Saturday, October 14, 2017

An even bigger Big Ag

Several high-profile mega-mergers are pending approval, including a $130 billion merger between U.S. agrochemical giants Dow and DuPont, Bayer's buyout of Monsanto, ChemChina's acquisition of Syngenta and its planned merger with Sinochem. If the world's major agriculture companies go ahead with these planned mergers and gain greater control of the way food is produced, farmers will face higher costs and food will eventually become more expensive to buy, a panel of experts said.
"We are now in unchartered territory. If the deals on the table go ahead, three firms will control more than 60 percent of global seed and pesticide markets," said Pat Mooney, lead author of a report launched by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). "Farmers will face ... anywhere from 1.5 percent to 5.5 percent increases in seed prices, if you follow the pattern of mergers," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Pesticide prices will also rise, he said. If companies continue to merge throughout the food production chain - from seed and pesticide firms to supermarkets - "we're going to see higher prices coming out at the retail end", he said.
Olivier De Schutter, IPES-Food co-chair and former U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, said: "Rampant consolidation in the agri-food industry is bad for farmers, whose incomes are squeezed at one end by a handful of input providers, and at the other by processing and retail giants with huge bargaining power." He added, "It is also bad for society. Once they have cornered the market, mega-firms focus on defending their market share and shaping policies to fit their needs – not on delivering the innovation we need to build sustainable food systems."
"Mega mergers are extremely worrying for us food producers," said Ramona Duminicioiu, a small farmer and seed producer in Romania, and a coordinator of La Via Campesina, a movement representing more than 200 million smallholder farmers.

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