Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry by Austin Frerick
In Barons, Austin Frerick examines seven of the largest American agribusinesses and exposes how they rose to power and the role they currently play in our food system.
Many of the stories the author profiles will be familiar to farmers — e.g., that just a few companies control most of the slaughter/butchering capacity in the country, or that corporations like Cargill take advantage of certain Farm Bill regulations to amass great market share and wealth. Some of the case studies may be less familiar, but should be — for example, it is shocking to realize that Walmart controls so much grocery market share (as much as the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grocery chains combined!). The book is extensively referenced — notes take up almost a quarter of the pages.
Unfortunately, the tone of the book is true to our times. In the book summary, for example, the first sentence tells us that “democracy itself” is at stake. The second invokes a connection between one of the companies the author profiles and the Nazis. The fourth infers that the leaders of these food businesses are criminals.
This type of doomerism appeals to those who already agree with the premise, but it does little to persuade those who don’t — often even hardening them in the opposite direction.
The book also dismisses a few key perspectives on this debate. The first is the role of government in allowing and sustaining monopolies. Many have argued that monopolies aren’t actually even possible aside from government — that “natural monopolies” don’t exist because, absent government regulations that prop up established companies, new ones will move in to compete. This theory says that the power of the state, through laws and regulations, significantly raises the cost of entry for competitors.
Governments often regulate industries for good reason — doing nothing after The Jungle was published wasn’t really an option. But this is also why, for example, large tech companies go to Congress and actually ask for more regulation — they know that extra administrative burdens raise the barrier to entry and thus protect them. This theory has been debated by economists for years, but many have never considered it, and the author doesn’t really wrestle with the possibility that government — not the corporations — are the root of the problem (or that it’s simply human nature that people in both government and corporations act equally in self-interest).
This type of cooperation between large companies and the government should be called what it is: crony capitalism. This is what Frerick should really be against, and we should all agree. But he goes beyond this and places all the blame on the corporations. This is likely because he wants the government involved to the same, if not a greater, degree in regulating agribusiness — just to different ends. He seems to presuppose that corporations act out of greed but that it is possible to elect people to government who would act without self-regard.
Getting government completely out of food — or anything — is unrealistic. But the libertarians would be shocked to learn that what actually exists right now is an extreme version of laissez-faire. It should also be acknowledged that the political right has recently turned to become far more friendly to government playing a shaping role in markets. Frerick might not need to be so surprised to find allies there in coming years.
The second issue Frerick doesn’t really address is the possibility that large corporations can sometimes do the right thing. What if large farms realized — as many are beginning to — that steps toward a more regenerative model are both more profitable and better for the environment and for consumers? What if large corporations start to discern that people want higher-quality food? What if Walmart, for example, as the giant in the grocery industry, said that all of their products must meet certain regenerative standards by a certain date? Most of us would be skeptical, and there would of course be greenwashing, but such a move would arguably do more to convert more acres to better practices than individual farmers (or even government!) could, since individuals are more likely to simply respond to the government’s incentives to continue farming conventionally.
Is it less resilient to have a few large companies compared to many smaller ones? Yes, it can be — especially if government-imposed barriers to entry are high. And it is true that we need more stewards in the landscape, not fewer. But large companies can sometimes do things right, and small businesses often do things wrong. For the author, “big equals bad” seems to be a hard and fast presupposition.
Barons is a great book for learning about the state of large-scale agribusiness in the United States, and it presents one viewpoint on the cause of the current situation. Other perspectives will examine the same data and come to different conclusions.
