Agribusiness Hunger Profiteers Perpetuate Injustices

Food shop. Photo courtesy of Gabriella Clare, Unsplash

A report by Greenpeace International, ‘Food Injustice 2020-22: Unchecked, Unregulated and Unaccountable‘, shows how 20 of the world’s biggest agribusiness corporations – the largest in the grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy sectors – exploited their outsized power to deliver obscene profits for shareholders, of which the majority are located in the Global North, while millions face food poverty and starvation.

The research analysed the profits of the corporations during 2020–2022, the period of Covid-19 and since Russia invaded Ukraine – while looking into how many people have been affected by food insecurity and the extreme rise of food prices across the globe over the same period of time. The 20 companies’ payments to shareholders in the financial years of 2020 and 2021 alone reached $53.5 billion, more than the UN’s estimate of $51.5 billion needed in 2023 to save 230 million of the world’s most vulnerable people.

Market concentration allows this small but inordinately powerful group of companies to have wildly disproportionate control, not only over the supply chains for food, but over information about those supply chains. This in turn allows for greater extraction of wealth to the benefit of their owners and shareholders, but to the detriment of everyone else.

The report calls for an international trade order based on cooperation and human rights instead of competition and coercion, as well as bold and transformative policy progress, empowering consumers and small-scale farmers, while curtailing the power of multinational companies that currently dominate the system.

The report states that, if we want to see a world without hunger, the most impactful structural change we can make to the global food system is working to bring about food sovereignty; i.e., taking the power back from those few corporations and returning it to small-scale ecological farmers. Food has to be treated as a key component of human rights and climate change.

- Third World Network

Source: https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/58437/hunger-profiteers-food-security/#:~:text=Let’s%20take%20the%20example%20of,they%20know%20about%20global%20markets