Modern biotechnology is a new tool various
actors in the food system are keen to use for their benefit. These various
actors-farm input suppliers, farmers, traders, workers, food processors and
manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, caterers and consumers-have
different interests, although no group is homogeneous. Yet power and control,
risks and benefits lie at the heart of the food system and use of this new tool
should be seen in relation to these issues. Who has what power to control their
part of the food system; to maximise the benefit they get from it; and minimise
their risks or ensure they fall on others?
Reducing risks
Farmers are at the riskiest end of the system, subject
to the vagaries of the weather, economic policy and regulation and with little
control over the direction research takes. They use the power fossil fuels,
machinery, seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and other inputs gives them to control
their operations more closely with fewer people. Food manufacturers, however,
can use the power technology provides to control the processes they use to
manufacture foodstuffs in a managed environment. By having wide-ranging sources
of supply, they can smooth out climatic variations that affect farmers while
still keeping produce flowing though their factories. There are similarities
with distributors, especially the major retailers.
Shifting balance of power
For years, food manufacturers led in setting terms for
both buying from farmers and selling through tens of thousands of retailers.
They have been challenged by the growth of a few multiple retailers who now
control the bulk of food moving into consumption in the UK and increasingly
influence the products produced and methods used by their suppliers. Most major
multiples, for example, have developed variations on integrated crop management
which their growers must adopt.
This shift in power from manufacturer
to retailer is seen in the distribution of 'the profit pie'. In the UK in
1981-82, cash and carry wholesales accounted for 2% of this, multiple retailers,
18%, and the rest went to manufacturers. By 1995, the multiple retailers had
doubled their share to 36%, cash and carries remained on 2% and manufacturers
had 62%. The pie itself, however, had gown from £1.25 billion (US$ 2 billion)
in 1981 to £5.6 billion (US$ 9 billion) in 1995.
From public to private research
Over the past two decades there has been a retreat
from publicly financed research-needed because individual farmers could not
afford costly research programmes-and a switch to private research. In
1990-91, about 9% or £246 million (US$ 390 million) of the total civil R&D
budget of £2.79 billion (US$ 4.46 billion) was spent on agricultural and
fisheries research in the UK through the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and
Food (MAFF) and the Agricultural and Food Research Council (AFRC)*. During the
1980s, however, priorities were reoriented. Budget and staff cuts were made
after a long period from 1947 to 1982-83 when the real resources devoted to
agricultural research by the public sector in the UK increased about eight-fold.
The government decided to fund less applied or 'near
market' research and increasingly to sell advice to individual farmers who
will have to rely more on the results of research carried out by companies. By
1988, real research expenditure in the public sector had fallen by about 18%
from the 1981/83 peak and the AFRC had lost a quarter of its scientific staff.
The number AFRC institutes had been cut from 29 in the mid-1970s to seven in
1990 and some, such as the Plant Breeding Institute and the National Seed
Development Organisation were privatised.
Revolutionary change
The drive for innovation in the food system stems from
the commercial logic of the major actors, not the needs of food consumers. On
present trends, it will cause the fastest and most wide ranging revolution in
what we eat in the history of the human race-in a generation or so, compared
to hundreds or thousands of years. It raises several key issues including:
Who is responsible if new products and processes being pioneered by biotechnologists, go wrong or have completely unforeseen consequences-perhaps in a far more far reaching manner the Exxon Valdez tanker crash or the Bhopal chemical works disaster?
Is the limited legal liability status of major corporations appropriate given the potential social and environmental consequences of their actions and should they not risk dissolution if they get it wrong?
Will the information available to ordinary consumers be adequate for them to exercise a real choice in whether or not to eat such foods?
Will there be alternative,
publicly-funded research and freely distributed results that will benefit
resource poor farmers?
Biotechnology may bring another power
shift, away from retailers and food manufacturers, to those industries supplying
the primary producers-such as Monsanto-who can say, in effect, 'consume the
crops we produce for farmers to use'. Its action over the introduction of
genetically modified soya in refusing to go for segregation of the crop, makes a
mockery of the idea of consumer choice. It also represents a major defeat for
the retailers in their claim to be able to offer people a choice of whether or
not to buy products produced in a certain way or containing certain ingredients.
* Incorporated into a new Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council in 1994.
Geoff Tansey is visiting Professor of
Food Policy at Leeds Metropolitan University, and is co-author of The Food
System-A guide (Earthscan, 1995, £15.95, 259pp).
[This
article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 34,
December 1996, page 14]