Food, Health and Mega Profits

After a series of food related scandals, such as BSE, E-Coli and foot and mouth disease, followed by revelations about the fat, sugar and salt drenched contents of processed foods, the government has finally recognised that it will be cheaper to try and deal with the health implications now rather than stick to their free market principles. However, free market capitalism will not be able to resolve this crisis. Most ordinary people will only be told part of the story because the food lobby, like the pharmaceutical industry, is very powerful and most will be left unaware of the real causes of many health problems.

In schools, the balanced diet of the post-war period has long been replaced by meals provided by contractors whose motive is wealth not health; vending machines sell sugary snacks and there are adverts for junk foods; playing fields have been sold off to fund education; all these have contributed to a deterioration in children’s health. Nor is the relation between poverty, food and health seriously confronted. For obesity tends to be a disease of poverty, both here and in the US. It is the cheap, processed food that is most harmful, which combined with a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables, often not locally available, makes for a very unbalanced diet. While the new middle classes (?), who have more time to read between the lines, turn increasingly to organic foods and nutritional supplements, these are individual strategies not available to most of the working class, for financial reasons. This shows that healthy eating is very much a class issue.

The White Paper’s contents

The weakest part of the government proposals is of course the section on the food industry itself. Phrases like, ‘the Government intends to discuss with the food industry how it might contribute’; ‘introducing long-term and interim targets for reducing sugar and fat levels’; ‘we will work with the farming and food industries to co-ordinate action’; show the limits of the New Labour approach, which is to appeal to the food industry monopolists to regulate themselves with not even the pretence of attempting any kind of democratic control.

The adulteration of food is not of course a new problem. The Co-operative movement was founded in the late 19^th century to counter this common practice. However, consciousness of these issues on the left, which existed in the early socialist movements, has today been mostly lost. This is in part due to more state regulation of the food industry, particularly in the post World War 2 period and, in the advanced metropolitan countries at least, the apparent elimination of malnutrition, together with the highly deceptive appearance of superabundance in our supermarkets.

Even with tighter controls, through the 20^th century and throughout the world, scandals about adulterated food and drink, (cooking oils, wine, for example), littered the headlines. But now food is being adulterated on an industrial scale: pesticides and chemical fertilisers on plants; chemical additives in fizzy drinks; hydrogenated or trans fats and modified starch in processed foods. It is big business. And no amount of ‘targets’ or ‘discussions’ can overcome this one fact - the food industry is about making mega profits and is not in business to keep us healthy. In fact the increasing monopolisation of production, distribution and retailing of goods, dominated by companies in the US and Europe is, along with the concentration of finance capital, an essential component of imperialism.

Concentration and monopolisation

In a series of articles and books Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, [1] shows how this concentration has come about since 1945, and how it has accelerated and is continuing to accelerate in the present period. For example, market share of the top 20 food manufacturers in the US has doubled since 1967, so that now 100 firms account for 80% of value-added in the sector. There is a similar pattern in Europe. Nestle (Switzerland), Unilever (UK and Netherlands) and Kraft (US) are the top three global players with gigantic annual turnovers of 50, 48 and 33 billion dollars respectively. Six of the top ten food producers are US companies, with the rest in Europe.

Retailing shows a similar pattern. The list of the top 30 is dominated by US company Wal-Mart with a turnover of 180 billion dollars, three times that of its nearest rival. Seven of the top 30 retailers are US companies, 17 are from Europe.[2] Of the rest two are Japanese and one each from Australia and Canada. The recent cut-throat competition between supermarkets in Britain, with Sainsbury losing out to Asda (Wal-Mart owned) and Tesco, is an example of this process. It is predicted that the market share of the top ten European retailers will increase from 37% to 60% by 2010 if present trends continue.[3]

The third and key infrastructural sector is agrochemicals and here monopolisation is at its most advanced. In the late 1980s twenty firms controlled 90% of global production; in the late 1990s this number was reduced to ten; now it is seven. The names are familiar to those who follow the debate on genetic modification – Syngenta, Aventis, Monsanto, BASF, Dow, Bayer and DuPont – for many have diversified into the seed and biotech industries. [4]

In the US, the top four beef packers already controlled around a quarter of the market in the 1970s. Today, just 20 feedlots feed half the cattle in the US and these are directly connected to the four processing firms that control 81% of the beef processing either by direct ownership or through formal contracts.

Concentration of power over the food system is now remarkable, whether one looks nationally, regionally or globally. A web of contractual relationships turns the farmer into a sub-contractor, providing the labour and often some capital, but never owning the product as it moves through the supply chain.[5]

We have allowed a structure to emerge that enables our shops to be resupplied at short notice by casual labourers picked up from the roadside whatever the hour in the Costa del Sol, or collected from their Dickensian housing in rural England. These workers are at the mercy of pecking orders as brutal as those in the turn-of-the-century American docks. We are told this has happened because people want cheap food.

The paradox is that our fresh food is not cheap any more. By the time it has been packaged and transported, and the retailers have added their margins, it is very expensive. Ninety-nine pence for a few leaves is a lot of money. But 99p for an unlimited supply of servants to wash and pick over it all, hidden not as in the old days below stairs, but in remote caravans or underneath plastic hothouses – that is cheap.[10]

What would we do?

From the point of view of capital cheaper foods lowers the price of labour and increases profits. However, poor quality, mass-produced food means less healthy workers, which is why governments in Britain and elsewhere constantly exhort us to eat better, take exercise, etc. The contradiction can be solved in the short term by the super exploitation of workers outside the main imperialist centres. Hence

the widespread use of more vulnerable migrant agricultural workers across Europe and beyond.

Trade unions and socialist parties ignore this at their peril. Global capital requires a global response. But trade union solidarity on its own will not be enough: we need to challenge the global food monopolies at the political level as well. New Labour’s weak appeals to the food monopolists to regulate themselves will have to be replaced by something more fibrous!  

March 2005