Corporate concentration and the exercise of corporate power in the Canadian food system materially limits how farmers, food service workers, and consumers can participate in the food system, or even imagine and create alternatives.
Continuous mergers and acquisitions have created a highly concentrated, corporatized food system in Canada. Two companies, JBS and Cargill, control 95 per cent of Canada’s federally inspected beef processing. Four corporations control 68 per cent of Canada’s grocery sales. Other aspects of the food sector are also consolidated.
Under neoliberal policy, corporations can extract more money from all parts of the food system. This means higher input prices for farmers, lower prices received by farmers for their products, low wages for food sector labour, and high prices for consumers.
For instance, the European Union has approved the merger of agribusiness giants Bunge and Viterra. A report by Gray, Nolan, and Slade showed that farmers stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars each year due to that monopoly power. This is a deepening of wealth extraction from farmers. Corporate concentration is pervasive throughout the food system, creating expensive input prices for farmers, suppressing prices for producers, and inflating prices for consumers.
The effects of corporate concentration are corrosive. It translates into the ejection of the smaller farmers from the agricultural economy. Monopolies gain enough power to set the terms of engagement, whether that is rail freight rates, contracts on seed usage, or the ability to repair a tractor. Without policy intervention, monopoly power will continue to intensify.
That intensification has crept into Canada’s agricultural system. In Canada, the average size of farms increased between 2001 to 2021; the number of farms has decreased by 23 per cent, from 246,923 to under 190,000 individual farms.
This move to larger farms is intimately linked to Canada’s export-oriented approach, which includes policies that encourage a form of agriculture that prioritizes the high-volume, low-price commodities.
Cathy Holtslander, director of Policy and Research at the National Farmers’ Union, argues that “when selling bulk commodities, there is little to compete on except for price. The lower your price, the more competitive you are.” Only farms that can cope with low prices can survive, usually because they have large acreages to make up for low prices in volume produced. These prices are certainly affected by the oligopoly power of the processors and product handlers the farmers must sell to.
On a more fundamental, relational level, the extension of private property rights to nearly all facets of our food system—including land and genetic material in seeds—requires that they are viewed only in terms of “monetary value” defined by the market.
This is inherently anti-democratic and pacifies the agency of people within the food system, which is everyone. We all need to eat.
High-yield farming extracts surplus value from the land and deems other forms of farming inefficient. On the consumer end, we are limited in our choices. Meanwhile, Canada imports a substantial amount of food.
To resist the forces of neoliberalism, we must envision a more expansive, inclusive approach to farming and food. This alternative approach begins with food sovereignty, empowering people—farmers and eaters—to make important decisions about food and agriculture.
Great examples of food sovereignty in the face of larger market forces in Canada include the former Canadian Wheat Board and our supply management system. Both systems were enabled by government legislation.
Food sovereignty empowers people to define their own food and agriculture systems to produce healthy and culturally appropriate food for people through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. It’s a holistic approach to food production that uses—and creates—social, cultural, economic and environmental knowledge that promotes food sovereignty, social justice, economic sustainability, and healthy agricultural ecosystems.
Food sovereignty moves us away from the promotion of higher exports at the expense of domestic production. Farmers are valued and economically encouraged to diversify farming practices. In this type of system, more farmers can make a livelihood on smaller land bases, with better prices and lower costs.
An inclusive farming and food economy is premised on viewing our food supply chain as a whole, including processors, retailers, and consumers. It creates supply chains that provide good, affordable food choices. It would welcome more people into the farming economy, making land more available and more affordable for young farmers, and Black, Indigenous, and racialized farmers.
Through the CCPA’s Alternative Federal Budget, the National Farmers’ Union has advocated for a foodsheds program, which could be part of an inclusive food system. A foodshed is an area that produces food that flows towards a centre—urban areas, in this case—analogous to how watersheds feed rivers and lakes.
These lands would be administered through a Foodshed Lands Trust. It would aim to provide land access to people with high barriers to land acquisition, including new, young, and BIPOC Canadian farmers. It would acquire lands in urban areas to provide long-term, affordable leases to farmers and farming communities.
Farmers agreeing to these leases would be encouraged to use low-emission farming practices, with the goal of protecting water quality and sustaining biodiversity. The trust would encourage the development of new local food cultures based on what grows well in the area while supporting communities to grow the foods they need to maintain their food traditions.
For this vision of an inclusive farm system to become reality, our government must confront corporate power through regulation. There are many ways to approach this. The first is to strengthen the Competition Act to outlaw mergers of companies that would result in a market share greater than 20 per cent.
Revisions to the Competition Act should also strengthen the enforcement capacity of the Competition Bureau, including the resources it has to publish data and report on the harmful effects of corporate concentration.
An empowered Competition Bureau and Tribunal would be better able to ensure public interest goals of economic fairness and inclusion in the Canadian economy.
The second mechanism to achieve an inclusive farm system would be to institute a windfall profits tax on large corporations in the food and agriculture sectors, which would help Canadians recapture the value that was extracted through exercise of market power by the big players in the food system.
The third mechanism would be to cap the size of land holdings owned by corporations and large farms in each province, similar to Prince Edward Island’s Lands Protection Act, which prevents farmland from being monopolized.
By creating an inclusive farming system, we can imagine a flourishing of the world we all want: one that supports farmers’ livelihood, diversified farms, and local markets; healthy waterways, soils, and farmers; biodiversity in hedgerows and shelterbelts; real, not fake climate solutions.
An inclusive farming economy model would benefit all Canadians by supporting the lives and livelihoods of farmers, farm workers, food sector workers, and consumers alike.
