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Time to look for alternatives

The Bayer-Monsanto deal represents the push for efficiency in farming which gave rise to the modern agricultural industry dominated by food giants like Cargill and Archer-Daniels-Midland, and crop science companies like Monsanto and Bayer.

After growing up in rural Australia and seeing the science first hand, I am not opposed to either large farming nor GMO, however, the concentration of power within an increasingly smaller number of corporations does seriously concern me. Consolidation and monopolization in an area that is key to human survival and impacts the livelihood of, literally, billions of people is heading is down a path with very dire consequences for us all.  This has been a serious issue in the U.S. for decades, Chicken Farming being a great example, and in other nations it is a growing problem such as we see in the Australian Dairy industry.

The capital markets and finance industry we have today ensure that corporations act in a certain way, companies such as Monsanto and Bayer are neither good nor bad, they are merely the result of the environment which we created.  It is an environment where any corporation that fails to grow and seek profit by any means available will be punished and consumed by others.  The financial sharks are always circling looking for an easy meal.


The world has created a viscous financial jungle and corporations evolved to be successful in that environment.  The best way for a company to survive is to become the biggest, most fearsome and predatory monster in the jungle. Despite any good intentions of the management, they are a slave to the ecosystem.

Protesting against the likes of Bayer or Monsanto is not effective, they are only being what we encouraged them to become.  If they fail to “be the monster” then they will only be consumed by a bigger monster that is willing to be more viscous, opportunistic and unethical than they are.  The world made monsters and it is naive of us to expect them to behave in any other way.

Appealing to consumer human nature is the Alternative approach, but the results are temporal at best.  When consumers are appealed to strongly some will change behavior for a short time, many people do genuinely want to do the right thing and act responsibly. This strategy has had little long term impact on companies or bad practices.  It is arguably about as effective as the war on drugs, companies are perfectly capable of adapting strategies and creating defenses.  And if the target company wont adapt there is another wait to pop up and take advantage of it.

The best example of corporate adaptation to consumer ‘protests’ is the way organic farming and products have been hijacked as a branding strategy.  I personally will not buy organic products because the term ‘organic’ is now corrupted by marketing to the point of being meaningless.  ‘Organic’, sadly, has the same superficial meaning to me as ‘Louis Vuitton’ or ‘Prada’, it is invariably just a way for a company to encourage us to pay more for a product than it is really worth.  The extreme to which the term organic is now meaningless was made abundantly clear in NY last year when a beauty product sales assistant tried to sell me salt (NaCl) as a present for my wife and insisted it was ‘organic’, and hence worth about $500 a kg.

Then is there a solution?
I honestly do not see any quick fix, as the root cause of the problem is a fundamental part of the capital and financial markets. The financial markets have evolved to be sophisticated to a point that even most people within them do not understand their dynamics or interconnection. They have evolved to serve themselves, the wealthy and elite, the same people that control the world and have a huge incentive not to allow it to change.

The concept of decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) utilizing blockchain has potential to be an alternative to the financial market model.

I feel any solution must evolve from the other end of the spectrum, as DAO does. Creating transparency and empowering the small farmers is the most potentially fruitful approach I can see. Creating more properly-structured, ethically-operated farmer-owned cooperatives may be the best or perhaps even the only means to counter the impact of growing corporate influence in Agriculture.

The post Time to look for alternatives appeared first on AgriLedger.



This post first appeared on AgriLedger Blockchain For The Greater Good, please read the originial post: here

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Time to look for alternatives

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