By mid-morning snack you will certainly have encountered their products several times already wherever you are in the world, whether it is the corn in your flakes, the wheat in your bread, the orange in your juice, the sugar in your jam, the chocolate on your biscuit, the coffee in your cup. By the end of the day, if you've eaten beef, chicken or pork, consumed anything containing salt, gums, starches, gluten, sweeteners, or fats, or bought a ready meal or a takeaway, they will have shaped your consumption even further.
And yet, the four giant transnationals that dominate the raw materials of the global food system have largely stayed below the radar of European consumers. Known as the ABCD group for the alphabetic convenience of their initials, ADM, Bunge, Cargill and (Louis) Dreyfus, account for between 75% and 90% of the global grain trade, according to estimates. Figures cannot be given with confidence, however, because two of the companies are privately owned and do not give out market shares.
This extraordinary concentration of power and money in the global food trade has been identified by Oxfam in a new report this week as one of the structural flaws of the system. At each stage a handful of players dominate, not just in primary agriculture but in food manufacturing and retailing. The result, according to Oxfam, is that "they extract much of the value along the chain, while costs and risks cascade down on to the weakest participants, generally the farmers and labourers at the bottom".
Oxfam is the latest in a long line of critics to highlight this corporate concentration as a root cause of hunger and poverty. The ABCD group have said they welcome informed debate but that, as far as they are concerned, their operations are the vital waters that keep food and its finance flowing from those who can grow it to those who need to consume it. Scale enables them to be highly efficient. The grain trade is capital intensive; they invest heavily in storage facilities and port and transport infrastructure.
US-based Cargill with the highest revenues, is the largest private company in the world – and famous for its secrecy. Its headquarters is a mock-Tudor meets mock-French chateau in Minnetonka in the US mid-west, where the company was founded by a family of grain traders in 1865. Today, it is still majority-owned by descendents of the family. Its main commodity trading operation is run out of the tax haven of Switzerland. Its sales were $108bn in 2010, and $115bn in 2009, and its net earnings were nearly $6bn for those two years.
As well as being a leading player in the trading, processing and transporting of the most important agricultural commodities, fertiliser and meats, it is one of the world largest hedge funds. When Gordon Brown, as prime minister, called a summit in London on the 2008 food crisis, Cargill was invited. When Walker crisps had an image problem with the saturated fats in its crisps, Cargill came to the rescue, having a large acreage of land in eastern Europe planted with a new variety of "Sunseed".
It produces about half of all McDonald's chicken products across Europe. It sells fats to Unilever. When the US needed to appoint someone to lead the reconstruction of agriculture in Iraq, it turned to former Cargill executive Dan Amstutz. In China, where it has a joint venture with Monsanto, to whom it sold its enormous seeds interests a decade ago, it has trained over 2 million farmers in the American way of agriculture.
Over that same decade, Cargill, ADM and Bunge are thought to have acquired about 80% of China's soya processing capacity. More recently, Cargill has been moving up the food chain into high-value, hi-tech additives and what it calls food solutions for the manufacturing industry.
Louis Dreyfus, established in 1851, is also private and still family owned, headquartered in Paris but again trading largely out of Switzerland. It gives no figures and never comments to the media, but its estimated revenues in 2009 were £34bn. It has enormous grain, sugar and energy trading interests around the world, although in recent years it has concentrated on financial aspects of commodity trading.
Bunge, which expanded through the late 19th century as a grain trader in South America, is now incorporated in the tax haven of Bermuda but its headquarters are in the US. Its net revenues in 2010 were $47bn, and net earnings were $2.3bn. It is a leading processor of oilseeds, and producer and trader of grains, sugar and bioenergy. It is also a key player in the global fertiliser market.
ADM, or Archer Daniels Midland, is incorporated in the US tax-haven state of Delaware and headquartered in Illinois. Its revenues in 2010 were $62bn and its earnings were $1.9bn.
ADM's origins go back to a US seed crushing business begun in 1902. Today, it has vast interests in trading, processing and transporting soya and other oilseeds, and corn, wheat cocoa and other agricultural commodities. It is a leading manufacturer of oils, corn sweeteners, flour, biofuels, food additives from gums to gluten, soya isolates and animal feed ingredients.
To add to the concentration, Cargill, ADM, and Bunge have strategic alliances and joint ventures with the seed and agrochemical companies that dominate the agricultural inputs part of the global food system. In seeds four firms, Monsanto (incorporated in Delaware, HQ in Missouri), Dupont (incorporated and HQ in Delaware), Syngenta (incorporated and HQ in Switzerland) and Limagrain, a French-based international co-operative, account for over 50% of global seed sales.
In agrochemicals six firms, DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow (incorporated in Delaware, HQ in Michigan), and the two German chemical giants Bayer and BASF, control 75% of the market.
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