"Companies are playing with the food system, and we can't afford to have that played with. These companies tend to focus only on five crops: corn, rice, wheat, soya beans and potatoes. Their advice is going to be: Well, we don't know about your using teff in Ethiopia—we never heard about teff—but we do know about how to use corn in Ethiopia, so we'll advise you on the ways you can use corn."
"Farmers are at risk of being locked into a globalised system where, instead of growing locally adapted crops they have cultivated for generations, they are forced to buy seeds manufactured by industrial companies that come bundled with machinery and chemical inputs from other parts of the world."
"The globalised food system has already shown it is vulnerable to shocks, such as the climate crisis or the war in Ukraine. The more global the system is, the harder it is to guarantee that you're actually going to have it work."
Major technology companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and Alibaba collaborate with industrial agriculture firms to influence crop selection and farming practices globally. This creates a top-down system where large corporations dictate what farmers grow, prioritizing the most productive and profitable crops—primarily corn, rice, wheat, soya beans, and potatoes. Farmers face pressure to abandon locally adapted crops cultivated for generations, instead purchasing seeds bundled with machinery and chemical inputs from global manufacturers. This globalized approach concentrates expertise around major commodities while ignoring regional alternatives. The resulting system demonstrates vulnerability to disruptions like climate crises and geopolitical conflicts, threatening food security and agricultural diversity.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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