Globalisation threatens the future of EU farms: report

HALF the farms in Sweden will go out of business in the coming decade, says Worldwatch, the public policy research organisation.

EU farms won’t escape the effects of vertical integration of the world food industry, predicts researcher Brian Halweil.

Worldwatch’s brief is to inform policymakers and the public about emerging global problems and trends, and the complex links between the world economy and its environmental support systems.

In its latest report, the organisation looked at the farmer’s shrinking share of the consumer’s food spend.

Low commodity prices are not the only reason why small farms and farmers are encountering increasingly desperate conditions worldwide, according to the report.

“As globalisation accelerates, the food industry is becoming more vertically integrated, with many of the more profitable functions once performed by farmers now being taken over by giant agricultural conglomerates such as ConAgra and Novartis,” says the Worldwatch report.

The result in the US is the farmer getting only 7 cents of the consumer’s food dollar, compared to more than 40 cents before 1950.

“If you pay a dollar for a loaf of bread, you’re paying as much money for the wrapper as for the wheat,” says report author Brian Halweil. About 5 cents of the dollar goes for the wheat, and another 5 cents goes for the wrapper. About 75 cents goes to marketing.

Farmers who once selected which crops to grow, whom to buy supplies from, and whom to sell their products to, now have little or no choice in those decisions.

Often, a farmer finds himself with only one buyer for the crops, which is the same conglomerate from which he must buy his seed and supplies. Forced to “buy high and sell low,” the farmer is either driven out of business or compelled to become a virtual “serf” on his own land.

The net result, in countries where corporate farming has become dominant, is that thousands of farmers have given up.

In the US ‘breadbasket’ states of Nebraska and Iowa, where the farm population has plummeted in recent years, about a quarter of those who still remain are expected to be driven out in the next two years.

In Poland, it’s predicted that 1.8 million farms will cease business in the next few years.

In the Philippines, half a million farms in the Mindinao region alone are expected to go out of business.

As small farms are taken over by larger ones, and as all farms become more subservient to the conglomerates, the rationale often given is that the larger enterprises are more efficient or productive.

But that is in large part a myth, says Halweil.

While a large monoculture operation may produce more output per acre of that crop than a small farm does, the small farm doing traditional polyculture (raising more than one kind of crop, using different root depths or soil nutrients on the same piece of land) makes more intensive and efficient use of resources and can produce significantly more food overall per acre.