Why Unfettered Capitalism Is Bad for Your Diet

Beyond the 30-year experiment in free-market ideology having been judged a failure in financial markets, one thing is clear, as Kerry Trueman reminded us in a recent post: Unfettered capitalism has also been bad for our health, and indeed the safety of our food.

Recently, the New York Times reported that this administration has said it will take a harder line on antitrust legislation in diverse sectors of the economy, including agriculture.

Perhaps its premature to tell what this will look like, but enforcing the laws that we already have on the books would be a great start to building a better food system.

This is because the largest sectors of the agribusiness world (grain, meatpacking, biotechnology, etc.) are monopolizing food from seed to supermarket shelf and thereby deciding what we can (and can't) buy and eat across this country, and by extension, the world.

These are the companies that are trying to efficiently process tens of thousands of cows per day -- cows that have been lined up in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and fed grain (more efficient than using land to feed them their natural diet of grass), pumped with hormones and antibiotics to keep them from dying, which means a glut on the market of cheap (antibiotic-filled) beef.

And these are the companies that are creating the seeds -- those seeds that the farmer can't even save for fear of litigation -- to grow the crops that require the use of their pesticides and which produce a proliferation of fast food.

Yes, efficiency is the bottom line in our current agricultural system. Not safety, not health, nor least of all, taste. No, for a corporation that is beholden first to it's shareholders, its all about the quickest way to get to the bottom line.

Besides exacerbating obesity, heart disease and diabetes cases, this kind of thinking can only be limited in its long-term ability to maintain itself, because it refuses to take a holistic approach to creating goods for the common good. In other words, we know it can't be sustained, and therefore it is not sustainable.

But these megacompanies aren't fully to blame, because this is what our economic system has been set up to do for 30 years or more: build a conflagration of trusts.

Will President Barack Obama pull a Teddy Roosevelt and begin a new era of trust-busting? Here's hoping he will and that he begins with Big Ag.

Last week, on the Leonard Lopate Show, when he was asked how taking a harder line on antitrust law could effect the food industry, Michael Pollan responded:

"It's very significant, actually, because you have more concentration in the food industry than in just about any other industry. Most antitrust experts say that if four [or fewer] companies control 40 percent or more of a marketplace, it's not competitive. And in food, we have that in meatpacking, [where] there are four companies that control 85 percent of the beef, [and in] seed production, fertilizer production ... there is this tight little hourglass in the food industry, [which means] lots of farmers, very few buyers, which forces farmers to take prices, they have no control over prices at all. So if indeed we were to push an antitrust agenda in the food industry, it would be the best thing for farmers and the best thing for consumers."

In other words, there are only a handful of people pulling the strings of our food system. And something as fundamental as food should not be so minimally represented, for food-safety and health reasons, but because it also violates our human rights.

To this I ask, is this food system not an oligopoly, a market form most at risk for collusion? All the more reason to investigate the megafirms that form through the process of mergers.

That hourglass concept Pollan mentioned comes from William Heffernan and Mary Hendrickson's report, "Consolidation in the Food and Agriculture System" (1999) [PDF], which revealed the "food chain clusters" forming through constant mergers within the food system and also gave the first comprehensive data on concentration ratios of each firm in the food sector. (An updated version from 2007 is here [PDF].)