Invisible Giant

Brewster Kneen

Description

Transnational corporations straddle the globe, largely unseen by the public. Cargill, with its headquarters in the US, is the largest private corporation in North America, and possibly in the world. Cargill trades in food commodities and produces a great many of them: grains, flour, malt, corn, cotton, salt, vegetable oils, fruit juices, animal feeds, and meat.



Among its most profitable activities is its trade in the global financial markets. There are few national economies unaffected by Cargill's activities, and few eaters in the north whose food does not pass through Cargill's hands at some point. Yet Cargill remains largely invisible to most people and accountable to no one outside the company.



This is an explosive book that breaks the silence on the true extent of Cargill's power and influence worldwide - its ability to shape national policies, and the implications of these strategies for all of us. Thoroughly revised and updated, Kneen's new book offers shocking new evidence of Cargill's activities since the book was first published.
Preface

1. Mutant Giants

2. Cargill Inc – The Numbers

3. Origins, Organisation and Ownership

4. Policy Advocacy and Capitalist Subsidies

5. Creatures: Feeding and Processing

6. Cotton, Peanuts & Malting

7. Processing: Oilseeds, Soybeans, Corn & Wheat

8. Invisible Commodities

9. E-commerce

10. Coming and Going: Transport and Storage

11. A Typical Story– Canada, and Mexico

12. Fertiliser

13. The West Coast

14. Rivers of Soy - South America

15. Juice

16. The 'Far East'

17. Seeds

18. Salt

19. Only Cargill’s Future?

Periodicals referred to

Endnotes

Index

Sujets

• Food Industry
• Social Science
• Industries
• Sociologie, société et politique
• África
• General officer
• South
• Manufacturing
• Food
• General
• Agriculture
• Africa
• Industrie

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783715435
• Langue: English

Extrait

Invisible Giant
Invisible Giant
Cargill and its Transnational Strategies
Second edition
Brewster Kneen
First published 1995, this edition 2002 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Brewster Kneen 1995, 2002
The right of Brewster Kneen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1959 9 hardback ISBN 0 7453 1958 0 paperback ISBN 978 1 7837 1543 5 ePub ISBN 978 1 7837 1544 2 Mobi
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kneen, Brewster.
Invisible giant : Cargill and its transnational strategies / Brewster Kneen.–– 2nd ed.
      p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–7453–1959–9 (hbk) –– ISBN 0–7453–1958–0 (pbk)
1. Cargill, Inc.––History. 2. Grain trade––United States––History. 3. Agricultural industries––United States––History. 4. Food industry and trade––United States––History. 5. International business enterprises––United States––History. 6. Grain trade––History. 7. Agricultural industries––History. 8. Food industry and trade––History. I. Title.
HD9039.C37 K58 2002
338.8'873'0973    dc21
2002005038
10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester Printed in the European Union by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, England
Contents
Preface
1
Mutant Giants
2
Cargill Inc. – The Numbers
3
Origins, Organization and Ownership
4
Policy Advocacy and Capitalist Subsidies
5
Creatures: Feeding and Processing
6
Cotton, Peanuts and Malting
7
Processing: Oilseeds, Soybeans, Corn and Wheat
8
Invisible Commodities
9
E-commerce
10
Coming and Going: Transport and Storage
11
Typical Stories – Canada and Mexico
12
Fertilizer
13
The West Coast
14
Rivers of Soy – South America
15
Juice
16
The ‘Far East’
17
Seeds
18
Salt
19
Only Cargill’s Future?
Notes
References
Index
Maps
1
Major North American bulk transport waterways
2
Major rivers of South America
Preface
Invisible Giant Applies New Make-Up
February 20, 2002. I was making a routine check of Cargill’s website to see what they had acquired the previous week. To my surprise, I was not greeted by a news release on their latest deal, but by ‘the new Cargill’ and its new logo. Gone is the old green toilet seat – the stylized green ‘C’ with the teardrop shaped centre with the fully detachable Cargill name. The new logo – with the upper three-eighths of the old green ‘C’ arching gracefully from the ‘a’ over to dot the ‘i’ in Cargill – integrates the Cargill name in the logo, signifying that Cargill has decided it will no longer be quite such an invisible giant.
It was almost exciting.
The new logo is intended to convey that Cargill is ‘building on tradition while moving forward’, and as you will find herein, Cargill has indeed been moving relentlessly ‘forward’.
As Cargill explains:

The green banner of colour in the new Cargill logo connects visually to our previous logo ... There is much we want to keep from the Cargill that grew organizationally and geographically during the 36 years the logo was used ... At the same time, a new Cargill is taking shape – one that is more approachable, innovative and forward-facing ... Our fundamental business purpose is about nourishment, growth and making connections – to harness our knowledge and energy in providing goods and services that are necessary for life, health and growth.
And of the new hype for the new Cargill:

Cargill entered the 21st century on a new journey – to become, within the decade, the premier provider of solutions to our food and agricultural customers ... We bring to this journey our traditional strengths of integrity and dependability. We also bring our accumulated expertise across many geographies, products and services. On this foundation we will build stronger relationships with each customer. That will enable us together:
•
to explore unmet needs;
•
to discover jointly best ways of filling them;
•
to create unique and valued solutions;
•
and to deliver them reliably.
Reading these words, carefully crafted and probably at considerable expense, I am struck by their subjectivity and lack of content. I am also struck by their emphasis on what seems to be called today ‘values’ – which are identified as ‘dependability’ and ‘integrity’. Not bad values, actually, but by themselves they don’t tell us anything about the company’s vision for us and for the world. This book is intended to give some content to this vision by looking at where Cargill has come from and where it is going.
The imprecision of Cargill’s words is clever. The company is not making itself liable for anything, so it cannot be held to any promises by either its fans or its critics. It has not established any specific concrete goals – such as doubling in size every five to seven years, as it once rashly declared, or increasing its earnings, or being the biggest this or that.
What may really be new about the new Cargill is an acknowledgement, in both philosophy and practice, that cooperation is superior to competition as a way of doing business, though today the term is ‘partnership’ or ‘joint venture’. Gone is the mean old trader buying low and selling high. Well, not really gone – the company is still willing to take advantage of the misfortune, or mismanagement, of others by buying their facilities cheap, and the company is still a global trader in an almost endless list of commodities using its capital leverage to make deals that most mere mortals can seldom dream of. But then Cargill is not mortal. It is the essence of corporate being, exercising an immortality that the immoral engineers of biotechnology still only fantasize about.
Cargill apparently no longer seeks to take advantage of others, but to give them advice, as ‘partners’. At least this is what it tells farmers and the purchasers of its specialized food components and ingredients.

‘We are undertaking a fundamental change in our approach to doing business,’ said company chairman Warren Staley. ‘Our efforts today centre on creating distinctive value for our customers – from helping farm customers market their products to helping manage food customers’ supply-chain logistics and risks. With this strategy we are more customer-focused, performance-oriented and innovative in all of our business relationships.’ 1
In offering advice, as the seller of ‘inputs’ and the buyer of ‘product’, what Cargill is really doing is creating agricultural policy from the bottom up. In helping the farmers to grow more of what Cargill requires as its ‘inputs’ for trading and processing, and helping farmers sell their ‘product’ in the global system over which Cargill exercises considerable control, Cargill is building the kind of industrial agricultural system it can best profit by, not necessarily the one that serves the farmers or the public best, or the system that ensures that everyone everywhere is adequately nourished.
This second edition of Invisible Giant was undertaken because of a renewed interest in the broad issue of increasing corporate concentration and control in every economic sector, but particularly in agribusiness. Since the first edition went to press at the end of 1994, I have exercised ‘due diligence’, dumping every bit of information pertaining to Cargill I came across or was sent into a file on my hard drive. Then I had to sort it all out and try to make sense of it. I’ve also done some more travelling.
I am sure that Cargill changed its information policy after Invisible Giant first appeared. It did not want Invisible Giant to be the only source of information about the company, so it began to make much greater use of the Internet to supply the public with news of its activities, but at the same time it has been very careful not to put so much information in public view that the novice could actually know what the company was up to. A trick it often pulls is to post information without a date, or to post information and then not update it. Many of its web pages are three years old or more, making the information interesting but not necessarily accurate. Some information is posted and then withdrawn – press releases, for example – leaving a little ‘not available’ sign posted where the news had been. One has to wonder what prompted the withdrawal. The company has also removed any corporate publications from the reception areas of their offices and facilities.
As a result of this, and my inability to travel the globe talking to local Cargill people as much as I would like – which has always been the best source of reliable information – the reader will find that not everything is as up to date as one would prefer. I, too, would like to know how this or that turned out, or what happened next. I certainly would like to know, for example, what Cargill – and Monsanto, or Cargill and Monsanto as Renessen – are doing in China.
Dartmouth College historian Wayne G. Broehl Jr was commissioned by Cargill to write an official history of Cargill from 1895 to 1960. * The resulting book, the only official history of the company that I am aware of, provides the kind of visibility for the corporation that Cargill obviously wanted. With over 1,000 pages, its thickness makes it highly visible on the bookshelf. It also contains many good stories (in voluminous detail) of Cargill encounters with financiers, government agencies and competitors, as well as stories about the internal dynamics and personalities of the company. In fact, there is so much detail that the whole becomes invisible – or un -visible. I don’