Focus on the Global South, the ETC Group and Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute (CUSRI) are organizing a Forum on Corporate Concentration in Food and Agriculture; Implications on Food Sovereignty in South East Asia on 24 July.
Venue: The Political Science Alumni Conference Room; 12th floor, Kasem-Udhayanin Building, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok
The rate and scale of corporate mergers and acquisitions over the past three years in the food-agriculture sectors, from agricultural inputs, farm machineries to commodities trading and food retailing, have resulted in oligopolistic control that the world has not seen before.
Four giant corporations that emerged from recent mega-mergers – Bayer-Monsanto, ChemChina-Syngenta, Dow-Dupont and BASF – now control 70.7% of the total global market for agro-chemicals. Four companies – Bayer-Monsanto, Dow-DuPont, Syngenta and Vilmorin/Limagrain – control 68% of global market share.
Increase of mega-mergers in the food-agriculture sectors represents a power shift that impacts farm and food chain workers, consumers, and rural communities, and shapes the political economy of food systems.
Accumulation of wealth in the hands of few corporations and individuals reinforce their economic and political power and their control over the agriculture and food system at the national, regional and international levels.
The Forum will present an overview of corporate concentration in global food and agriculture sector and analysis of implications of these developments on Southeast Asia.
Participants will share resistances, campaigns and strategies to tackle corporate control and concentration at different levels. Attached are the programme for the Forum in Thai and English languages.
Translation from English-Thai, refreshments, and lunch will be provided.
