featured-image

-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email This article was originally published on The Conversation . Across the world, over 800 million people spend their days hungry. More than 2 billion have limited access to food.

Yet today's global food system produces enough to feed every person on the planet. This imbalanced situation can be explained in part by the effects of things like natural disasters, war, fragile supply chains and economic inequality. These are all significant factors which highlight the problems of a truly global food system, where shocks spread quickly from one place to another with sometimes devastating results.



But they do not provide the full picture and cannot fully explain the rise of ultra-processed foods , the financial difficulties facing farmers , or why the world has failed to address the harmful environmental impacts of food production. To account for these trends, we need to look at market concentration , and how a small number of very big companies have come to dominate the production and supply of the food we all eat. For the global food system has become much more concentrated in recent years, partly through an increase in mergers and acquisitions, where large firms buy up rival companies until they completely dominate key areas.

High levels of market concentration mean less transparency, weaker competition, and more power in the hands of fewer firms. And our research reveals that a rise in the number of mergers and acquisitions is taking place at.

Back to Food Page