need for a “continuous supply” makes him favor countries like Ethiopia and Egypt “which do not have any local market for these products.” He foresees that “Africa is going to become the world’s biggest producer of vegetables, not only to Europe but also to America.” Recent World Bank reports on Senegal and Mauritania also see the region’s future in mango, eggplant, and avocado exports.
Why is Africa so attractive to agribusiness? Not only is it close to high-paying consumers in the Middle East and Western Europe but many African countries offer the prospect of unutilized land. Take the case of Ethiopia, where, notwithstanding the recent severe famines, most of the arable land is not utilized. The existence of large, uncultivated royal and church estates has been an open invitation to agribusiness looking for cheap production sites. One obstacle, a lack of adequate roads to transport the production out of the country, is being removed: Foreign aid projects and World Bank loans are beginning to “open the country up.”
Ethiopia’s climate makes possible several cuttings of alfalfa a year, compared to only two or three in the United States. In the early 1970s, the Ethiopian government granted a concession to the Italian firm MAESCO to produce alfalfa to feed livestock in Japan. MAESCO’s plantation is in the area where thousands of people, evicted by such commercial plantations from their best grazing lands, starved to death in 1973 along with their herds of camels, sheep, cattle, and goats. That year MAESCO started to raise cattle and sheep for export.19
Exporting the Steak Religion
The question asserts that what the underdeveloped countries need is know-how. Certainly there is one activity in which a lot of American know-how is being applied abroad — cattle raising. United States firms have set out with missionary zeal to spread the American steak religion to the world. Yet, we ask, who benefits? Is the meat going to the hungry? Or does it merely mean low cost imports for fast-food chains in the United States?
From one third to one half of total meat production in Central America and the Dominican Republic is exported — principally to the United States. Alan Berg, in his Brookings Institution study of world nutrition, notes that, despite dramatic gains in per capita meat production in Central America, the meat is “ending up not in Latin American stomachs but in franchised restaurant hamburgers in the United States.”20 Central America has become the chosen site for investment in meat export operations, first because it is so close to the United States and, second, because it is free from foot-and-mouth disease, not true of Argentina and Brazil whose fresh and chilled meat imports are not allowed into the United States. Should Central America consider itself fortunate?
In 1975, Costa Rica, with a population of 2 million, sent 60 million pounds of beef to the United States. Per capita beef consumption declined in Costa Rica from almost 49 pounds in 1950 to 33 pounds in 1971. If the 60 million pounds exported had stayed in Costa Rica, local meat consumption would have doubled.
Per capita consumption figures, however, are deceptive. Many Costa Ricans — those without land or jobs to earn money — can never afford meat no matter how much is available. One half of the country’s children do not get enough food to eat, much less meat. True, however, to the Global Supermarket phenomenon, a few well-off Costa Ricans can afford to get some Costa Rican beef just like Americans — at one of the three McDonald’s in San José. (“El Big Mac” is now in every Central American capital.)
The export market for beef has lured farmers, in countries like Costa Rica and Guatemala, away from raising dairy cows. The result has been sharp increases in the price of milk, putting it out of reach of most families.
We might think that, even though most of the meat gets exported because people are too poor to buy it, at least local folk are the ones who make money on these exports. But are we really talking about Central American small-time producers making good in the big-country market?
Not exactly. Those profiting in the meat export market are the traditional oligarchs as well as former United States diplomats (e.g., the ex-ambassadors to Nicaragua and British Honduras), a former Peace Corps director in Costa Rica, big western ranchers (including the lawyer for the country-sized King Ranch in Texas), and giant processors like United Brands’ meat subsidiary John Morrell Co.21 Even industrial multinational corporations like Volkswagen are getting into the beef business. As one Volkswagen executive pointed out, “You get a lot more for a pound of sirloin than a pound of beetle in Tokyo.”
The World Bank, regional banks, and agribusiness corporations, working in projects costing several billion dollars, seem as committed as ever to increasing cattle production for export from Latin America and Africa. Several studies indicate it may be only the beginning.22 The growth rate for world demand for beef has been higher than that for any other agricultural item.
Those who demand meat with every meal are capable of being coaxed on to a higher and higher price to get it. The American steak religion has already caught on in Japan and Western Europe and is becoming the “in” thing in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the oil-producing Middle East. In many Asian countries, a taste for grain-fed meat is being developed. But why is cattle production shifting to the underdeveloped countries? First, big U.S. ranchers have turned away from the higher land and labor costs of the United States. As one rancher put it: “Here’s what it boils down to — $95 per cow per year in Montana, $25 in Costa Rica.”23
Second, to avoid the rising costs of feedgrains, the beef industry is searching for areas where grazing is economical. Moreover, multinational conglomerates have recently taken over the major meat-processing firms. (Now Armour is really Greyhound, Wilson is L.T.V., Swift is Esmark, and Morrell is, as we just saw, another way of saying United Brands.) As meatcutters in the United States and Europe are just beginning to realize, these firms will now try to transfer labor-intensive meat preparation (boning, prepacking) right to the new production sites in cheap-labor countries. Finally, giant agribusiness firms do not want the bother of purchasing from several independent suppliers and competing among themselves for those supplies. Thus, United Brands is integrating backwards to ranching subsidiaries, especially attractive due to cheap labor, government incentives, and available development funds, in countries like Honduras. The Global Ranch is but a variant of the Global Farm.
Another impetus behind shifting the beef industry abroad is the U.S. government and corporate drive to build markets for American grain and soybean exports. Meat production may yet become the equivalent of the 1960s “screwdriver” industries for many Third World countries. Just as in the sixties underdeveloped countries assembled consumer items that were machined in industrial countries for shipment back to industrial markets, cattle operations controlled by multinational corporations commonly import American grain to be fed to animals that then get shipped to the United States.
In their drive to increase exports to Western Europe, Japan, and the United States, many governments in underdeveloped countries have enacted a whole series of measures to decrease domestic beef consumption at home. Several Latin American countries, including even Argentina and Uruguay, have even decreed days and weeks of the year during which no beef can be sold. (The principal impact has been that the well-off suddenly decide it is time to buy a freezer!)
Africa has many of the same attractive features for livestock investors as Latin America. European corporations are reportedly considering numerous ranching projects in Kenya, the Sudan, and Ethiopia — some of the finest and cheapest grazing land near Europe. According to one FAO officer who is afraid to be quoted, the plan is to use Green Revolution inputs on fully mechanized farms to raise the feed grains. This feed would fatten the animals brought in from ranches. The goal is export.
A Chicken in Every Pot?
Americans tend to think of chickens as a true “people’s food” compared to meat. Promoting chicken in the underdeveloped countries might sound like a good idea: Isn’t a low-cost source of protein just what they need?
But that is not how Ralston Purina sees it. Ralston Purina considered creating a poultry industry in Colombia, not so that the poor would have more chicken in their diet, but to create a need for its chief product, concentrated feeds. Experience had taught multinational feed companies like Purina that promoting poultry production was the fastest way to create customers for concentrated feed. The poultry business requires less initial capital and land than the cattle-feeding operations. Moreover, poultry feeds are among the most profitable for the feed companies.
First, Purina offered credit to commercial farmers to buy baby chicks and feed. Soon there were more chicks than could be supplied by feedgrain. So the company offered credit to other commercial farmers to grow feed crops and encouraged the government and private creditors to do the same. Traditional food crops like corn gave way to sorghum for feed. A portion of the corn crop that had been for human consumption now brought a higher price as grist for Purina’s mill. Beans, another staple of the poor, gave way to soybeans for feed. Between 1958 and 1968, the acreage planted with the traditional beans was halved while soybean plantings — all grown for animal feed — jumped sixfold.
The plight of the poor is compounded by the nature of the market. As livestock feed production takes up land that once grew beans and grain for human consumption, the prices of these staples go up.
Ralston Purina still likes to talk about how it was a prime mover in the production of new sources of protein: chicken and eggs. It is true that Colombia, an egg importer in 1957, was by 1961 no longer importing eggs. From 1966 to 1971, annual broiler production doubled from 11 million to 22 million. Yet, as the excellent Consumers’ Union-sponsored study Hungry for Profits notes, “The displacement of cropland from pulses [beans] to feed crops did not simply replace a cheap source of protein with an expensive one. It also reduced the total availability of protein in the country, because animal sources of protein are less efficient to produce than are vegetable sources.”24
A plot of land used to grow beans and corn can satisfy the protein requirements of significantly more people than when it is used for animal feed crops. Based on actual experience in the Valle region of Colombia, the Universidad del Valle arrived at the following estimates: One acre of land growing feed crops for chickens provides only one-third the amount of protein for people that the same land could provide if it grew corn or beans; if the acre grew soybeans for human consumption, it could provide sixteen times more protein than is produced by using that land to grow chicken feed.25 Using the feed to produce eggs instead of chicken reduces these differences somewhat. But according to calculations based on Colombian government statistics for 1970, a dozen eggs would cost more than an entire week’s earnings for over a quarter of the population.
Ralston Purina and the other feed companies in Colombia like to cite figures showing increases in per capita egg consumption. But, as usual, per capita figures are misleading. Higher averages merely reflect the increased consumption of eggs by the small middle- and upper-income groups, directly or in processed items such as snack foods and mayonnaise. For all the additional eggs Ralston Purina can count on a national basis, there is evidence that Colombia’s protein gap is growing eight times faster than the population.26
Thus what looked like just the way to create a needed source of cheap protein for Colombians turns out to undermine the only accessible protein sources of the people. Ralston Purina helps teach us, as discussed earlier in Part V, that “modern” techniques and production skills in themselves mean nothing. We must always ask: For what? For whom? At the cost of what alternatives? The answer to these questions will be determined by who is in charge of the production: the people themselves or multinational corporations.
Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
Another “know-how” that agribusiness is eager to bring to underdeveloped countries is the production of “ornamental crops” — the academic name for cut flowers and foliage.
If the local peasants cannot afford chicken or eggs, perhaps they can brighten their shacks with cut flowers. Since 1966 the value of cut flowers and foliage imported into the United States has increased over sixty times to over $20 million in 1975 — over 90 percent coming from Latin America.27 Some experts feel that by 1980 it will no longer be “feasible” to produce cut flowers in many current production areas in the United States.
The favored country so far is Colombia, where cut flowers are now a $17-million-a-year business. In 1973, a Colombian government economist estimated for us that one hectare planted with carnations brings in a million pesos a year; planted with wheat or corn, the same hectare would bring only 12,500.28 Given that at least 70 percent of Colombia’s agricultural land is controlled by a small group of wealthy farmers who need not think of land in terms of growing food to live by, it is not at all surprising that ornamental crops join feedgrain and cattle on their list of priority crops.
Ecuador and Guatemala, and to a lesser extent Mexico, are also being transformed into major flower production sites for the Global Supermarket. Already in 1972, Guatemala was supplying the United States with 159,278,421 — the USDA counts them! — chrysanthemums, roses, pompoms, daisies, chamaedorea, and statice.
Agribusiness’s shifting of flower production to underdeveloped countries to supply the Global Supermarket follows the twofold pattern we have seen with other crops.29 First is the search for lower-cost production sites (land preparation costs for flower cultivation in Central America have been estimated to be less than 10 percent of comparable costs in Florida). Second is the corporate effort to integrate operations from the seed to the flower shop. The U.S. flower business has historically consisted of large numbers of independent enterprises: small growers, larger grower-shippers, and tens of thousands of retail shops. But certain agribusiness firms such as Sears, Green Giant, Pillsbury, and United Brands and the supermarket chains are beginning to eye the profits to be made by linking the retailing to low-cost foreign production sites30 — an integration process that is a little out of the reach of your neighborhood florist. United Brands is known already to have production operations of several hundred acres in Central America and plans for major expansion. These corporations would seek to brand name flowers as United Brands did with Chiquita bananas in the 1960s. They will market the flowers through supermarket chains and franchised stores (“Flowers from Sears” and Backman’s European Flower Markets, a subsidiary of Pillsbury). Neighborhood florist shops could well go the way of tens of thousands of other mom and pop stores — out of business.
So agribusiness firms are doing exactly what the question suggests: bringing their production know-how to the countries where many go without food. But what are they growing? Asparagus, cucumbers, strawberries, eggplant, beef, and flowers — “luxury crops.” And for whom? For the well-fed to whom it is profitable to sell. More and more of the prime agricultural resources that the hungry people abroad need for their food get channeled into supplying Americans and other well-fed foreigners.
In answering this question we have not looked for the worst corporations. Those we use as illustrations are run by managers probably no better or more ill intentioned than any others. But there is one fundamental obstacle: corporations must sell for a profit. You say that agribusiness firms cannot afford not to be successful. You are right. “The bottom line is what counts,” James McKee, chief executive of CPC International, told us in an interview. “If we lose sight of that, no matter how much good we were doing, we wouldn’t be around long.” But that is exactly the reason they cannot help the hungry. No matter how many hungry people there are, as long as they are being impoverished, hungry people just do not add up to a market.
