The Cargill Mob

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In this photograph we see fourteen members of the Cargill clan, the family-owned company ultimately benefiting from the industrial chicken farming that is destroying the River Wye. They were sued twenty years ago for similar damage to the Illinois River and to lakes Eucha and Spavinaw in the US. Meanwhile we still grant planning approval for new chicken units.  Cargill is one of several huge corporations that have been able to mould agriculture to their needs. Damaging the environment is what they do. Cargill may be more extreme and more secretive but their aggressive business model and their lack of any moral obligations are defining characteristics of these big corporations. They are able to use their power on a global scale and to influence politicians in their favour, and their power is daunting for people who, like the citizens of the Wye Velley, want change. However, although developing less harmful ways of doing business may be difficult, there are alternative business models. There are alternatives that have the power both to challenge these corporations and to allow us to gain experience of a better way of life both for humans and for the planet. More of that later.

Cargill started as a grain trader in the mid-West in the 1860s, growing to be the largest family-owned business in America, with a history of aggressive and controversial dealings. 1n 2019 twenty-three members of the Cargill-MacMillan family owned 88% of the company.  Their estimated wealth was $38 billion. Now only six of them sit on the board. They are no longer involved in the daily running of the company and seem to live quiet lives on their ranches in states such as Montana and Idaho. Fourteen of them are billionaires, making them the family with the largest number of such wealthy members in history. The family have pulled back from the running of the company but the six of them that sit on the board must nevertheless share responsibility for the activities of Cargill, even if they are not making the daily decisions about how to run the business. Cargill is one of the very largest global agribusiness corporations, ranking among the top three in fields such as flour milling, soybean crushing and grain trading. They will make a killing as a result of the war damage to the Ukraine harvest. They are also the largest US beef slaughter firm, the second largest commercial feed company, the third largest beef feedlot operator, the third largest turkey processor, and the eighth largest pork processor. They produce all McDonalds’ chicken nuggets, too.

Cargill likes to portray itself as benevolently feeding the world. Their business actually feeds astonishing amounts of money to some of the most spectacularly wealthy people in the world, and they do not appear concerned about the damage they do to people and to the environment in the process. The environmental campaigning organisation Mighty Earth in the US has described Cargill as ‘the worst company in the world.’

While the owners of Cargill do stuff on their ranches in Idaho and Montana, the actual running of the company is now done by a lower tier of professional managers. You might think that they could simply to run a stable company with a dominant position in much of the global food industry, but of course huge corporations don’t work like that. It is an article of faith with such corporations that they have to constantly expand and compete. This may have part of its origin in the machismo of the men who have developed this way of doing business, but it is also linked to the doctrine of economic growth that came to dominate economic thinking during the cold war, when we aimed to out-grow the Soviet Union.

 In all such corporations the managers get rewarded for providing profits and dividends to owners and shareholders. This is their most important role, and if they generate rewards for the owners they are in their turn rewarded. There is no place in this scheme for the welfare of their workers, who exist to generate profit for the company, although of course without them the company could not exist. If this leads managers to generate growth by destroying ever larger areas of the precious Cerrado region of Brazil , for example, in order to produce soy beans to feed chickens in the Wye Valley,  to make moral or ethical judgements is not in their job descriptions. They are all part of a chain and their careers depend on passing profits all the way up that chain until they reach the Cargill family, the people who need money less than pretty much anyone else on earth. There is in fact no-one in this whole system whose job it is to make decisions on moral, ethical or environmental grounds, but it is worse than that. When they have been pressured – by Mighty Earth, a global advocacy agency working to defend the living planet, for example - they have consistently broken any commitments they have been persuaded to make, and because of their dominance of the markets this makes it very difficult for other companies competing in the same field to take action to reduce their environmental impact.

The sober-suited men in the picture above are all doubtless Rotarians and Masons and churchgoers but they head an organisation that appears not only amoral but completely out of control. Global companies can act in ways that would be clearly criminal if we had adequate international laws to protect the environment and the remaining areas of wilderness and the lands of indigenous peoples. As a family-owned business Cargill is less accountable, too, than publicly-quoted companies. There are as far as I can see no adequate mechanisms to control what has gone way beyond greed and has become a lunatic transfer of power and resources to a tiny number of people who have no conceivable need of any more wealth or power.  Many of these resources are plundered from the environments of precious ecosystems in Brazil, Borneo, Sumatra, the UK and the other 66 countries where Cargill operate, and the wealth generated is self-evidently produced by the labour of people paid as little as possible, especially in the Global South. Such corporations have an essentially imperialist attitude to those parts of the world that get called the Third World or the Global South – their labour and resources are used as far as possible to enrich corporations in the Global North, such as Cargill.

Apologists for this kind of business might nevertheless suggest that they provide people with jobs. And indeed they do. They employ 166,000 people worldwide.

If you look Cargill up on Wikipedia, you will see a succession of paragraphs detailing the activities of the company described by US Congressman Henty A Waxman as "the worst company in the world" that drives "the most important problems facing our world" (deforestation, pollution, climate change, exploitation) "at a scale that dwarfs their closest competitors."  These paragraphs detail, for example:

·       Child trafficking and enslavement on cocoa plantations in Côte d'Ivoire

·       Use of child labour in Uzbekistan

·       Union busting

·       Worker safety infringements  during Covid

·       Land grabbing in Columbia, where they have managed by devious means to own thirty times the amount of land permitted to a single owner

·       Food contamination

·       Deforestation to grow soy in the Amazon, palm oil in Sumatra and Borneo, and cocoa in the Côte d'Ivoire (where 7 of 23 protected areas are now cocoa monocultures.)

·       Tax evasion.

This list of activities suggests that Cargill is not likely to be a model employer especially in parts of the world where regulation is lax, and that its activities are damaging to communities and ecosystems and hence to incalculable numbers of people worldwide. Cargill’s workers would doubtless be better off being employed by pretty much anyone other than Cargill.

In  the Wye Valley Cargill is damaging an environment already damaged by farming methods. Intensive agriculture is also an important source of income to many other large corporations , such as Monsanto, original manufacturers of glyphosate, which is used in huge quantities worldwide to kill plants. (I avoid the word ‘weeds’ where possible as ‘weeds’ are important parts of ecosystems). In July 2019, U.S. District Judge  Vince Chabhia said the evidence before him "easily supported a conclusion that Monsanto was more concerned with tamping down safety inquiries and manipulating public opinion than it was with ensuring its product is safe." The literature is full of evidence of such companies employing academics to write research reports exonerating dangerous products, from asbestos and tobacco to pesticides, and of fossil fuel companies attempting to cast doubt on the science of climate change.

This leads me, at least, towards the conclusion that it is the very nature of large capitalist corporations, and the doctrine of economic growth that has become their shibboleth, that results in their being a threat to the environment so serious that they have become a threat to life on earth. We have been sleepwalking while they were wrecking our planet, and it is not as if the system under which they operate is actually the only option. They are part of an economic system that is actually very unstable, going though boom and bust cycles on average every four to seven years, and creating a horrifying inequality,  where the 86 richest people on the planet are worth more than the bottom half of the world population. In the US the ratio of top pay of business executives to the lowest paid is 350 to 1. The UK is even worse - CEOs in the UK’s top 100 companies now pocket an average of £5.3m each year, or 386 times that of a worker earning the National Living Wage. It is extraordinary that this outrageous level of inequality is tolerated. It is also extraordinary that in countries that call themselves democracies our working lives are spent working in entirely undemocratic organisations. Do we tolerate this situation because we do not believe, as Churchill said of democracy, that anyone has invented a better system yet?

Actually there is an entirely viable alternative.

Mention of worker cooperatives may start you thinking about some co-operative health-food shop you might have come across in somewhere like Hebden Bridge. Such enterprises are entirely admirable and form part of a web of idealistic projects such as community gardens, or herbs grown in planters outside the station where commuters can pick them on their way home from work. They are born of a vision of a way of life that is more equal and more democratic than our current business models, and a vision of enterprise that meets human needs without the destructive imperative of economic growth. That a percentage of your divvy in the Co-op goes to local good causes, rather than to some rich investor, is revolutionary in spirit if not in scale, as is the work of volunteers in food banks or people tending those planters outside the station. There are people working on modern versions of the commons – like Wikipedia, for example. Communities in Scotland are being supported by their government to acquire land previously owned by large estates, and running it for the benefit of the community.

These projects all share a vision of an alternative society not driven by greed, exploitation and self-interest. That is fine and dandy, you may say, but it isn’t going to change the world. You are likely, having been brought up in the current system, to doubt whether such idealistic projects can ever threaten the dominance of the big ruthless corporations. This may be because because you haven’t heard of the many really successful worker cooperatives such as the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in Spain, or the many social enterprises throughout Europe, where democratic groups of partners often work in cutting-edge technology while using any surplus to support local needs, projects and charities, and taking turns to cook lunch for everyone.

The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation started in the Basque country in the 1950s, in a region badly affected by the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Despairing of ever being lifted out of poverty and unemployment by some capitalist enterprise coming to their rescue looking for cheap labour, a priest and six young people started a worker cooperative, initially making paraffin heaters. The principles of the cooperative included a limit on the top manager’s pay at 8 times that of the lowest paid, and that the managers were hired and if necessary fired by the workers. Equality and democracy were fundamental to the organisation.

The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, which is now a federation of linked enterprises operating to the same ethos and principles, bas become the seventh largest corporation in Spain. It provides employment to around 100,000 people, and is actually the biggest business success story in Spain in the last half century. Such enterprises offer a real prospect of tackling inequality, and of creating a business environment that has ethical or moral values and is not going to trash the environment for the benefit of a few insanely rich individuals, or to lie about the dangers of its products to the health of the environment, consumers or workers.

Mondragon employs about two-thirds as many people as Cargill in democratically run workplaces. It offers a model of a way of doing business that does not depend on ruthless exploitation of the earth’s resources in the name of a doctrine – economic growth – originally devised as a weapon in the cold war; a weapon which turns out to threaten the planet as seriously as the more obvious cold-war weapons.

Mondragon is not the only cooperative of its kind.  In Catalonia the Catalan Integral Cooperative, founded in 2010, now has 2,500 members, runs exchange networks, its own currency, food pantries, assemblies, a machine working shop and so on. Like Mondragon, it offers its members the opportunity to experience working in a democratic workplace where production is designed to be along ecological principles and to benefit society at large rather than a very few rich investors.

Cooperatives worldwide are an important phenomenon. There are around 3 million cooperatives in the world, in which 12 percent of humanity is engaged and which provide jobs for 10 percent of the employed population worldwide. They demonstrate to us all, and in particular to those lucky enough to work in cooperatives, that the business model of the huge corporations is neither the only possibility nor the best.

Cooperatives give us a window into a world where workers are not part of the competitive struggle of growth capitalism, but one where shared and common resources and co-operation offer a vision of a fuller life. This is important. For those of us struggling to pay exorbitant ‘market driven’ rents and fuel bills so that our society can support people like the Cargill family, working for a cooperative offers a prospect of a radically different future and a vision of fuller participation in society as opposed to simply being wage labour with minimal hope of a fulfilling life for working people or for their children, who they may struggle to feed. Part of the hopelessness of wage labour in the UK – one of the wealthiest countries in the world -is that spiralling inequality ensures that many people cannot even work with the hope that their children will as well-off as their parents. Under the present system many of our children will continue to struggle to pay for housing and to feed and clothe themselves, unless Mr Kwarteng is right and making the rich richer will magically trickle down. Challenging the current economic system with its astonishing and growing inequalities and its total lack of any moral compass must surely be central to saving the planet. These companies can trash the world’s ecosystems far faster than we can rewild them. Developing the cooperative sector can be a powerful tool to improve life on earth for us all, and in ‘all’ I include the creatures I so sadly miss now in my daily life in the Wye Valley.