Před sto lety... a dnes

Lenin, 1916: “Half a century ago, when Marx was writing Capital, free competition appeared to the overwhelming majority of economists to be a “natural law'. Official science tried, by a conspiracy of silence, to kill the works of Marx, who by a theoretical and historical analysis of capitalism had proved that free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopoly. Today, monopoly has become a fact. The economists are writing mountains of books in which they describe the diverse manifestations of monopoly, and continue to declare in chorus "Marxism is refuted." But the facts are stubborn things, as the English proverb says, and they have to be reckoned with, whether we like it or not. The facts show that differences between capitalists countries, e.g. in the matter of protection or free trade, only give rise to insignificant variations in the form of monopolies or in the moment of their appearance, and the rise of monopolies, as the result of concentration of production, is a general and fundamental law of the present stage of capitalism."

2008: "The crippling of food systems in the global South opened up entire continents to the expansion of industrial agri-foods from the North. This expansion devastated local agro-biodiversity and emptied the countryside of valuable natural and human resources. But as long as cheap, subsidized grain from the industrial north kept flowing, the industrial agri-foods complex grew, consolidating control of the world’s food systems in the hands of fewer and fewer grain, seed, chemical and petroleum companies. Today three companies, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Cargill and Bunge control 90% of the world’s grain trade. Chemical giant Monsanto controls one-fifth of seed production while Bayer Crop Science, Syngenta, and BASF control half of the total agro-chemical market.

Given the rise of monopoly power in the food system, it should come as no surprise that when the world food crisis exploded, ADM’s profits increased by 38%, Cargill’s profits by 128%, and Mosaic Fertilizer (a Cargill subsidiary) by a whopping 1615%! Contrary to conventional wisdom, big livestock production and packaging industries are also benefiting. The world’s largest producer and exporter of beef, JBS S.A has seen a 475.4% revenue increase since 2007. This is also a function of monopoly expansion. In March 2008 JBS acquired U.S companies National Beef, Smithfield Beef and Australian Tasman."