Commercial trade
International exports and imports
The World Bank
reported that the European Union was the top food importer in 2005,
followed at a distance by the USA and Japan. Food is now traded and
marketed on a global basis. The variety and availability of food is no
longer restricted by the diversity of locally grown food or the
limitations of the local growing season.[44] Between 1961 and 1999, there was a 400% increase in worldwide food exports.[45] Some countries are now economically dependent on food exports, which in some cases account for over 80% of all exports.[46]In 1994, over 100 countries became signatories to the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in a dramatic increase in trade liberalization. This included an agreement to reduce subsidies paid to farmers, underpinned by the WTO enforcement of agricultural subsidy, tariffs, import quotas, and settlement of trade disputes that cannot be bilaterally resolved.[47] Where trade barriers are raised on the disputed grounds of public health and safety, the WTO refer the dispute to the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which was founded in 1962 by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization. Trade liberalization has greatly affected world food trade.[48]
Marketing and retailing
Main article: Food marketing
Food marketing brings together the producer and the consumer. It is the chain of activities that brings food from "farm gate to plate".[49]
The marketing of even a single food product can be a complicated
process involving many producers and companies. For example, fifty-six
companies are involved in making one can
of chicken noodle soup. These businesses include not only chicken and
vegetable processors but also the companies that transport the
ingredients and those who print labels and manufacture cans.[50] The food marketing system is the largest direct and indirect non-government employer in the United States.In the pre-modern era, the sale of surplus food took place once a week when farmers took their wares on market day into the local village marketplace. Here food was sold to grocers for sale in their local shops for purchase by local consumers.[26][42] With the onset of industrialization and the development of the food processing industry, a wider range of food could be sold and distributed in distant locations. Typically early grocery shops would be counter-based shops, in which purchasers told the shop-keeper what they wanted, so that the shop-keeper could get it for them.[26][51]
In the 20th century, supermarkets were born. Supermarkets brought with them a self service approach to shopping using shopping carts, and were able to offer quality food at lower cost through economies of scale and reduced staffing costs. In the latter part of the 20th century, this has been further revolutionized by the development of vast warehouse-sized, out-of-town supermarkets, selling a wide range of food from around the world.[52]
Unlike food processors, food retailing is a two-tier market in which a small number of very large companies control a large proportion of supermarkets. The supermarket giants wield great purchasing power over farmers and processors, and strong influence over consumers. Nevertheless, less than 10% of consumer spending on food goes to farmers, with larger percentages going to advertising, transportation, and intermediate corporations.[53]
Prices
Main articles: 2007–2008 world food price crisis and Food vs. fuel
It was reported on March 24, 2008, that consumers worldwide faced rising food prices.[54] Reasons for this development include changes in the weather and dramatic changes in the global economy, including higher oil prices, lower food reserves, and growing consumer demand in China and India.[54] In the long term, prices are expected to stabilize.[54] Farmers will grow more grain for both fuel and food and eventually bring prices down.[54] Already this is happening with wheat,[55][56] with more crops to be planted in the United States, Canada, and Europe in 2009. However, the Food and Agriculture Organization projects that consumers still have to deal with more expensive food until at least 2018.[54]It is rare for the spikes to hit all major foods in most countries at once. Food prices rose 4% in the United States in 2007, the highest increase since 1990, and are expected to climb as much again in 2008. As of December 2007, 37 countries faced food crises, and 20 had imposed some sort of food-price controls. In China, the price of pork jumped 58% in 2007. In the 1980s and 1990s, farm subsidies and support programs allowed major grain exporting countries to hold large surpluses, which could be tapped during food shortages to keep prices down. However, new trade policies have made agricultural production much more responsive to market demands, putting global food reserves at their lowest since 1983.[54]
Food prices are rising, wealthier Asian consumers are westernizing their diets, and farmers and nations of the third world are struggling to keep up the pace. The past five years have seen rapid growth in the contribution of Asian nations to the global fluid and powdered milk manufacturing industry, which in 2008 accounted for more than 30% of production, while China alone accounts for more than 10% of both production and consumption in the global fruit and vegetable processing and preserving industry. The trend is similarly evident in industries such as soft drink and bottled water manufacturing, as well as global cocoa, chocolate, and sugar confectionery manufacturing, forecast to grow by 5.7% and 10.0% respectively during 2008 in response to soaring demand in Chinese and Southeast Asian markets.[57]
Rising food prices over recent years have been linked with social unrest around the world, including rioting in Bangladesh and Mexico,[58] and the Arab Spring[citation needed].
As investment
Institutions such as hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks like Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley[58] have been instrumental in pushing up prices in the last five years, with investment in food commodities
rising from $65bn to $126bn (£41bn to £79bn) between 2007 and 2012,
contributing to 30-year highs. This has caused price fluctuations which
are not strongly related to the actual supply of food, according to the
United Nations.[58] Financial institutions now make up 61% of all investment in wheat futures. According to Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on food, there was a rush by institutions to enter the food market following George W Bush's Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000.[58]
De Schutter told the Independent in March 2012: "What we are seeing now
is that these financial markets have developed massively with the
arrival of these new financial investors, who are purely interested in
the short-term monetary gain and are not really interested in the
physical thing – they never actually buy the ton of wheat or maize;
they only buy a promise to buy or to sell. The result of this
financialisation of the commodities market is that the prices of the
products respond increasingly to a purely speculative logic. This
explains why in very short periods of time we see prices spiking or
bubbles exploding, because prices are less and less determined by the
real match between supply and demand."[58] In 2011, 450 economists from around the world called on the G20 to regulate the commodities market more.[58]Some experts have said that speculation has merely aggravated other factors, such as climate change, competition with bio-fuels and overall rising demand.[58] However, some such as Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, have pointed out that prices have increased irrespective of supply and demand issues: Ghosh points to world wheat prices, which doubled in the period from June to December 2010, despite there being no fall in global supply.
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