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Oligopoly-type situation in food industry

A couple of years ago I visited a small cooperative in the south of Brazil which was rearing chickens for Sadia, Brazil’s largest poultry producer. Pointing to the tens of thousands of chicks crowded together in a battery, one of the co-op members, Oney Zamarchi, said they reared the chickens just as the company decreed, even poking the chicks day and night to keep them awake and eating all the time. When the chickens reached 45 days old, they were big enough to be s laughtered — some were so fat they could not stand — and were sent to the slaughterhouse. A colleague visiting a poultry farm in Thailand a few months later described an identical process. But how could this synonymous operation be happening in different parts of the world?

The answer lies in the fact that a handful of poultry breeders now control the chicken industry. They have been instrumental in the creation of a few types of chicken that have the characteristics that global supermarkets require: they grow quickly and have a lot of tender white meat. The breeders supply tens of thousands of poultry companies throughout the world with the genetic material, the DNA, of the animals. One German company, Erich Wesjohann Grupp, supplies the genetic stock for an estimated 68 per cent of all the world’s white-egg layer hens, and a Dutch company (Hendrix Genetics) provides a similar proportion of the stock for brown-egg layer hens. Poultry companies then furnish this material to “multipliers,” who produce tens of thousands of chicks. It is these chicks that go to the farmers to be fattened.

This technological revolution in poultry farming has occurred at a time of other far-reaching changes. New intensive methods of agriculture have made it possible for farmers to produce massive soya and maize harvests.

This, in turn, has allowed the production of millions of tonnes of concentrated chicken feed, which is needed to rear poultry in confined spaces.

Does this matter to us, the consumers? Yes, because some of the consequences are serious and unplanned. Local animal breeds throughout the world, which are of no interest to the big companies, are becoming extinct, to the tune of one breed a month. Many of these animals are resistant to disease and able to survive on little food and water, characteristics that will be needed as the world moves into an era of unprecedented climatic change.

Genetic breeds are less hardy and the genetic uniformity of industrial livestock creates the perfect breeding ground for the evolution of highly pathogenic strains of disease.

(Sue Branford helped edit a study of livestock farming published in the January edition of Seedling, a magazine produced by Grain [grain.org].)

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