Trading Up: How Cargill, the World's Largest Grain Company, Is Changing Canadian Agriculture

George Jackson is a retired professional agrologist.

Kneen is an economist/theologian who is committed to the concept of
sustainable agriculture. Here he offers his views on how a large
U.S.-based transnational corporation (inc), the world’s largest grain
company, is changing Canadian agriculture.

Cargill, a privately held company, operates worldwide, and there is no
doubt that its interests and influence will continue to grow in Canada.
It provides services and supplies to producers of grains and livestock
in western Canada and Ontario. A vertically integrated operation, the
company does everything but grow the grain or raise the livestock.

On the Prairies, it competes primarily with the farmer-owned wheat pool
co-operatives, which market most of their grains through the Canadian
Wheat Board. Some would like to change to a market-driven system, under
which the selling price would determine the value of the crop and
product-related subsidies would be eliminated. This is the approach
favored by the present federal government, which has made some tentative
steps in this direction.

Kneen refers to this policy as decoupling, and maintains that such a
system would see “farmers marketing their products at a price
considerably below cost of production, with their real income coming
from off-farm employment supplemented by agricultural welfare
payments.”

According to Kneen, Cargill has had undue influence on the
government’s development of agricultural policy. He states that “the
steady erosion of Canadian social policy in regard to agriculture may
have been due more to the work of Cargill, Ltd. than to any other single
power in the country.” In Trading Up, he lays out the company’s
philosophy, the scope of its operations, and the tools it employs to
meet its goals for the reader’s inspection and interpretation.

This book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the
gathering storm that lies ahead for Canadian agriculture. Trading Up
should be on the must-read list for anyone involved in agriculture.
Those who want to balance this work with further reading and a review of
alternate proposals will find its short bibliography and a number of
references cited in the text helpful.