Crisis in East Africa

[dub solution]

Not to discourage benefit concerts etc for the immediate crisis ( we are doing one here) but this Guardian article ( not that I ever buy the damn thing)  is really alarming.
Wheat
 stands in a field in Brazil waiting to be harvested. The ABCD group of 
ADM, Bunge, Cargill and (Louis) Dreyfus, account for between 75% and 90%
 of the global grain trade. Photograph: Adriano Machado/Bloomberg via 
Getty ImagesBy
 mid-morning snack you will certainly have encountered their products 
several times already wherever you are in the world, whether it is the 
corn in your flakes, the wheat in your
 bread, the orange in your juice, the sugar in your jam, the chocolate 
on your biscuit, the coffee in your cup. By the end of the day, if 
you've eaten beef, chicken or pork, consumed anything containing salt, 
gums, starches, gluten, sweeteners, or fats, or bought a ready meal or a
 takeaway, they will have shaped your consumption even further.And
 yet, the four giant transnationals that dominate the raw materials of 
the global food system have largely stayed below the radar of European 
consumers. Known as the ABCD group for the alphabetic convenience of 
their initials, ADM, Bunge, Cargill and (Louis) Dreyfus, account for 
between 75% and 90% of the global grain trade, according to estimates. 
Figures cannot be given with
 confidence, however, because two of the companies are privately owned 
and do not give out market shares.This extraordinary concentration of power and money in the global food trade has been identified by Oxfam in a new report this
 week as one of the structural flaws of the system. At each stage a 
handful of players dominate, not just
 in primary agriculture but in food manufacturing and retailing. The 
result, according to Oxfam, is that "they extract much of the value 
along the chain, while costs and risks cascade down on to the weakest 
participants, generally the farmers and labourers at the bottom".Oxfam
 is the latest in a long line of critics to highlight this corporate 
concentration as a root cause of hunger and poverty. The ABCD group have
 said they welcome informed debate but that, as far as they are 
concerned, their operations are the vital waters that keep food and its 
finance flowing from those who can grow it to those who need to consume 
it. Scale enables them to be highly efficient. The grain trade is 
capital intensive; they invest heavily in
 storage facilities and port and transport infrastructure.US-based
 Cargill with the highest revenues, is the largest private company in 
the world – and famous for its secrecy. Its headquarters is a mock-Tudor
 meets mock-French chateau in Minnetonka in the US mid-west, where the 
company was founded by a family of grain traders in 1865. Today, it is 
still majority-owned by descendents of the family. Its main commodity 
trading operation is run out of the tax haven of Switzerland. Its sales 
were $108bn in 2010, and $115bn in 2009, and its net earnings were 
nearly $6bn for those two years.As
 well as being a leading player in the trading, processing and 
transporting of the most important agricultural commodities, fertiliser 
and meats, it is one of the world largest hedge funds. When Gordon 
Brown, as prime minister, called a summit in London on the 2008 food 
crisis, Cargill was invited. When Walker crisps had an image problem 
with the saturated fats in its crisps, Cargill came to the rescue, 
having a large acreage of land in eastern Europe planted with a new 
variety of "Sunseed".It
 produces
 about half of all McDonald's chicken products across Europe. It sells 
fats to Unilever. When the US needed to appoint someone to lead the 
reconstruction of agriculture in Iraq, it turned to former Cargill 
executive Dan Amstutz. In China, where it has a joint venture with 
Monsanto, to whom it sold its enormous seeds interests a decade ago, it 
has trained over 2 million farmers in the American way of agriculture.Over
 that same decade, Cargill, ADM and Bunge are thought to have acquired 
about 80% of China's soya processing capacity. More recently, Cargill 
has been moving up the food chain into high-value, hi-tech additives and
 what it calls food solutions for the manufacturing industry.Louis
 Dreyfus, established in 1851, is also private and still family owned, 
headquartered in Paris but again trading largely out of Switzerland. It 
gives no figures and never comments to the media, but its estimated 
revenues in 2009 were £34bn. It has enormous grain, sugar and energy 
trading interests around the world, although in recent years it has 
concentrated on financial aspects of commodity trading.Bunge,
 which expanded through the late 19th century as a grain trader in South
 America, is now
 incorporated in the tax haven of Bermuda but its headquarters are in 
the US. Its net revenues in 2010 were $47bn, and net earnings were 
$2.3bn. It is a leading processor of oilseeds, and producer and trader 
of grains, sugar and bioenergy. It is also a key player in the global 
fertiliser market.ADM,
 or Archer Daniels Midland, is incorporated in the US tax-haven state of
 Delaware and headquartered in Illinois. Its revenues in 2010 were $62bn
 and its earnings were $1.9bn.ADM's
 origins go back to a US
 seed crushing business begun in 1902. Today, it has vast interests in 
trading, processing and transporting soya and other oilseeds, and corn, 
wheat cocoa and other agricultural commodities. It is a leading 
manufacturer of oils, corn sweeteners, flour, biofuels, food additives 
from gums to gluten, soya isolates and animal feed ingredients.To
 add to the concentration, Cargill, ADM, and Bunge have strategic 
alliances and joint ventures with the seed and agrochemical companies 
that dominate the agricultural inputs part of the global food system. In
 seeds four firms, Monsanto (incorporated in Delaware, HQ in Missouri), 
Dupont (incorporated and HQ in Delaware), Syngenta (incorporated and HQ 
in Switzerland) and Limagrain, a
 French-based international co-operative, account for over 50% of global
 seed sales.In
 agrochemicals six firms, DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow (incorporated 
in Delaware, HQ in Michigan), and the two German chemical giants Bayer 
and BASF, control 75% of the market. 		 	   		   		 	   		   
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