Worried about grocery prices? The U.S. wastes 40% of the food it produces. In Canada in 2019, it was nearly 60%.

The statistics are shocking, and so is the waste - sometimes from farm straight to landfill. And it's not just grocers.

Food is very political - as you would expect, with something you can’t live without. In a world where we talk about supply and demand, hunger is a demand we can’t ignore.

In current political discussions, the issue of food, and food prices touched on issues of inflation, poverty, seniors, jobs, investment, carbon taxes, climate change, population growth, agricultural and trade policy. The issues are real and serious, because of the real consequences of famine and hunger are death and harms than can last a lifetime.

Because it is a sensitive topic, today’s politicians can also abuse it by crying wolf, and threatening that a particular tax will raise food prices.

All of those arguments about prices suddenly seem pretty hard to square with the absolutely unbelievable amount of food waste in the U.S. and Canada.

In June 2015, the PBS Newshour ran an item about the level of food waste in the U.S, which was an astonishing 40%. In one example, perfectly good food - fresh organic broccoli that had not yet left the farm it was grown on - was going straight to landfill by the truckload because prices had changed.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/almost-half-americas-food-go-waste

Right now, food that isn't sold to your best buyer is often dumped in the landfill. The prices for fresh fruits and vegetables can go up and down quite a bit, and farmers may plant thinking they will get one price, but, by the time harvest comes around, there's another price, and it's not even worth it for them to get to the market.

ALLISON AUBREY:

A report by the Natural Resources Defense Council says that as much as 40 percent of all the food produced in the United States never gets eaten.

PETER LEHNER:

The idea that almost half of our food is wasted is crazy.

ALLISON AUBREY:

That waste occurs at every point along the food chain. Some is lost in transport and during food processing. Supermarkets and we the consumers end up tossing out a lot too.

But what about what's lost on the farm? An NRDC report found that anywhere from 1 percent to 30 percent of farmers' crops don't make it to market.”

When you consider the need - and high food prices, the fact that 40% of food in the U.S. is wasted is bad enough - but also all the resources that go into growing that food is being wasted - everything from fuel and fresh water, to land and effort.

What’s more, in Canada the number is even higher: 58% of food is lost and wasted.

And again, sometimes when people talk about food being wasted, it can wrongly conjure up slightly disgusting images in the mind of food that’s half-eaten or going bad.

It’s good food, untouched, that is going to waste. A lot of it is because of appearances.

Some of it is because “best before dates” are treated as “expired” so people and stores end up throwing out perfectly good food.

Stores will take food that looks perfect but throw out good food with blemishes.

Customers won’t take the last items off a display - so stores keep shelves more full than they need to be, and throw out good food as well.

The food we throw out could feed every person in Canada for 5 months, and means we are wasting all of the time, effort, fuel and water used to grow it. All in a country where there are people who can’t afford healthy food, like fresh fruits and vegetables.

Second Harvest goes into detailed analysis of the problems, as well as the solutions - which include changes to regulation and legislation. They argue that 1/3 of the food could be recovered. When it goes into landfill, it rots, and the methane it emits is 28 times worse than carbon dioxide.

“The research estimates that the total avoidable and unavoidable FLW occurring annually along the Canadian food value chain equates to 35.5 million metric tonnes,3 of which 11.2 million metric tonnes (32%) is avoidable FLW (the equivalent of the weight of almost 95 CN Towers).

Based on the consumer (retail and HRI4) value of food, the value of avoidable FLW equates to $49.5 billion, representing 51.8 percent of the money Canadians spent on food purchased from retail stores in Canada in 2016. ($49.5 billion equates to 3% of Canada’s 2016 GDP and would feed every person living in Canada for almost 5 months.)”

The numbers are shocking - and we should take stock of the fact that, for all of our worries about not enough food, we are producing much more than we realized.

It raises a lot of questions about why we are paying such high food prices, and our food policy in general.

There is an element of good news here - which is that food is much more plentiful in North America than we’ve been led to believe. In fact, it is more plentiful globally than we’ve been led to believe.

The thing is, the threat of food prices and food scarcity is also a potent political motivator. Being able to blame your opponent for higher grocery bills or saying their policy will lead to higher food prices, is a politically persuasive because people are sensitive to the risk.

The pain and threat of hunger is real. Famine can be either natural disaster, or human-made: weather, crop diseases or insects can leave people starving, but so can policies and deliberate human decisions.

In the last century alone there have been multiple famines in which millions of people died. The Holomodor in Ukraine, where the Soviet Union starved millions to death; the Chinese Famine of 1959-1961, where the death tolls estimate ranges from 15-million to 55-million are two of the worst in history, and they were politically engineered.

It was essentially the same agricultural policy that was followed in the Irish famine, which is the political equivalent of “trickle down economics” - all of the surplus goes to the owners. So available food was actually taken from farmers and communities where people did not gave to eat. It is not just a question of hunger - the stories of the horror that people are driven to by famine are harrowing to hear or read, much less experience.

If you want to understand how important the possibility of famine was 2,000 years ago, in the Roman Empire, “meddling with wheat production or transportation was the only crime that carried an automatic and immediate death penalty.”

“The Ancient Roman Empire ran on wheat. Its major grain growing area was in North Africa, centered on present day Tunisia. Roman wheat farms were typically about sixteen hundred acres and supported about 10 coloni families and the estate owner.  The families did the work and made extra money growing dates, olives, and exotic birds for Roman tables.

Roman wheat was moved to port in half ton capacity carts pulled by oxen owned by the Roman military.  Then commercial ships would move it across the Mediterranean into state owned and regulated warehouses for distribution.  In ancient Rome the wheat crop was so important that meddling with wheat production or transportation was the only crime that carried an automatic and immediate death penalty.  On April 25, feasts, celebrations, and sacrifices were held in honour of the Roman god of wheat rust known as Robigus in the hopes of avoiding crop failure, for when the Roman wheat harvest failed, rebellions in the colonies and riots in the cities soon followed.”

This is part of what people mean when they talk about “food security.”

Food shortages are not just a market crisis, they can be a matter of life and death, not just from starvation, but from riots and civil unrest. They have been critical drivers in politics and history and have resulted in governments being overthrown. The Arab Spring was driven in part by increases in the global price of wheat: in developed countries, the cost of the wheat makes up only a small portion of the price of a loaf bread, but in Tunisia and Egypt, the price of food soared.

To make up for this very issue, governments often subsidize crop production — (which is also be politically convenient if it can help win elections or support in rural areas). Canada has often found itself squeezed by a decades-long subsidy war between the EU and the U.S. But the rationale for food subsidy in Europe is partly that, having experienced famine and shortages after WWII, they don’t want to experience it again. In the U.S., many subsidies were introduced with the twin goal of supporting the “family farm” and keeping food affordable.

The other, however, is that agriculture is colossally big business. Just as there used to be Big Tobacco, there is Big Wheat, Big Sugar and various other massive global players.

The entire global grain market is controlled by four companies, two of which are completely privately owned. They are owned by families and their shares are not traded on public exchanges. That means they do not have to disclose their business operations.

Known as the ABCD group for the alphabetic convenience of their initials, ADM, Bunge, Cargill and (Louis) Dreyfus, account for between 75% and 90% of the global grain trade, according to estimates. Figures cannot be given with confidence, however, because two of the companies are privately owned and do not give out market shares.

Cargill, which began in Minnesota is the largest private company in the world.

“Today, it is still majority-owned by descendents of the family. Its main commodity trading operation is run out of the tax haven of Switzerland. Its sales were $108bn in 2010, and $115bn in 2009, and its net earnings were nearly $6bn for those two years.”

Louis Dreyfus, established in 1851, is also private and still family owned, headquartered in Paris but again trading largely out of Switzerland. It gives no figures and never comments to the media, but its estimated revenues in 2009 were £34bn.

If “Louis Dreyfus” sounds vaguely familiar, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the actress who played Elaine on Seinfeld and a Vice-President on Veep, is part of the family.

Bunge, which expanded through the late 19th century as a grain trader in South America, is now incorporated in the tax haven of Bermuda but its headquarters are in the US. Its net revenues in 2010 were $47bn, and net earnings were $2.3bn.

… ADM, or Archer Daniels Midland, is incorporated in the US tax-haven state of Delaware and headquartered in Illinois. Its revenues in 2010 were $62bn and its earnings were $1.9bn.

Part of the reason Canada had a Canadian Wheat Board, which was a publicly owned “single desk” buyer for all Canadian grain farmers in Western Canada, was that for decades it provided individual farmers with collective bargaining power, but it was dismantled and sold to Bunge.

It’s notable that every one of these companies operates out of a tax haven - two in Switzerland, one in Bermuda and one in Delaware.

To add to the concentration, Cargill, ADM, and Bunge have strategic alliances and joint ventures with the seed and agrochemical companies that dominate the agricultural inputs part of the global food system. In seeds four firms, Monsanto (incorporated in Delaware, HQ in Missouri), Dupont (incorporated and HQ in Delaware), Syngenta (incorporated and HQ in Switzerland) and Limagrain, a French-based international co-operative, account for over 50% of global seed sales.

In agrochemicals six firms, DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow (incorporated in Delaware, HQ in Michigan), and the two German chemical giants Bayer and BASF, control 75% of the market.

In the 1990s, ADM was charged with price-fixing for an additive called lysine, which is an additive to feed grains, raising the price of food around the world. It was called one of the “best documented corporate crimes in American history.”

In addition to the concentration of market power in the hands of a few firms, there has also been a fundamental change in the way farmers are expected to pay for seed as well as the other chemicals they need to grow crops.

That’s because companies started patenting seeds - not just machinery and chemicals, but seeds as well. Seeds became intellectual property, and certain companies have the exclusive right to those seeds.

What happened with “designer” seeds is similar to what happened with other kinds of intellectual property, like proprietary software programs and music.

Instead of buying something once, and and letting you make your own copies, you are buying a license to the IP. There was a famous case with Monsanto in Saskatchewan, where Monsanto sued farmer Percy Schmeiser because the company claimed he was using the seeds for genetically modified canola but had not paid for the right to grow them. It went all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court, where it was determined that Schmeiser had violated Monsanto’s patent.

Monsanto had just begun to sell its "Roundup Ready Canola"— genetically modified canola seeds containing a patented cell and gene engineered to make it resistant to Monsanto's weed-killer Roundup.

The multinational company required farmers to buy annual licences for the seed technology, at $15/acre, and to sign contracts that forbid them from saving seeds for replanting. Monsanto aggressively pursued anyone accused of buying seeds on the black market — a practice known as "brown bagging." 

This is the issue with GMO crops - it is not the Frankenfoods, it is the financial impacts, which are higher - the cost of inputs.

In the fight between GMO and organic farming, the argument is not just about the use chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified crops, it’s about their costs, and the fact that you are locked into paying them.

The increased yield comes with increased financial cost. The argument made for “industrial farming” is that it the extra yield is essential to “feed the world” and a planet with twice the population it had 50 years ago. It’s argued that chemical fertilizers and pesticides will result in much smaller total output, but that doesn’t consider current levels of waste.

The point that some organic farmers make is that when it comes to their financial costs, their input costs when they don’t use chemicals are much lower, and that the yield is comparable. The fact that the financing costs are higher makes a big difference, because debt becomes an issue - including accessing it and paying it.

There are serious concerns about the waste involved with current practices, because the increased output has been from increased use of chemicals, which is exhausting soils and polluting water. Over 95% of the total mass of all mammals on earth is now livestock - chickens, pigs, cattle, turkeys. These practices are harming lakes and rivers while crowding out other species to the point of extinction.

There are alternative agricultural practises, like regenerative agriculture.

Concentrated Canadian Market Share

In Canada, there has been a lot of discussion about grocery prices, since our national market is dominated by a few chains, and there has been ever greater consolidation over the years.

Canada’s competition bureau has said there isn’t enough competition in Canada, and Canadians are paying higher prices as a consequence:

Canada’s retail market is mature and largely consolidated, with five retailers accounting for 76 percent of the total retail grocery market. The remainder of the market is represented by smaller regional retail chains that include 6,800 independents and 27,000 small and independent convenience stores.

• Loblaw 28%

• Sobeys 20%

• Metro 11%

• Costco 9%

• Walmart 8%

• The rest - 24%

It’s worth talking a little about a couple of significant issues that have arisen with Loblaws over the last two decades.

In 2017, Loblaw avoided a criminal charge for co-operating with an investigation into 14 years of price fixing the price of bread across Canada.

Grocery giant Loblaw Cos. Ltd. has admitted to participating in a scheme to increase packaged bread prices for more than 14 years, saying it will co-operate with a Competition Bureau investigation into the industry.

The cost of the price fixing was not small - they agreed to reimburse customers with $150-million worth of gift cards.

It’s also worth remembering another story from Loblaw, which is what happened 20 years ago when Walmart came to Canada.

There was a media furore and various articles about Canadian grocers quaking in their boots, because Walmart was known in the States (including by cross-border shopping Canadians) for its low prices, and its lack of unionized workers. The fear was useful to Loblaws, who used it to leverage concessions out of workers from their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers of Canada.

Not only did Loblaw give over $1-million to the UFCW, they bailed out their pension plan, then demanded concessions that resulted in similar working conditions to Walmart - along with a deal to get UFCW to agree to launch a drive to unionize WalMart as well, to try to scare it off more. Loblaw workers were paying union dues on minimum wage.

Loblaw gave the CCWIPP a large cash infusion. Then the hugely profitable grocer put the arm on the UFCW for a multi-million-dollar deal of its own. According to a December, 2003, Ontario Labour Relations Board decision, Loblaw plans to open at least 40 mammoth Real Canadian Superstores in Ontario by 2005. Loblaw claimed that "would require changes to the collective agreements to allow the new superstores to be more competitive with its non-union competitors like Wal-Mart."

That's when Loblaw gave the UFCW an ultimatum: If the UFCW agreed to give Loblaw massive contract concessions, Loblaw would continue their mutually profitable partnership. If the UFCW refused, Loblaw would terminate the partnership by closing its unionized stores and opening non-union stores in the future. However, it didn't stop there. Loblaw got assurances that the UFCW was prepared to wage an expensive drive to woo Wal-Mart employees. Sometime after Loblaw discussed forking over the $1.35-million for communications, the UFCW began to boast that “A major effort is underway. The union has made a long-term commitment to persuade Wal-Mart workers to join UFCW Canada.”

All of which provides an important political perspective.

Given all the political reasons to be worried about food, and food prices, and all the resources that go into creating that food - land, water, people, wildlife, energy - the fact that we are wasting huge amounts of food, while workers are underpaid, , while paying prices we can’t afford?

There’s no silver bullet, but it’s time for a serious rethink. Breaking up big companies, encouraging new Canadian competition, encouraging local and taking real steps to reduce food waste.

With nearly 60% being lost, we can do much, much better, for everyone.

DFL