Читать книгу Food - Jennifer Clapp - Страница 14

State support for international exports of grain and the spread of large-scale agricultural production throughout much of the developing world in the 1970s enabled large transnational corporations in the agrifood sector to expand their international operations. This expansion included not just marketing their products around the world, but also global-scale sourcing and processing operations. Already engaged in extensive international food trade since the 1800s, firms in the global grain industry began to expand their operations into new markets in the 1970s. At the same time, the grain companies also began to accelerate their expansion both horizontally and vertically – acquiring firms specializing in different food commodities, and expanding up and down along the food supply chain into shipping and food processing. With the spread of the agroindustrial production model, the agricultural input industry also began to market hybrid seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers in the developing world beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, and since the 1990s the sector has consolidated and is now dominated by just a handful of firms. From the 1990s and early 2000s, retail grocery firms also began to go global, not just marketing food to consumers, but also engaging increasingly in processing and the direct acquisition of fresh foods from around the world.

In extending their global reach in this way, these corporations have actively shaped the global food system to fit their own needs. Transnational agrifood firms have been able to influence the world food economy in ways that serve their own objectives via a variety of means and through new governance spaces. These range from pricing power – that is, the power to set the prices paid to their suppliers as well as the prices consumers pay in the marketplace – to lobbying and other means of influencing government regulations that affect their business. They also include the establishment of private sector regulations that govern the global food supply chain, and taking an active role in public debates in order to shape public discourse about the role of global firms in the world food economy. Using these strategies, global food sector TNCs have been able to shape the global food system around corporate needs – moving large amounts of agricultural inputs and foodstuffs through relatively few firms – with a large number of farmers on one side, and even more consumers on the other.