Tuesday, 24 November 2020

Food Production Monopoly?

A recent study has shown that, since the 1980s, the control of the world's farming land has become more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/24/farmland-inequality-is-rising-around-the-world-finds-report). We are now in a situation, where 70% of the world's entire stock of crop fields, ranches and orchards, is dominated by 1% of the agricultural businesses. This domination is both by direct ownership and by contract farming (where the process is sub-contracted to farm managers who are expected to follow the directives of the owners). The downside, is that this results in the widespead use of destructive monocultures (these are prone to disease) and fewer carefully-tended small holdings. Agrobusiness can have powerful impacts on climate change by e.g. encouraging deforestation in some parts of the world and rearing lots of cattle that burp methane (a potent 'greenhouse gas'). It is also powerfully impacted by climate change, as land becomes unusable in some locations and has to be 'replaced'. It seems a tad dangerous to put much of the world's food production into the hands of a few major companies, driven only by the immediate profit motive. This has been one of the long-voiced criticisms of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, which allocates money on the basis of the total area farmed.

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