Revealed: the true extent of America’s food monopolies, and who pays the price | Food & drink industry

Farmers squeezed … and desperate

America’s farmers have become increasingly dependent on government aid.

Farmers received $424.4bn in subsidies between 1995 and 2020, of which 49% were for just three crops: corn, wheat and soybeans, according to the Environmental Working Group. Corn subsidies are the largest by a long way – $116.6bn – accounting for 27% of the total. Very little corn grown in the US is eaten these days. Instead, more than 99% goes into animal feed, additives like corn syrup used in sugary junk food and, increasingly, ethanol, which produces toxic air pollutants when burned with gasoline.

It’s a cruel paradox, according to some campaigners, as subsidies incentivise farmers to grow just a handful of cash crops, a practice that floods the market, depresses prices and keeps them hooked on government aid.

A farmer preparing a field for spring planting in Prairie Grove, Illinois. Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA

Commodity prices peaked in mid-2012 and plunged by about 50% by the end of 2019.

This is good news for big corporations like meat processors, as it reduces costs, but bad for many farmers: total farm debt has reached levels not seen since the 1980s farm crisis.

Advocates say that a toxic mix of financial woes, climate chaos and trade wars have contributed to a mental health crisis among farmers. At least 450 farmers died by suicide across nine midwestern states between 2014 to 2018, according to the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. Calls to a crisis hotline operated by Farm Aid, a non-profit agency trying to help farmers keep their land, almost doubled over the same period. In 2020, 552 farmers filed for bankruptcy – 7% fewer than the previous year, as commodity prices and government aid increased during the pandemic, but still the third-highest figure over the last decade.

“The economic power of these corporations enables them to wield huge political influence, so we have a system in which farmers are on a treadmill just trying to stay afloat. Basically there’s a handful of individuals in the world, mostly white men, who make money by dictating who farms, what gets farmed and who gets to eat. Consumer choice is an illusion; the transnationals control everything in this extractive agricultural model,” said Joe Maxwell, president of Family Farm Action.

Less than a third of farms – mostly big ones – benefit from USDA subsidies in part because the system has a long history of descrimination against farmers of color and small farms without the time, resources or expertise to dedicate to online applications.

Food industry workers: low pay, high hazards

At least half of the 10 lowest-paid jobs in the US are in the food industry, and they rely disproportionately on federal benefits. Walmart and McDonald’s are among the top employers of beneficiaries of food stamps and Medicaid, according to a 2020 study by a non-partisan government watchdog.

Even before the pandemic, farms were among the most dangerous workplaces in the country, where low paid workers have little protection from long hours, repetitive strain injuries, exposures to pesticides, dangerous machinery, extreme heat and animal waste. Between 50% and 75% of the country’s 2.5 million farmworkers are undocumented migrants who have few labor rights and limited access to occupational healthcare.

Workers at a pork processing plant in Missouri trim fat from pork. Photograph: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

Covid exposed and exacerbated the risks faced by frontline food workers, especially those working in meatpacking plants. As of last week, at least 58,898 meatpacking plant workers had tested positive for Covid, according to data collected by the Food and Environment Reporting Network (Fern), and many of the outbreaks led to community spread in rural areas. This is a massive undercount as the majority of states do not collect or share the data, nor do the big companies.

“The meatpacking industry is much more dangerous now than in the 1990s, and the biggest factors are consolidation and cutting corners of worker safety,” said Debbie Berkowitz, director of the worker health and safety program at the National Employment Law Project.

Environmental impacts

About half of the planet’s land and 70% of freshwater withdrawals are for farming, which is increasingly industrialized.

Industrial agriculture is focussed on extracting maximum profits for minimum costs – an exploitative model with grave consequences for animal welfare, water, land and global heating.

Agriculture is responsible for more than a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, making food production a major contributor to the climate crisis. Across the board, the carbon footprint for animal-based foods – beef, lamb, chicken, cheese – is higher than for plant based food, which is mostly due to the consequences of deforestation to create space to grow feed crops, fertilizer used for these crops and methane emissions.

Despite the community, environmental and economic benefits of supporting local sustainable producers, transporting food is a very small contributor to greenhouse gases: it’s really what you eat, not where it comes, from that’s key to reducing your dietary carbon footprint.

Here in the US, there were 1.6bn animals living on 25,000 factory farms in 2017 – a 14% rise in just five years. Together, these animals produced about 885bn pounds of manure annually – equivalent to the human sewage generated by residents of 30 New York Cities.

Incentivising farmers to grow the same crops has reduced the productivity of some of the country’s most fertile lands, as monocropping depletes soil of nutrients and can lead to significant erosion. The practice requires synthetic fertilizers to compensate for the lost nutrients, and pesticides to combat fungi and insect predators that thrive in these conditions. Indigenous and subsistence farmers have always rotated multiple crops because it’s the best way of ensuring healthy soil and good yields.

Agricultural runoff is now responsible for 80% of excessive nutrients in our freshwater and oceans, which cause dense growth of plant life like algae that block oxygen from reaching fish and other animals.

In 2019, agriculture and aquaculture were identified as a threat to 24,000 of the almost 28,000 species threatened with extinction, according to the IUCN Red List.

What can be done?

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s agriculture secretary told farmers to “get big or get out”.

This investigation has examined the far-reaching consequences of government support – political and economic – for big corporations that now dominate every part of the food chain.

Last week Joe Biden signed an executive order to tackle the rampant concentration across the US economy – including food and farming. Biden called on government agencies to enforce existing antitrust laws and consider rolling back recent mega-mergers which boosted profits and power for a handful of corporations while hurting the rest of us. The order specifically directs the USDA to take swift action to protect farmers including by making it easier for them to sue meat processors for alleged abuses.

But the problems in the current system run deep.

“From farm to fork, America’s food system has been rooted in the exploitation of women, Native Americans and people of color. This is at the heart of capitalist food politics – big corporations taking as much as they can and paying as little as possible for it,” said Raj Patel, academic and author of Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System.

In addition to executive actions, which could be overturned by the next president, such deep-rooted injustices need sweeping reforms by Congress. But bills banning new mega-mergers and factory farms currently lack bipartisan support, despite public opinion supporting them. It’s time to support small-scale regenerative farmers, regional food hubs and grocery coops, according to Starbuck. “Alternatives already exist. We just need to boost public funding and resources to help sustainable, affordable, more equitable food systems take root.”

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 and online chat is also available. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org