A Thanksgiving Reading List on Food Monopolists
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Did you know Nestle sells 80 percent of the world’s canned pumpkin? Or that cranberry cooperatives will destroy one-fourth of this year’s crop in order to maintain fair prices for farmers? Before you sit down to enjoy your Thanksgiving feast, come prepared with some monopoly facts for the family with this Food & Power turkey day reading list. We start the list with two “classic” articles on the monopolists at your table, one by our friend Chris Leonard, and one by Chelsea Harvey of the Washington Post:
“That turkey on your plate could use some more industry competition” by Christopher Leonard, Washington Post Op-Ed – Just four corporations produce over half of all US turkeys. But as the packer’s profit margins rise, poultry growers’ can barely eke out a living. Leonard lays out how the poultry contract-farming model keeps farmers on the edge of bankruptcy, and how to restore farmers’ autonomy.
“There’s a shortage of pumpkin for the holidays — and you can thank climate change” By Chelsea Harvey, Washington Post – Few may remember the great canned pumpkin shortage of 2015. Harvey blamed it on climate change, or more specifically, record-setting rains that cut Illinois’s pumpkin harvest in half that year. The real culprit? Consolidation. It turns out the canned pumpkin supply chain isn’t very resilient. Over 80 percent of the world’s canned pumpkin comes from one company, Libby’s (owned by Nestle), which buys all their pumpkins from one region, central Illinois. (This year, we could see a similar story for sweet potatoes, as Hurricane Florence flooded much of North Carolina’s sweet potato fields. North Carolina grows roughly sixty percent of the nation’s sweet potatoes.)
“Farmers will destroy one in four cranberries this year” by H. Claire Brown, The New Food Economy – There are already more cranberries in storage than Americans will eat this year. In order to deal with another year of cranberry surplus, growers received permission from the USDA to destroy or donate a fourth of their crop. The Ocean Spray coop processes and manages 60 percent of US cranberries, and they would rather have farmers overproduce than encourage their members to grow less in the first place. Farmers would prefer to save themselves the extra work and resources, but Ocean Spray, “[prefers] to hoard berries in hopes of using extra supply for research and to edge out competitors,” reports Brown.
“A Major Beer Battle Is Brewing and it Could Mean the End of PBR” by the Associated Press, published in Time – The beer company Pabst has outsourced the brewing of old-timey brands including Old Milwaukee, National Bohemian (Natty Boh), Lone Star, and hipster favorite, Pabst Blue Ribbon, since 1999. But now the beer giant MillerCoors – the corporation that brews, packages, and ships these brands – has demanded that Pabst pay three times as much for the services after the agreement expires in 2020. Pabst says MillerCoors and AbInBev, thanks to their roll-up of the U.S. industrial beer capacity, are the only corporations with the capacity to make its products, and AbInBev doesn’t contract. A recent suit by Pabst alleges MillerCoors purposefully closed “two breweries to be sure they [didn’t] have excess capacity for contract manufacturing’” in a deliberate plan to “’eliminate Pabst altogether.’”
In other food news:
The Minneapolis Federal Reserve reported that chapter 12 farm bankruptcies in the midwest and northern plains are at a ten year high. And as Joe Schroeder, a farm advocate for Farm Aid, explains, this metric does not capture all the farm closures, because ag banks do not have to report the same detailed statistics as say, home mortgage lenders. “When a farm goes under and doesn’t file bankruptcy, when they have enough assets to basically call it a day and get out for what they’ve got in it … that’s just a transfer of assets, it’s not recorded anywhere,” says Schroeder. “We don’t know when a farm has been lost or when a family has been dispossessed, there’s nobody that tracks that.”
Perdue announced they will open an organic grain processing and storage plant in Baltimore County, reports Food Business News. This marks Perdue’s latest step to vertically integrate their organic certified chicken business.
Chinese-owned Smithfield had been awarded $240,000 as a part of Trump’s bailout to farms impacted by Chinese retaliatory tariffs. After backlash, the pork packer requested that this contract be terminated, reports the Washington Post (who first broke the original story).