We may not be conscious about it, but many of us wake up and sleep with corporations, or at least with the things that they produce and sell.
Let’s take food as an example. In our homes, we get connected to a UK-based company through its biscuits that we love to dunk in our tea. Our favorite canned soup links us to a top food and snack firm headquartered in New Jersey. Our streaky bacon ties us with a China-based corporation that grows pigs for their fatty bellies. Top trading firms in Singapore, Switzerland, and India reach us through our staples of rice, wheat, or corn.
Outside, we get connected with transnational corporations through their omnipresent fast-food restaurants and products stacked in supermarkets and groceries. Farther in the fields, we get linked to corporations that control plantations grown with monocrops such as soybeans that are made into feeds for hogs, cows, chickens, and fish, which in turn are processed into meat products that we buy and eat.
In this video,* historical sociologist Philip David McMichael of Cornell University explains that our constant connection to corporations through product consumption didn’t happen by chance. Corporations had to gain power first and then impose it onto the world’s food systems so they could get into nations, farms, stores, homes, and finally to our plates and palates.
Michael succinctly tells us how governments enabled corporations to gain power over food systems and helped them promote their false and for-profit solutions to hunger and malnutrition.
He says this started with the ascension of the U.S. as an international power after World War II and the country’s donation of its food surpluses to nations of the Global South that led to their commercial imports of food products and inputs from countries of the Global North.
Michael then explains how corporations, through the help of states, expanded their power and replaced local food systems during the Green Revolution of the 1960s, the foreign debt crisis in the 1980s, the trade liberalization of the 1990s, and the financialization era in the 21st century.
He says this year’s UN Food Systems Summit was another move to further intensity the corporations’ power and “build” their “legitimacy and capacity…to become the governors of the global food system.”
*This video is part of the Oct. 13, 2021 online seminar, Not Our Menu: False Solution to Hunger and Malnutrition, organized by the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition.
**Subtitles in English and other languages are available. Click the CC icon at the bottom of the YouTube video.
HUNGRY FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS ISSUE?
Read “The Emergence of the 'Food Systems' Discourse and Corporate Solutions to Hunger and Malnutrition” written by Franco, Elisabetta Recine, and Colin Gonsalves via this link: https://www.righttofoodandnutrition.org/files/rtfn_watch_art.01-2021_eng_web.pdf
#righttofood #foodsovereignty #foodsystems4people #notocorporatecapture #foodystems
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