Those
who preach that the 'free' market is the best solution to everything
tend to be those who benefit from the fact it is distorted in their
favour. Nowhere is this truer than in the modern industrialized food
business, where a tight and ruthless agribusiness oligopoly has
exploited these distortions to staggering advantage over the public
interest. The chart above shows how the system works, and why it
doesn't.
Market purists argue that business cannot be put in an
impossible conflict of interest by having to meet the needs of both
shareholders and the public. We have a political system, they assert,
that balances the interest of corporations (to maximize short-term
profit for shareholders) with the interest of the public (to maximize
their personal and collective well-being). The politicians and judges,
who, it is claimed, are beholden equally to both groups, have the
challenge of balancing these clearly conflicting interests. If they get
the balance wrong, the citizens will vote them out or the shareholders
will starve their re-election campaigns, and they'll be replaced with a
crew who will do the job right.
So in the case of agribusiness, it is in the interest of the food production oligopoly to
squeeze out all family farms and replace them with massive factory
farms that inflict unimaginable suffering on farm animals and deplete
the soil until it is dust and needs to be 'replenished' with oil-based
fertilizers and soaked in oil-based chemical pesticides and herbicides.
In order to be viable, agribusiness (in North America alone) then needs
to be subsidized to the tune of $150B/year. To keep costs down and
profits up, the agribusiness oligopoly uses the cheapest possible
ingredients (notably corn, corn sugars and other low-nutrition
'fillers') and adds dangerous chemicals that make foods look better
than they really are, taste different than they really do, addict the
customer on sugar and salt, and have the micronutrients processed out
of them. They then collude to charge the public as much as possible for
this processed garbage.
Oh, and the factory farms are also the breeding ground for poultry flu.
Their political actions to achieve this
objective include lobbying for deregulation, for immunity from
prosecution by farmers whose livelihoods have been destroyed and by a
chemically poisoned, nutrition-starved, price-gouged public, and for
the aforementioned massive subsidies. They also mount fierce opposition
to new regulations drafted in the public interest.
On the other
side, it is in the interest of the public to have prosperous, local,
organic family farms that do not inflict suffering and chemical
poisoning on farm animals and do not exhaust and poison the soil,
producing healthy and safe foods. The political actions to achieve this
include lobbying for regulation against the excesses of the
agribusiness oligopoly, and for enforcement of existing regulations and
full disclosure of what agribusiness is doing and what is in (and not
in) their foods. And the pursuit of class actions when the politicians
fall down on their job as regulators.
Theoretically, these
incompatible objectives and means, and conflicting lobbying actions are
reviewed and balanced by politicians who must weigh the personal
financial consequences of pissing off the oligopoly against the
political consequences of pissing off the voters.
Alas, the
theory doesn't work in practice. The oligopoly has a lot more resources
to apply to tip the balance in their favour, shown in the lower part of
the graphic above. They can muzzle the mainstream media, which depend
heavily on them for advertising dollars, not to investigate or report
on agribusiness misdeeds (fortunately we still have Oligopoly Watch).
They can get politicians to simply ignore the regulations, citing a
shortage of inspectors. This is perfect for politicians: They can placate the public by passing stiff regulations that seemingly favour the public interest, and at the same time placate the oligopoly by ignoring
the regulations. This is how political business is done all the time in
struggling nations (Mexico has some of the strongest environmental laws
in the world, none of them enforced), and now the practice is catching
on in affluent nations as well.
The oligopoly can also
intimidate political opponents by running huge (and tax-deductible)
public advertising campaigns specifically directed against them under
the name of anonymous, phony 'public interest groups' with Orwellian
names. And they can have their armies of lawyers threaten farmers and
the public with crippling lawsuits if they utter a peep of complaint,
while their huge advertising campaigns are full of blatant lies that
pander to public ignorance, fear, and aversion to bad news that doesn't
have a simple fix.
So you end up with a citizenry which is
largely ignorant and misinformed, and fearful of prosecution. The
public lobbying ends up being done by a small group of informed
progressives on behalf of a public that is unaware, unappreciative and
unsupportive of their efforts, and not prepared to use their votes when
that lobbying fails (as it increasingly does) to counter the more
extensive, powerful, expensive and effective campaigns of agribusiness.
The
result is what we have now: An agribusiness oligopoly that is obscenely
subsidized with handouts from political parties grateful for the
oligopoly's generous campaign contributions. Factory farms that inflict
horrific suffering. Polluted air, water, soil and food. Food that is
unhealthy and even dangerous, virtually devoid of nutritional value.
And political parties complicit in the continuation of this deliberate
poisoning of our bodies and our environment.
You could develop a
similar chart for the corporatist oligopolies of just about every other
industry. The Big Pharma oligopoly, for example, is a huge beneficiary
of a poisoned and malnourished public – more chronic diseases to come
up with expensive drugs to combat for lifetimes.
There are two possible approaches to trying to restore the balance so that the public interest at least has a fighting chance:
- A
combination of public media (not in thrall to corporate advertisers),
real campaign finance reform (no corporate financing, and equal public
funding for all), and stronger consumer protection laws (with
enforcement requirements constitutionally enshrined – the right to
healthy food, water and living environment), or
- A change to
corporate charters to require corporations themselves to balance the
public interest against the interest of shareholders, and hold the
officers and directors liable for failure to do so.
There are
compelling reasons why neither will ever come about, and why neither
would work even if it did. If fixing this complex problem was easy,
someone would have already proposed a solution and some vanguard
jurisdictions would have acted on it. But this is a global problem, and
no one has found an answer to it. There may be no answer, even if we
can one day prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the agribusiness
oligopoly's actions kill thousands of people every day.
But
getting more people to be aware of the problem, and to realize that the
'market' is utterly incapable of resolving it in any balanced way, is a
start. One step at a time.
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MADE IN CANADA
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