Romanian farm craft.Wikicommons/pragmatopian.Some rights reserved.Industrial agriculture and its discontents have been in the headlines more than usual as World Food Day rolls around. Over $100bn looks set to be spent as Monsanto and Syngenta are bought out by Bayer and ChemChina, while Dow and DuPont intend to merge in a deal reportedly worth $130bn.
What this means away from the business pages is that the agribusiness stranglehold on our food supply is going from bad to worse. At the start of the 2016, six companies controlled 59% of the world’s seed supply, and 64% of the global pesticide market. Nine months on, three mergers later, and the outlook is even bleaker: three mega-corporations could control these huge swathes of the farming system in the coming months.
These deals have already faced huge backlash, with dire warnings that they would price small-scale farmers out of the market – particularly in the global South – and force genetically modified crops onto a resistant EU public.
