Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars\u2019 worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although agricultural inputs are a huge sector of the global economy, the lion\u2019s share of that market is controlled by a relatively small number of very large transnational corporations. The high degree of concentration among these agribusiness titans is striking, considering that just a few hundred years ago agricultural inputs were not even marketed goods. In\u00a0Titans of Industrial Agriculture<\/i>, Jennifer Clapp explains how we got from there to here, outlining the forces that enabled this extreme concentration of power and the entrenchment of industrial agriculture.
\nClapp reveals that the firms that rose to the top of these sectors benefited from distinct market, technology, and policy advantages dating back a century or more that enabled them to expand their businesses through mergers and acquisitions that made them even bigger and more powerful. These dynamics matter because the firms at the top have long shaped industrial farming practices that, in turn, have generated enormous social, ecological, and health impacts on the planet and the future of food systems. Beyond analyzing how these problems have arisen and manifested, the book examines recent efforts to address corporate power and dominance in food systems and assesses the prospects for change.<\/p>\n
Among the first works to examine deep roots of corporate power in agriculture,\u00a0Titans of Industrial Agriculture<\/i>\u00a0helps illuminate just how corporate actors have encouraged the \u201clock-in\u201d of industrial agriculture, despite all its known social and ecological costs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":67225,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[66,370,65],"product_tag":[],"class_list":["post-67222","product","type-product","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","product_cat-books","product_cat-farming-agroecology-land-stewardship","product_cat-garden-gift-shop","first","instock","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"group_of_quantity":0,"min_quantity":0,"max_quantity":"","exclude_order_quantity_value_rules":"no","exclude_category_quantity_rules":"no","combine_variations":"no","exclude_global_add_ons":[],"addons":[],"acf":[],"meta_data":[],"yoast_head":"\n