Concentration and crises: exploring the deep roots of vulnerability in the global industrial food system

ABSTRACT

The world has experienced three global food crises in the past 50 years. While unique triggers sparked each of these crises, they all exposed extreme concentration within the global industrial food system at multiple scales – at the field, country, and global market levels. This multi-level concentration heightens vulnerability to worldwide food crises that have profound consequences for the world’s most marginalized populations. With a focus on staple grains production and trade, this contribution traces the origins of the high degrees of multi-level concentration in the industrial food system and draws insights for debates on the current food systems transformation agenda.

KEYWORDS:

• Global food crises
• concentration
• industrial food system
• agroecology
• grain trade
• corporations
• financialization

The crisis gripping the world food system for the past several years in the wake of two major and overlapping globally important events – the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine – has caused a sharp increase in food prices and rising food insecurity that has reversed global progress towards the goal of ending hunger (UN 2022). This crisis occurred just over a decade after the 2007–12 food price crisis, which similarly sent the number of hungry people on the planet soaring. These are just the most recent food price crises. There was also a multi-year world food crisis in 1973–74, which saw a significant jump in food prices on a global scale and had serious repercussions for global food security. As more people source their food from the global food industrial system, they become increasingly vulnerable to shocks that have worldwide impact. In the 1970s, it was widespread drought, massive Russian grain purchases, and rising oil prices. In 2008, a financial meltdown combined with soaring fuel prices and rising use of food crops for biofuels contributed to instability in food markets. More recently, supply chain disruptions due to COVID-19 were soon followed by the Russian aggression against Ukraine, which disrupted grain exports from the Black Sea region and sent commodity prices soaring beyond their already record high levels. And in each of these three world food crises, financial speculation on commodity markets exacerbated price trends and caused sharp price peaks that affected food access for hundreds of millions of people.

While the crises that have emerged in the past 50 or so years have each had unique triggers, all exposed deeper structural features of the food system that make it prone to volatility on a global scale in the face of shocks. Three of these features have been highlighted in analyses of the current crisis and are also relevant to past crises. First, the global industrial food system relies on a small number of staple grains produced using highly industrialized farming methods, making the system susceptible to events that affect just a handful of crops and to rising costs of industrial farm inputs. Second, a small number of countries specialize in the production of staple grains for export, on which many other countries depend, including many of the poorest and most food insecure countries. And third, the global grain trade is dominated by a small number of firms in highly financialized commodity markets that are prone to volatility (IPES-Food 2022; FAO 2022; OECD and FAO 2020).

Although these features are increasingly recognized as making the global food system more susceptible to crises, they are often presented as separate and distinct problems. Here I argue that these features are in fact interrelated dimensions of the same problem – that of concentration, which manifests in specific ways at different levels within the global industrial food system – from farm fields to national distribution of production to global agricultural markets. By concentration, I am referring to circumstances where a small number of actors or items come to be dominant within certain activities to the extent that they play a large role in shaping the contours and dynamics of that activity. At field level, there is a concentration of crops, seed varieties, and industrial inputs. At the country level, there is a concentration of countries producing staple grains for export. And at the global level, there is a concentration of firms and financial actors that dominate global grain and inputs markets.

Viewing the problem as one of concentration at multiple levels helps to reveal why the global industrial food system is rigid and inflexible in the face of numerous types of shocks, making it prone to volatility, especially when it is hit with more than one disturbance at the same time. If one or more staple grain suppliers is taken out of the mix due to war or drought or some other factor, one major staple crop is diverted to non-food uses in major quantities, fuel or fertilizer prices rise sharply, a new market player suddenly purchases more than their historical norm, and/or financial actors move into commodity futures markets on expectations of shortages for any of the above reasons, huge price shifts can occur rapidly on world markets and leave those who live in low-income, food-import-dependent countries to bear the cost, resulting in rising hunger and food insecurity. Different manifestations of concentration across multiple levels also tend to reinforce one another, which amplifies the vulnerability of the system.

There is wide agreement, emanating from a range of quarters, that a radical transformation is necessary to make food systems more resilient in the face of potential shocks, especially as recurrent crises reveal structural weaknesses and vulnerabilities (e.g. HLPE 2020; IPES-Food 2022; FIAN and Focus on the Global South 2021; Guterres 2021). Despite this growing consensus, there is disagreement on how that might be accomplished (Béné 2022). I argue that it is instructive to look more closely at the previous major food system transformation, the one which brought us the current global industrial food system and its concentrated nature that makes it so vulnerable to crises, to gain insights that can inform the path moving forward. This closer examination reveals that this previous food system transformation has deep roots, with the process of establishing a highly concentrated global food economy dating back several centuries. While this earlier transformation brought cheap grains to world markets through massive surpluses traded globally, it also created new dependencies and uneven power relationships, and contributed to massive environmental degradation and climate change, all of which have heightened the vulnerability of that system. Moreover, despite this system producing an abundance of food on a global scale, hunger has remained a serious problem in the world’s poorest countries, and it is these countries that are hardest hit in times of crisis.

A deeper appreciation of this long history of concentration at multiple levels – as illustrated here with a focus on staple crops – gives important insights for scholarship and practice. The analysis shows that the origins of the global industrial production and trade of staple crops dates back to the early to mid-1800s, indicating that the next transformation needs to be informed by long-term thinking, but also that we must speed up the process because we do not have another 200 years to bring about a radically transformed food system. The experience of the last transformation, which encouraged and reinforced concentration across multiple levels, also indicates that the next transformation needs to coordinate measures that unwind concentration and encourage greater diversity simultaneously across different scales to make it more resilient in the face of shocks. Finally, the historical experience also gives insight into the dynamics that generate concentration, including the drive for capital accumulation and its messy and complex interaction with technological change and government policy shifts.

World food crises and multi-level concentration

The world has witnessed three major worldwide, multi-year food crises in the past 50 years, each of which had its own unique triggers that affected the system to an extent that led to soaring prices and rising hunger. Yet these crises also share some similarities that point to key structural features that make the global industrial food system vulnerable to dysfunction in the face of shocks. A brief review of the three major world food crises reveals their unique dynamics as well as their similar features.

The current crisis resulted from multiple triggers that occurred only a few years apart, which, because they overlapped, are considered here as a single, multidimensional food crisis with distinct yet concurrent dynamics. The eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 was a shock to food systems that, by early 2020, had shut down global supply chains, leading to empty shelves at food retailers, falling food prices, and collapsing purchasing power (Clapp and Moseley 2020). The initial disruption caused by the pandemic soon turned into a situation of rising and volatile food prices by late 2020, as supply chain interruptions continued to reverberate throughout the food system even as people’s capacity to acquire food began to recover. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, scarcely two years after the COVID-19 crisis began, food prices had already reached record levels (FAO 2022).

The Russian attack that began in February 2022 dealt a second significant blow to the global food system, as both Ukraine and Russia are major exporters of wheat, maize and oilseeds, and the bombing campaign meant an abrupt stop to Ukraine’s exports and put a serious dent in its agricultural productivity. Many countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa are heavily reliant on imports of grain from these two countries, and the disruptions set off major concerns about global food security as grain prices soared (FAO 2022; UN 2022). Oil and fertilizer prices, also key exports from the Black Sea region, also rose sharply and supplies became scarce, driving up the cost of farming. Adding to these various shocks, speculators rushed into the grain markets following the invasion, adding to their earlier increased financial investment in the agricultural commodity markets over the latter part of 2021 when food prices were already climbing (IPES-Food 2022). The price of wheat spiked sharply, prompting several dozen countries to impose export restrictions (IFPRI 2022). Just as these dynamics unfolded, India experienced an unprecedented heat event in March and April that resulted in a drop in wheat yields of up to 15-25%, prompting the country to restrict exports of that crop (Bal, Prasad, and Singh 2022). Grain prices began to fall in June 2022 when investors left the sector as central banks around the world increased interest rates to tame rising inflation (Terazono et al. 2022). A UN brokered deal to unblock Ukrainian ports enabled some grain to make its way to global markets. It is far from clear that the price volatility is over, however, given the continuation of the war and the pandemic as of late-2022.

The 2007–12 food price crisis also occurred in a context of multiple shocks to the system, triggered in large part by a major financial crisis and soaring oil prices that pushed up the costs of farming. The crisis was also a product of policy shifts that encouraged the increased use of biofuels in Europe and North America in the years just prior to the crisis. The diversion of large amounts of grain, especially maize, into use as feedstock for ethanol production, especially in North America, alongside the large amounts of grain already allocated to livestock feed, reduced the amount of grain available on global markets for human consumption (McMichael 2009). These developments also occurred as China had increasingly begun to source a portion of its soy and cereal grains from global markets following decades of aiming to be food self-sufficient (McMichael 2020). Food prices rose sharply from late 2007, with staples such as wheat, rice, corn, and soy doubling in price in the first half of 2008. These disruptions to global commodity markets prompted financial speculators, who sought more lucrative investments amid a global financial crisis, to profit from rising food prices. Speculative investments in agricultural commodities futures and other derivatives pushed food prices to new heights (Ghosh 2010). As food prices rose sharply, many countries adopted export restrictions on grains and other foodstuffs, further exacerbating price increases (Headey 2011). Food prices fell back from their highest peaks in the latter part of 2008, although they remained high and volatile through 2012, affecting food access for the world’s poorest people.

As this crisis took hold, rising food prices and concerns about constraints to global food production in a context of climate change sparked a global farmland rush that saw financial investors seek to capitalize on investments in large-scale land acquisitions focused on food and biofuel production (Cotula 2012; Fairbairn 2020; Franco and Borras 2021). These investments were in large part a response to the uncertainty unleashed by the crisis, but in many ways also added to it, especially given that many of these investments undermined traditional land rights for marginalized producers in target countries and installed large-scale industrial agricultural operations, a significant proportion of which were for the production of biofuels (Borras et al. 2011; McMichael 2012). The crisis was exacerbated and elongated by drought in multiple grain-growing regions from 2010 to 2012, further incentivizing investors to both speculate on commodity markets and to join the global land grab.

The more recent crises outlined above occurred not even 15 years apart. Prior to these events, the previous major worldwide food crisis, which was also the world's first, occurred in the first part of the 1970s. This earlier crisis was precipitated by a series of shocks that affected both food supply and demand. These included drought in multiple parts of the world in the early 1970s, which raised concerns about global food supply. The US, as the world’s major grain-exporting country at the time, had recently devalued its currency and pursued a policy of deliberately scaling back its grain in storage to reduce its own costs of serving as the world’s granary in the post-World War II era. The first of these changes made US grain exports attractive to Russia, which bought up huge quantities of grain on world markets to help it stabilize its own domestic grain prices as its production faltered due to a severe drought (Rothschild 1976; Allen 1976).

Massive Russian grain purchases, combined with lower amounts of grain held in storage in the US, had the effect of radically pushing up food prices. Food imports became prohibitively expensive for poor countries, and they had few choices in any case in terms of potential sources, since the US was the dominant exporter of wheat and maize at the time. The situation created uncertainty for all major grain markets, including rice (Timmer 2010). The 1973–74 oil price shocks occurred on top of the ructions that were already occurring on global grain markets, further adding turmoil because of the fossil fuel dependent nature of agricultural production. Speculative fervor on commodity markets was also widely blamed for exacerbating the situation at the time (Sarris and Taylor 1976). Prices for wheat, corn and soy tripled by 1975 compared to their levels in 1971, and prices remained high through the rest of the decade as further oil shocks in the late 1970s continued to rock the global economy, leading to rising world hunger.

Although each of these worldwide food crises had specific triggers that unleashed dynamics resulting in market chaos and food insecurity, in each case patterns of concentration at different levels made the industrial food system vulnerable to volatility in the face of shocks. At the level of farm fields, the focus on a few crops, produced in monoculture fashion with highly industrialized and fossil fuel dependent practices and inputs such as mechanization, fertilizers and pesticides, concentrated production practices and resulted in extreme reliance on just a few staples for most human diets. Just three cereal grains – wheat, maize, and rice – make up nearly half of human diets (FAO 2018), and account for 86% of all cereal exports (FAO 2020, 21). When soy is added into the mix, the four staple crops together account for two-thirds of human caloric intake (Zhao et al. 2017). Wheat and maize make up the bulk of the cereal crop trade, accounting for 40% and 36% of cereal exports, respectively, while rice makes up 10% of the world’s cereal trade, and soy is also a significantly traded staple crop (FAO 2020). This concentration of diets on just a few crops means that if the production or trade in one or more of them is diminished for any reason, global food security is put at risk. Reliance on specialized industrial farming methods to produce these and other export crops makes it extremely difficult to shift farming practices and crop mixes in the face of major disruptions, as production systems have become rigid and locked in (IPES-Food 2016). The focus in these systems on industrial inputs that rely on fossil fuels has also made the system especially sensitive to oil price rises, pushing up farming costs during crises.

At the country level, the distribution of staple crop production and trade between countries is highly concentrated, with just five countries accounting for at least 72% of the production of each of wheat, maize, rice and soy crops (Caparas et al. 2021). In 2021–2022, just seven countries plus the EU accounted for 90% of the world’s wheat exports and just four countries accounted for over 80% of the world’s maize exports (USDA 2022). The flip side of this concentration is that many countries are dependent on imports from these few grain suppliers. Although many countries produce staple grains for their own consumption, the majority do not produce enough to meet domestic demand and therefore rely on global markets to make up the shortfall. Indeed, the share of cereals production that is traded internationally has nearly doubled in the last quarter century, from roughly 10% in the late 1990s to 17% in the 2020s (Mercier 1999; OECD and FAO 2020). A major reason many countries rely on staples from abroad is that grains sold on world markets are typically cheaper because they are grown on a massive scale using highly specialized production methods that bring down costs per unit – i.e. concentration in farm fields. This high degree of concentration in the cereals market means that if one or more exporting countries is affected by a major event that undermines their ability to produce and export, there are few backup suppliers and prices tend to spike, leaving the countries that are dependent on imported grains particularly vulnerable, especially low-income, indebted countries. Further, because of concentrated field practices, countries dependent on imported grains cannot easily shift to staple crop production when prices rise, especially if they specialize in producing other crops for export, such as coffee, cotton, or cocoa (IPES-Food 2022).

At the global level, highly financialized and concentrated commodity markets mean that shocks can easily lead to extreme food price volatility, as they encourage investors to flood into commodity futures markets right when the food system is most at risk (Ghosh 2010; IPES-Food 2022). This type of investment pattern pushes prices far beyond what would be implied by food availability and demand. Huge inflows of financial investment into these markets, often concentrated via asset management firms and hedge funds, are typically associated with extreme price spikes (Clapp and Isakson 2018). A concentrated group of global grain trading firms also controls a sizeable share of the global movements of cereal grains, with a market share estimated to be at least 70 percent, influencing prices for both suppliers and consumers (Murphy, Burch, and Clapp 2012). These firms are also key actors engaging in commodity futures markets, and while they mostly operate under the radar when food prices are low, they tend to draw attention when they earn massive profits during food crises (Morgan 1979; Murphy, Burch, and Clapp 2012; Harvey 2022). The transnational firms that sell farm inputs are also highly concentrated and financialized and tend to see surges in profits during food crises, which bolsters demand for their products (Clapp 2018). In sum, a small number of financial and commercial actors operating at the global level have enormous sway over markets and prices for both inputs and outputs of commodity crop production.

While concentration at these three levels – field, country, and global agricultural markets – has been a key factor in making the global food system prone to volatility in the face of shocks, it also contributes to growing ecological problems including climate change that feed back into the system and create new vulnerabilities that are only accelerating. Concentrated monocultural and fossil fuel dependent practices in industrial production systems are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions from machinery use, as well as heavy use of inputs such as fertilizers and agrochemicals. These systems are also damaging to biodiversity as they rely on a narrow range of crops and just a handful of varieties of those crops. Industrial field practices are also reliant on water resources and chemicals, which contribute to water scarcity and pollutants. The ecological impact of industrial production systems, when combined with other forces contributing to climate change, including the transportation required for the international trade, storage, and retailing of food, thus has the capacity to trigger and exacerbate extreme weather events that can cause shocks that lead to both localized and global food crises (HLPE 2020; IPCC 2019; IPBES 2019; FAO 2016; IPES-Food 2022). As climate change accelerates, it also increases the likelihood of simultaneous production shocks in many of the regions that produce staple crops (Tigchelaar et al. 2018).

Although highly specialized global food supply chains are often justified by their proponents for being highly efficient and productive providers of cheap grains to address global food insecurity, they are very costly in practice in terms of ecological damage and rising hunger, especially in the face of increasingly frequent major world events that impact the sector – war, economic distress, and extreme weather linked to climate change – that appear to have become the norm rather than the exception.

How did we get here? Unpacking the dynamics that led to the last major food system transformation

The concentrated features of today’s global industrial food system have deep roots that reach back at least several centuries. Previous agricultural revolutions in Europe since the Middle Ages played important roles in establishing conditions for early industrialization in the economy more widely, which in turn have contributed to a more industrial approach to agriculture and food systems, including staple crop production (Mazoyer and Roudart 2006). But the main changes that brought us the features of the global industrial food system that make it so susceptible to worldwide crises began to take hold in the early to middle part of the nineteenth century when many of the world’s poorest and most food insecure countries were still under colonial rule. It was at this time that concentration at the field, country, and global market levels began to develop as defining features of staple crop production in the emergent global industrial food system. This multi-level concentration solidified by the early twentieth century, and further developments since that time have only deepened and accelerated those already-established dynamics.

Below, I provide a very brief sketch of some of the key developments that led to these interlocking dynamics since the early- to mid-1800s, with an emphasis on staple crop production and trade, to show the scale of changes that constituted this transformation of agriculture and food systems. While such a high-level overview inevitably leaves out some specificity, particularly with respect to unique circumstances in different contexts, the approach helps to identify the broad trends that laid the foundation for the highly concentrated features of today’s global industrial food system.

Field-level concentration of crops and production methods

At the level of the field, a major transformation of cereal crop production took place from around the early- to mid-1800s onwards that concentrated on a narrow number of crops and crop varieties, grown in monocultural fashion and increasingly reliant on industrial agricultural inputs. Focusing on single crops, using new kinds of inputs, was a way to increase labor efficiencies and reduce costs, especially in the settler-colonial states, including the US, Canada, Australia, and Argentina. But this practice increased the risk of depleting soil fertility, pest infestations, and other stresses that could undermine agricultural productivity. Despite these risks, monoculture cultivation dramatically expanded as new industrial technologies offered means to address fertility and pest problems using soil and crop amendments.

From the 1830s-40s, improvements to the plow that featured a steel ploughshare – often attributed to John Deere – made this tool stronger for deeper ploughing (Broehl 1984). The horse-drawn mechanical reaper was also invented and improved in this period, with several models emerging in the late 1820s and early 1830s, including those by Patrick Bell in Scotland and Cyrus McCormick and Obed Hussey in the US (Phillips 1956). These tools made for easier work in grain producing regions, especially for European settlers moving west in North America, who focused on wheat and maize production. Although at first these tools were produced in small numbers in local blacksmith shops and smaller firms, by the 1850s they began to be mass produced in large industrial factories as they spread widely across North America and began to be exported to Europe, Australia, Russia, and Argentina (Broehl 1984; Phillips 1956). By the early twentieth century, the emergence of gasoline-powered tractors again revolutionized plowing and harvesting activities, since they were powered by fossil fuels, rather than animal traction. These developments dramatically increased production, especially as tractors became more widely adopted by the 1930s and 1940s, not just in the US, but also in Europe and other grain growing regions (Olmstead and Rhode 2001). From the 1970s onwards, the adoption of tractors and other farm machinery was increasingly promoted in developing countries where labor shortages were less common, often displacing people from the land (Cabral and Amanor 2022).

New understandings about soil fertility beginning in the 1840s also led to important changes in field-level practices. Justice von Liebig’s widely read 1840 book Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology critiqued the idea that soil fertility depended on the quality of organic materials in topsoil and instead argued that plants simply needed appropriate amounts of chemical elements in the form of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) that could be added to the soil (Melillo 2012). This new ‘NPK mentality’ set off a global quest for minerals as ingredients for fertilizers. The result was the great guano rush that saw British merchants trade huge amounts of nitrogen-rich bird droppings from Peru and, once the guano was depleted, there was a scramble for nitrates from Chile, with devastating consequences for forced laborers in these industries (Clark and Foster 2009; Wines 1985; Markham 1958). New ideas about soil fertility also encouraged the development of a mining industry focused on phosphorus in North America and North Africa and potash deposits in Germany in the latter part of the nineteenth century (Lamer 1957; Markham 1958). Access to chemical fertilizers allowed farmers to plant crops continuously and more intensively on their fields, rather than rotating crops and leaving fields fallow to restore fertility. The discovery in the early twentieth century of methods to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere again dramatically revolutionized the fertilizer sector by creating a steady flow of nitrogen-rich ammonia as a key fertilizer ingredient (Johnson 2016). This new source of nitrogen, however, relied on massive energy inputs. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2019), global use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer increased by 800% from 1961 to 2017, while its production and use are responsible for over one fifth of direct greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture (IATP et al. 2021).

The development of a commercial chemical pesticides industry also began in the 1840s (Whorton 1974). Compounds such as pyrethrum powder (from dried chrysanthemum flowers), Paris Green (copper arsenate) and London Purple (calcium arsenate) were widely used in the mid-to-late 1800s to protect crops from pests that had become a growing threat to farm productivity due to more continuous cultivation and monocultural planting practices, as well as international trade, which further encouraged the spread of pests (Dunlap 1981; Bosso 1988). These commercially produced pest-control chemicals reduced the need for farm labor to control pests and weeds, and as such became an increasingly important part of farmers’ field practices, displacing more traditional natural control measures. The discovery of DDT in 1939 and its use for pest control during WWII, marked a further dramatic technological change in agrochemicals, leading to widespread production and use of the chemical as a pest control agent around the world and sparking the rise of a large agrochemical industry, despite early warnings about its safety and efficacy (Jarman and Ballschmiter 2012; Perkins 1997). Global pesticide use has risen dramatically since the mid-twentieth century, growing at almost double the rate of food production. At the same time, production centers have increasingly shifted from large firms in Europe and North America to generic producers in China, which brought down their price (Shattuck 2021).

Seed improvements since the mid-1800s were also very influential in further concentrating field practices. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century in the US, for example, there was a major government effort to support seed breeding for improved crops through support for agricultural colleges and extension stations, which encouraged farmers to adopt specific crop varieties that were increasingly focused on maximizing yield (Kloppenburg 1988; Fitzgerald 1990). The rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of genetics at the turn of the twentieth century prompted a massive research effort into hybridization to increase yields in maize, a key North American crop (Crabb 1947; Fitzgerald 1990). By the 1920s, several scientists had developed hybrid maize seeds, and by the 1930s and 1940s the use of hybrids increased remarkably. Between 1933 and 1945 in the US, for example, hybrids increased from 0.4% of the country’s maize acreage to 90% (Fitzgerald 1990, 220). Hybrid seeds further contributed to concentration in fields because they promoted single variety planting. These developments eventually led to plant genetic research for the improvement of other crops beyond maize – e.g. wheat in Mexico and India, and rice in Asia – as part of the wider Green Revolution, which brought the entire package of seeds, agrochemicals, fertilizers, and machinery to the developing world on a massive scale over the course of the 1950s-80s (Dahlberg 1979; Perkins 1997).

As each of these field technologies became increasingly available in the early twentieth century, adoption rates accelerated. In the US, for example, government farm policies during the Great Depression – which paid subsidies to farmers to limit the amount of land they cultivated in a bid to reduce surpluses – led farmers to adopt industrial inputs to maximize crop production on the lands they farmed (Fitzgerald 1990; Kloppenburg 1988). The technologies also reinforced each other. Once a farmer adopted one of the components, they were likely to adopt all of them, due to the way they had become highly complementary, or ‘locked in’ with one another. Hybrid seeds, for example, were bred to be more responsive to large applications of fertilizers and to facilitate harvesting by machine. Monoculture fields were also more susceptible to pests, thus spurring greater pesticide use. Subsequent technological innovations at the field level over the past century have largely been within this same industrial paradigm. For example, the development of agricultural biotechnology that conferred herbicide resistance to crop seeds and the digitalization of agriculture still rely on these same types of inputs, often encouraging yet further specialization at the field level in ways that link various inputs and encourage their continued use (Vanloqueren and Baret 2009; IPES-Food 2016).

Concentration of staple grains produced for export at the country-level

As an agricultural production revolution was setting new patterns of concentration in farmers’ fields by the mid-1800s, large-scale production of key staple grains for export became increasingly concentrated within a relatively small number of countries, underpinning the expansion of the international grain trade and associated foods, such as meat (McMichael 2021). Mirroring this development was the growing dependence of a number of countries on imports of staple grains to meet their domestic consumption needs. A key reason for this concentration and dependence was an expanding differential in the costs of production in these two sets of countries. Wheat and maize production expanded significantly in the nineteenth century, particularly in countries that were or had been settler colonies, where large areas of open grasslands were converted to highly productive agricultural production using concentrated field practices (Friedmann and McMichael 1989). In the US Midwest and in the eastern part of Canada, for example, maize was a principal crop that largely was grown as cattle feed, with settlers growing varieties adapted from those grown by Indigenous peoples. Wheat strains imported from Europe were also widely grown in these regions, as well as further west into the prairie states and provinces of both countries.

Similarly, wheat production for export expanded rapidly in Australia, Argentina, South Africa, India, Russia, and Ukraine. In each of these countries, which today are still among the world’s grain producing powerhouses, the lands converted to large-scale industrial grain production were in many cases brutally appropriated from Indigenous peoples by colonial and new settler state regimes. The export of grain from the Russian and Ukrainian Steppes at this time was significant enough that the 1850s Crimean war led to higher wheat prices in the United States, and incentivized farmers to purchase machinery and other inputs (Buck 1913; Phillips 1956). There was a rapid acceleration in specialization for export in the second half of the nineteenth century that made grain trade even more pronounced (Mazoyer and Roudart 2006), in sharp contrast to the eighteenth century when traded grains accounted for just 0.03% of consumption (Mercier 1999). As outlined briefly below, there are several reasons for this intensification of grain production for export in these countries at that time.

Britain’s 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws – policies that protected domestic agriculturalists by keeping out grains when they fell below a certain price level – constituted a major policy change that ushered in an era of free trade in agriculture in that country that unwound major protections that had been in place since 1815 (O’Rourke and Williamson 2000). By the 1840s, industrial interests lobbied the government to allow cheaper grain imports into the country so that factory worker wages could be kept low, thus ensuring continued capital accumulation for the industrial capitalist class. The Corn Laws were repealed in the context of a rising cost of living and hunger among working classes, who had come to rely on bread as a main source of sustenance (Rioux 2018). The Navigation Acts, which protected British shipping interests, were also repealed in 1849, opening the way for freer trade in grains into the country. The increased importation of surplus grain from abroad eventually brought down grain prices in Britain and allowed the industrial sector to flourish by exporting finished goods to those countries from which it imported food (Rioux 2018).

Growing adoption of farm machinery and other industrial inputs at the field level also played a role in specialization for export in key grain-growing regions. Many of these countries, particularly Canada, the US, Ukraine, Argentina, and Australia, had large areas of grasslands that had previously been used for hunting by Indigenous peoples, and which were not naturally suited to low-tech agriculture. In the Canadian prairies, for example, there are a limited number of frost-free days during the year, meaning that farmers could not profitably grow wheat using only family labor on small- or medium-sized farms, as it was simply not possible to raise and harvest crops before they would be ruined by freezing temperatures. As such, these lands could only be productive as grain farms if they employed machinery on a large scale, which sped up the planting and harvesting processes, giving maximum time for crops to mature (Ward 2011). Indeed, labor shortages were the norm in most settler-colonial grain-growing regions, and it is not surprising that these same countries were among the first to make widespread use of farm machinery such as mechanical reapers and steel plows, and later gasoline-powered tractors. The use of machinery, other inputs, and the cultivation of large tracts of land ensured that the regions that began to specialize in grain production for export had lower production costs and large surpluses, making their grain attractive to international markets (Friedmann and McMichael 1989).

New transportation modes and infrastructure also helped facilitate trade in agricultural surpluses in the second half of the nineteenth century. The development of steamships enabled the international grain trade on a larger scale than ever before between distant ports. A growing railway network in this period also connected rural areas to ports in both exporting and importing countries, making it possible to move grain across long distances over a relatively short period of time and at a low cost. These developments meant that rural grain-growing regions in far-flung corners of the globe were suddenly able to connect to a growing global marketplace (Mazoyer and Roudart 2006). In most grain-exporting countries, extended transportation networks also carried farm machinery, fertilizers, and chemical pest control products to those regions and enabled them to adopt increasingly industrial farming methods (Fowler 1994). Pests also often hitched rides on these modes of transit, however, which led to growing pest problems as non-native species with no natural predators made their way to new locations, driving up demand for pest control products (Dunlap 1981).

The availability of cheap grain circulating on international markets – especially wheat and maize as the more widely traded staple grains – contributed to the development of dependencies in countries that came to rely on imports to meet their national food needs. Between 1850 and 1900, US exports of wheat to Europe grew by a factor of forty while the price dropped by half (Mazoyer and Roudart 2006, 369). By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain became dependent on food imports and its farming sector suffered as a result of decreased demand for domestically grown grain. While some European countries, such as France and Germany continued to protect their agricultural sectors in the latter part of the nineteenth century, others, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, relied on imported grain while specializing their own agricultural sectors for export by focusing on dairy and other specialty products (Mazoyer and Roudart 2006).

Dependencies on imported grain further developed in the twentieth century, as the US took up the mantle of world hegemon in what Friedmann and McMichael label the second food regime after the Second World War (Friedmann and McMichael 1989). Food surpluses remained an ongoing problem for grain exporters such as the US and Canada, prompting them to launch food aid programs in the 1950s and 1960s, just as many poor countries in the Global South gained independence from colonial powers. Exporting countries entered into global cooperation agreements for food aid and wheat trade at this time, in a bid to ensure the orderly disposal of those surpluses (Friedmann 1990, 1995). By the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, the US became concerned about developing countries becoming too reliant on food aid, especially as it was carrying the cost of storage to stabilize global grain markets. This situation prompted the US to encourage the adoption of industrial agricultural production methods in Mexico, India, and other parts of Asia to bolster production in those regions under the banner of the Green Revolution (Perkins 1997; Cullather 2010). These efforts continued in response to the 1970s food crisis, while at the same time farm subsidies in industrialized countries increased, leading again to massive food surpluses by the 1980s as well as continued reliance on them by less industrialized countries (Friedmann 1995).

Dependencies on food imports in other regions only accelerated in the decades that followed. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, reliance on imported staple grains increased with the adoption of trade-oriented structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and the adoption of the World Trade Organization Agreement on Agriculture in the mid-1990s, which sought to liberalize agricultural trade (Clapp 2017). Both developments encouraged developing countries to further specialize in a range of specialty tropical export crops that they were often forced by colonial powers to produce a century earlier, such as coffee, cotton, and cocoa. These crops were sold on world markets to raise funds to repay debts, but the earnings often financed food imports, including staple grains (IPES-Food 2022; Clapp and Moseley 2020). China also became a major world importer of staple crops starting in the 1990s despite being a significant producer itself of rice, wheat, soy, and maize (McMichael 2020). For example, the country began to import substantial amounts of soy, primarily for animal feed, which it purchased not only from the US, but also from Brazil and Argentina, which have become major soy producers and exporters since the 1990s (Oliveira and Schneider 2016). Because China is such a major player, its staple crop imports have huge implications for global markets (McMichael 2020).

Concentration of highly financialized agribusiness firms

As the trade in staple crops increased from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, it was accompanied by the rise of financialized commodity markets and the emergence of a small group of powerful grain trading firms, as well as concentration among the firms that dominated in the agricultural inputs sector. These processes of financialization and corporate concentration were deeply entwined with one another, contributing to rigid global supply chains focused on just a handful of financial and corporate actors that have enormous sway over the contours of global grain production and trade.

The earliest agricultural commodity exchanges date back centuries and, like the early grain trade, were typically smaller in scale. Some of these trading houses, such as the Amsterdam Bourse, traded goods like coffee, fish, pepper, and grains as early as the mid-sixteenth century (Stringham 2003). The Dojima rice market, in Osaka, Japan, for example, dates to the seventeenth century, and involved some futures trading. England’s early commodity exchanges date back to the 17th and 18th centuries and originated in coffee houses that traded grain with the Baltic region and the Americas. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 paved the way for a dramatic expansion of exchanges that specialized in grain for import to England. The Liverpool Corn Trade Association, established in 1853, and the London Corn Trade Association, which set up shop at the Baltic Exchange in 1878, operated both spot and futures markets (Forrester 1931; Mercier 1999). In the US, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) was established in 1848 and focused on grain and other goods traded both within the US as well as exported abroad (Levy 2006). CBOT rose to prominence quickly as the grain trade expanded beyond the US East coast to European destinations. The expansion of CBOT was accompanied by technological changes that transformed grain storage, handling and transportation and led to the rise of Chicago as a key grain trading city (Cronon 1991). It was these grain exchange arrangements in the latter half of the nineteenth century that evolved into sophisticated and highly financialized trade, where grain warehouse receipts served like currency and speculators played a prominent role. As Cronon (1991, 120) notes, trading of these receipts ‘accomplished the transmutation of one of humanity’s oldest foods, obscuring its physical identity and displacing it into the symbolic world of capital.’

The new commodity exchanges in the second half of the nineteenth century soon became sites of speculative practices. As Morgan (1979, 95) notes of the Chicago Board of Trade in the 1860s: ‘There was an orgy of speculation and market manipulation during the Civil War. The Board printed rules governing trading in 1869, but abuses of all kinds continued – fraud, bribery of telegraph operators to obtain confidential information (before coded messages were used), and the spreading of false rumors to influence prices.’ There were attempts to corner the wheat market to drive up prices and enable speculators to earn spectacular prices far beyond the fundamentals of the market (Morgan 1979). The US government eventually enacted regulations to prevent excessive speculation in these markets in the 1920s and 1930s, including rules on positions and reporting requirements (Clapp and Isakson 2018). Nonetheless, speculative practices continued, with the US government regularly bringing cases against speculators for market manipulation. For example, in the 1930s-1950s period, the grain trading firm Cargill was accused several times of breaching position limits and conspiring to manipulate prices (Rochester 1940; US Commodity Exchange and Mehl 1954). The position limits rules on commodity exchanges in the US were unwound in the 1980s and early 2000s as neoliberal economic policies took hold, which unleashed additional financialization of the commodity trade that has even further separated food futures trade from physical markets by encouraging the rise of complex commodity derivatives such as index funds (Ghosh 2010). Large-scale institutional investors were attracted to these new investment vehicles and moved en masse into commodity markets (Clapp and Isakson 2018).

The financialization of the commodity trade through the rise of futures markets, which gave a relatively small number of investors a large influence over those markets, is difficult to separate from the rise of a small but powerful group of firms that dominated the grain trade over that same period.¹ These firms have long been deeply engaged in commodity futures trading, which they utilize to hedge their purchases and sales to protect them against sudden price changes, as well as to manage their own assets to raise capital for their operations (Morgan 1979). Access to markets that allowed this type of hedging was important given that purchases and sales were often done months in advance and to account for the long voyages of the ships to transport grain from the place where it was grown to its destination (Murphy, Burch, and Clapp 2012).

The early firms that rose to take on this role of moving the world’s grain from producing to consuming countries were family-owned businesses that kept many of their practices secret. They include Bunge, which was established in 1818 in the Netherlands, and expanded to dominate the grain trade between South America and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Louis Dreyfus was founded in 1851 in Switzerland, later headquartered in France, and specialized in the wheat trade between the Eastern European grain regions in Russia, Ukraine, and the Balkans to Western European destinations. Cargill was established in the US mid-west in 1865 and rose to prominence as it capitalized on the expanding wheat export trade between North America and Europe. Archer Daniels Midland was a relative newcomer, established in the US in 1902. Other early firms were part of the small original clique of grain trading firms, but have been subsumed into the others, and included Continental, established in Belgium in 1813, and André, established in Switzerland in 1877. The former sold its grain trading business to Cargill in 1999, and the latter went bankrupt in 2001 after a rogue trader lost the firm several hundred million dollars on risky and illegal futures trades (Blas 2012). This group of firms is often referred to as the ABCDs because of the first letters of their names.

While the recent rise of grain trading firms from Asia has in some ways challenged the dominance of the ABCD companies in the early decades of the twenty-first century (Hall 2020), the four remaining ABCD firms are still dominant players in the grain trade today (Harvey 2022). Two of these firms, Cargill and Dreyfus, remain tightly controlled family-owned companies, and as such are not required to publicly report their activities or earnings. Given their dominant and not particularly transparent position in the market, the ABCD firms wield enormous power in shaping food systems. Specifically, when just a handful of dominant firms control the bulk of the global grain trade, they have the capacity to shape the prices paid to farmers for their grain as well as prices at which they sell to consumers. Despite ongoing concern about their speculative practices on commodity futures markets, these firms insist that they only operate on these markets for purposes of hedging. However, it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between their hedging and speculative activities since they are mostly exempt from position limits rules because they are deemed by regulators to be ‘commercial operations’ that have a genuine need to hedge risks (Clapp and Isakson 2018). These firms have made substantial profits in times of higher food prices during crisis episodes (Murphy, Burch, and Clapp 2012; Harvey 2022).

It is not just the commodity trading firms that have been highly concentrated and financialized. A small handful of firms have dominated the farm inputs industry over the past 150 or so years. Both Cyrus McCormick and John Deere built major industrial enterprises to manufacture and sell their farm equipment, went to great lengths to out-compete their rivals, and were targeted as monopolists by the Granger movement (alongside railroads, banks, and commodity traders) in the 1870s (Buck 1913). The farm machinery sector has also been rife with mergers and acquisitions that have given a few firms a major share of the market, backed by deep-pocketed financial investors. In 1902, for example, five major harvester firms combined in a giant merger deal brokered by J.P. Morgan and backed by J.D. Rockefeller, which gave the new firm, International Harvester, a whopping 85% of the US grain harvesting machinery market in the early 20th century (Kramer 1964).

Similarly, just a few large firms came to dominate in the fertilizer, seed, and agrochemical sectors by the early decades of the twentieth century and held considerable market share (Markham 1958; Kloppenburg 1988; Dunlap 1981; IPES-Food 2021). Consolidation in the sector has continued ever since, with mergers between agrochemical and seed companies since the 1980s, and more recently with the mega-mergers in the sector that have resulted in just a few firms dominating the inputs markets. Since 2016, Bayer purchased Monsanto, Dow and Dupont merged to become Corteva, Syngenta was bought by ChemChina and was subsequently merged with Sinochem, and Potash Corporation and Agrium merged into the new fertilizer giant Nutrien. Like the grain trading firms, the input companies have also become increasingly financialized, with large proportions of their shares owned by asset management firms (Clapp 2018). Because just a few large firms have dominated in the farm inputs sector for such a long period of time, they have had enormous influence over the shape not just of farm input prices, but also over the direction of agricultural innovations and government agricultural policies (Clapp 2021) .

Moving toward a logic of diversity: how insights from history can inform the path ahead

There is wide agreement among activists, policy bodies and scholars that a radical transformation of food systems is urgently needed to make them more resilient and sustainable, especially as recurrent disruptions lead to increases in world hunger and as ecological emergencies – climate change, catastrophic biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution – continue to advance. Indeed, these ecological crises, in large part driven by concentrated practices across scales within the global industrial food system, now pose a major threat to food security and are likely to increase the frequency and intensity of worldwide food crises if the status quo remains. There is also some convergence toward the idea that increased diversity, as a counter force to concentration, is key for food systems resilience (Schipanski et al. 2016; IPES-Food 2016; Anderson et al. 2021). While processes of concentration are often the product of the quest for greater efficiency and opportunities for capital accumulation, diversity at different scales, by fostering alternative options, can act as a buffer that blunts the impact of shocks. For example, recent calls for greater diversity often include recognition of the need for more local and regional food production and distribution systems to create more flexibility in the system in the face of shocks (e.g. Schipanski et al. 2016; Willett et al. 2019; HLPE 2020; IPES-Food 2021). While there is general concurrence on the overall need for transformation, there are also important differences in opinion in terms of the specific measures that will be required to bring it about.

While it is understood that past experience is not a perfect guide for predicting the future, a deeper appreciation of the dynamics that brought us the current global industrial food system raises some important questions and points to potential areas for further inquiry about present challenges. Full coverage of all of the lessons from the historical experience is beyond the scope of this paper, but there is ample room for further inquiry on a number of fronts. Here I only have space to briefly highlight three areas where the historical overview of concentration processes provides potential insights that can inform the food systems transformation agenda and the scholarly work surrounding it.

The deep roots of concentration

First, the history mapped out above makes clear that the origins of the global industrial food system have very deep roots, emerging even before the first food regime that Friedmann and McMichael date to 1870 (Friedmann and McMichael 1989). Indeed, successive food regimes are both in part a product of, and are overlaid on top of, the concentrating processes of this global industrial food system. Recognition of the deep roots of the system highlights the longstanding nature of corporate and financial concentration in the food system, which, as the above analysis shows, is also intimately tied to other kinds of concentration at different scales. In other words, by looking through the lens of multi-level concentration, the long and continuous pattern of interlinked concentration in farm fields, regional production centers, and global commerce comes more clearly into view. The point is that corporate actors have had nearly two centuries of experience in shaping food systems in ways that further their own interests, not just in terms of controlling the market, but also in terms of using their power to shape discourses on food systems transformation, technological innovation, and government policy directions. The current transformation agenda must grapple with these entrenched power dynamics (Béné 2022; Clapp 2021).

An appreciation for the long roots of the current global industrial food system also signals that a radical transformation to food systems organized around the principle of diversity is not likely to happen overnight. I make this point not to dishearten those pushing for a radical food systems transformation agenda, but to draw attention to the need for long-term thinking to shape that agenda. But at the same time, as many advocates of transformation point out, we do not have another 200 years to gradually transform food systems to a more diversity-centered model because taking that long to achieve the goal would no doubt result in irreversible ecological damage as well as continuing hunger.

The challenge for transformation advocates today, then, is to ensure that the foundation for a new food systems pathway is laid carefully in ways that facilitate rapid adoption of new practices that foster diversity, rather than concentration, at multiple levels. Achieving this goal will require concerted action to break the lock-ins of industrial agriculture across multiple scales simultaneously, as discussed more fully below, in order to ensure the agenda is not co-opted by corporate actors who seek to further their own interests. It will also require explicit consideration of the relationship between the long-term transformation agenda and the short-term need to address hunger, especially as worldwide food crises are likely to continue in the immediate future. A key challenge will be to ensure that short-term measures do not undermine longer-term transformation goals.

The need for coordinated responses across different levels

Second, the interconnected nature of concentration at different levels signals that measures to promote food systems transformation must be coordinated across scales. That is, changes to field-level practices must be compatible with a shift toward greater diversity at the country level and with a move way from globally concentrated markets to more diverse market arrangements. Much of the recent attention – in both the scholarly and policy settings – has been directed toward the need to transform practices at the field level. Agroecology, for example, has gained growing attention as a production model, and is often presented as not just a science, but also a social movement and a practice that centers on the use of diverse production methods that minimize external inputs and work with rather than against nature (e.g. Wezel et al. 2020; Altieri and Nicholls 2020; Bezner Kerr et al. 2021; Van Der Ploeg 2021). Agroecological practices are gaining traction in a wide range of countries and studies are confirming its potential to achieve required levels of food production in ways that are much less ecologically damaging than industrial field practices (Anderson et al. 2021).

Transformative changes at the field level are vital, but they must also be linked up with efforts to bring about transformation at the country and global market levels, a point that agroecology advocates taking a more political stance, as well as proponents of food sovereignty, have also stressed (e.g. Anderson et al. 2021; Wittmann, Desmarais and Wiebe 2010). Although there has been an uptick in work in recent years that points to the need to address corporate concentration and capture of food systems governance agendas (e.g. Wood et al. 2021; Clapp 2021; McKeon 2021; Canfield, Anderson, and McMichael 2021), there is a need for further work that explicitly links action to curb corporate power at the global market level to the field and country levels. Curbing corporate dominance in the sector, for example, by instituting stronger competition policies to crack down on mergers and acquisitions that lead to fewer firms with greater market share, could open up space for alternative market structures for both the commodities and inputs trade. Such policies would be compatible with territorial markets serving as potential commercial outlets for more ecologically produced foods at the local scale, as well as with agroecological practices that do not require highly industrialized agricultural inputs (e.g. Anderson et al. 2021; Van der Ploeg 2020).

The level that has received somewhat less attention in recent years is the problem of concentration of grain production for export at the country-level and its connection to concentration at other scales. This neglect is somewhat puzzling given the strong focus on this level and its geopolitical dynamics in the wake of the 1970s food crisis (e.g. Friedmann and McMichael 1989). As the historical overview makes clear, many of the world’s current export-focused grain producing regions were once vast grasslands that were not previously under intensive agricultural cultivation. These regions only became highly productive and export-oriented with the displacement of Indigenous peoples and the application of industrial inputs – machinery, synthetic fertilizers, specialized seeds, and agrochemicals – provided by a concentrated group of corporate actors. It is important for both scholars and policymakers to better understand the role of these regions in the context of a radical transformation of food systems. More research is needed, for example, toexamine how diverse field practices and market systems might be made operational in these regions in ways that support struggles for self-determination by Indigenous peoples (e.g. Desmarais and Wittman 2014). Similarly, more work is needed to conceptualize the opportunities and challenges that arise with a shift toward greater self-reliance in those countries that have become dependent on imported grain (e.g.Fakhri 2021; Clapp 2017).

The underlying drivers of concentration

Third, a greater appreciation of the historical experience can help us better understand the broader mechanisms that resulted in interlinked processes of concentration at different levels, which is important for ensuring that the current transformation agenda avoids replicating that problem while at the same time generating a new dynamic that supports a logic of diversity. This is a huge question that I can only briefly touch upon here, although it opens important avenues for further analysis.

As is clear from the above analysis, processes of concentration within the global industrial food system over the past few centuries are intimately entwined with the dynamics of capital accumulation. For example, the intensified commodification of agricultural inputs, agricultural specialization geared for export in certain countries alongside growing import dependence in others, and the control of the global grain trade by a handful of highly financialized firms, are all processes embedded in broader relations of capital. The drive for profit among economic interests at each level played an important role in shaping the ways in which concentrating processes unfolded, the specifics of its manifestation at different levels, and the ways in which they ultimately reinforced one another. For example, powerful commercial interests were key players in the repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain (Rioux 2018), in shaping US food aid policy (Friedmann 1995), in marketing hybrid and genetically modified seeds and other industrial inputs (Kloppenburg 1988), and in shaping concentrated and financialized commodity markets (Clapp and Isakson 2018).

At the same time, the processes of concentration throughout history were messy and complex. Other forces, including scientific breakthroughs that led to rapid technological change and patterns of lock-in, as well as major government policy shifts, were instrumental at different historical moments in shaping market dynamics and the specifics of how concentration ultimately unfolded at each level. A better understanding of the iterative dynamics between markets and patterns of accumulation, technological change, and government policy in shaping outcomes is vital for understanding not just how to avoid processes of concentration, but also how these different forces can be utilized to set a logic of diversity into motion. For example, more research is needed on the role that government research funding can play in the development of more diverse agricultural field practices, such as agroecology (Miles, DeLonge, and Carlisle 2017). Similarly, further work is also needed on the potential role of technology in supporting agroecology and alternative market structures (Wittman, James, and Mehrabi 2020; Anderson et al. 2021). These are deeply political issues, however, where corporate influence has had enormous sway over government policymaking and technological developments.

Conclusion

Over the past 50 years, we have witnessed three multi-year world food crises, triggered by complex and manifold disruptions. While each is unique in its dynamics, concentration at multiple levels in the global industrial food system has increased vulnerability to these kinds of major crises. Concentration at the field level has increased reliance on just a few staple crops, grown using intensive and fossil fuel dependent methods. These few crops are grown primarily in a handful of countries that dominate the grain export market. And the trade in those crops is mediated by highly concentrated and financialized agricultural markets. This multi-level concentration in the global industrial food system has very deep roots that date back to the early- to mid-1800s. While the history of how concentration came into place at each level is unique, the field, country, and global market levels are interconnected in complex ways.

An appreciation for how the last transformation of food systems unfolded and resulted in high levels of concentration at these scales helps to give insights for today’s project of food system transformation towards greater diversity and resilience. A deeper understanding of the long roots of the global industrial food system, characterized by processes that resulted in concentration at different levels, takes us back several centuries and highlights that the dominance of corporate and financial interests in the global industrial food system has a very long history.

The history of concentration at multiple scales also raises important insights and questions for the current agenda for food systems transformation toward greater diversity and resilience in the face of increasingly frequent shocks. The long path that has led to the entrenchment of the industrial food system points to the need to plan for the long run for the next transformation, while also stressing the urgency of unwinding the lock-ins that have held the industrial system in place for so long, in order to create openings for a more rapid transformation. The interconnection of the dynamics at different levels over the past several centuries also highlights the need to coordinate current transformation strategies across multiple levels to build mutually reinforcing mechanisms that support greater diversity in terms of field practices, country and regional level production and distribution, and global commodity and input markets. In particular, the question of how country-level concentration and staple crop import dependence can be reduced deserves much more focused attention. History also shows that concentration in the global industrial food system was a product of complex dynamics between commercial imperatives of capital accumulation, government policies, and technological changes, indicating that the transformation agenda will need to navigate these forces, and their deeply entrenched power relationships, in ways that install a logic of diversity to counter tendencies toward concentration.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Derek Hall, Taarini Chopra, and Eric Helleiner for helpful comments and feedback on previous drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and The Journal of Peasant Studies editors for their critical insights and suggestions. I am also grateful to hold a Killam Research Fellowship and for funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada that supported the research on which this article is based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Killam Research Fellowship and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 435-2020-0664].

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Clapp

Jennifer Clapp is a Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability and Professor in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo. Her recent books include Food, 3rd Edition (Polity, 2020) and Speculative Harvests: Financialization, Food, and Agriculture (with S. Ryan Isakson, Fernwood Press, 2018). She is Vice-Chair of the Steering Committee of the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.

Notes

1 The grain trading firms that emerged in the 1800s and early 1900s in some ways mirrored the power of the European chartered merchant firms that were granted monopolies to trade commodities such as sugar and tea several centuries earlier – a trade that was deeply enmeshed with colonialism and slavery and also had deep entanglements with financial investors (see, for example, Edel 1969).