| By :
Alison Withers
Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers Globally huge multinational food corporations like Unilever, Nestle and Altria (Kraft Foods) and the big supermarkets like Asda/Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco dominate our food supply. In the UK alone the "big four" supermarket chains (Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda and Morrisons) now control more than 70% of the grocery market. They are therefore, between them the most likely customers of overseas producers and that gives them immense buying power to force down prices for farmers and farm workers. Around the world, farm income is plummeting, pushing farmers off the land and into destitution. The pressure to produce more for less also forces farmers to exploit their land to the maximum and beyond to survive. This unbalanced and loaded trading relationship is clearly unsustainable and short-sighted in a world where fears about food scarcity and food security are already growing daily. Yet while people continue to starve across the rest of the world mountains of food are thrown away or wasted in rich nations because centralised shopping in big supermarkets takes no account of local needs. Not only is this cost pressure short-sighted for helping farmers produce enough food to feed us all it is a catastrophe for the environment, land management and ecology. Without help, or access to safe, natural biopesticides and yield enhancers, to financial resources to buy them and without access to training in integrated pest management and sustainable farming smaller farmers could ruin the fertility of the land on which they depend for a living and on which we all, our children and future generations will depend for our food. Marcus Meadows-Smith heads one of the world's largest R & D companies developing the new low-chem agricultural products like biopesticides. He believes that lack of the ability to invest and of resources means that many farmers not only in the developing world are faced with an unacceptable choice between producing enough food and draining their land of precious goodness in the effort to do so. It's plainly obvious that if the planet is to survive something has to give and that something is the near-monopoly buying power of the big players, the supermarket giants and the multinationals. The crazy thing is that if the doomsday eco-prophets are right then by being so focused on short term profit for themselves and their shareholders they could be jeopardising their own long-term survival along with that of the rest of us. Put simplistically, if the land is so drained of goodness that it can't supply enough food for us all then what exactly are they going to sell? Consumer power could be the key to helping the faceless corporations of the world see sense. In 2007 the Co-op swapped all its 'own brand' chocolate to Fairtrade and saw its sales rise by 30% almost immediately. Organic food sales are more than 50% higher than five years ago and are worth a total of around £1.84bn in the UK, more than 70% of it going to the Supermarkets. Plainly consumers want their food to be chemical free, produced as naturally as possible and they continue to believe that organic is healthier. As our CEO quoted above has also said, however, while organic is a good lifetsyle choice for those who can afford it, it is lower yielding and cannot feed the world's growing population. That means that to maximize yield farmers and growers, wherever they are on the planet, will need access to safer, low-chem, forms of crop protection, soil protection and yield enhancers, such as the new ranges of biopesticides and biofungicides now being developed. It means farmers will need to be able to afford to buy them, to employ workers to use them and to afford to be able to train them in how. That means they need to be able to earn more from their produce and give less away to the powerful of the world, including the supermarkets.
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