[Recommended for investing geeks and students of power structures. Everyone else can take a pass.]
Certain industries or companies need to be "visible" and in the public eye. See, for example, story stocks like Nvidia, or branded consumer products companies (which require name recognition and habit formation in order to sell product), or any company run by a celebrity CEO. Think of this as one level of visibility.
Note also: any publicly traded company--even if it has a name or a CEO nobody's ever heard of--must file financial reports and other filings. To have access to public equity markets and have your stock trade on an exchange, your company has to "come in and register" (to borrow the phrase from incompetent SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler), and this means putting a lot of information about your business out in the open. Now anybody can look at your filings, see your profitability metrics, see who your managers and directors and large shareholders are, and so on. Think of this as another level of visibility.
Now, consider a level of invisibility: the privately-held or family-owned company, that never files SEC filings, that nobody knows anything about. And until recently, that was the grain industry: largely unknown multinational entities, storing, processing and transporting billions of dollars of grains of all types, taking it from where it's grown to wherever there's a market to buy it. The secrecy of this industry even enabled these companies to broker, quietly, huge grain deals between enemy governments. And get rich doing it.
Think about an analogy in politics. Obviously we can all "see" a political candidate and we typically assume, wrongly, that he's the power center--after all, he's the candidate, right? But what about the power structure behind the candidate? Who's doing the funding, who has chits on the candidate for extracting favors and favorable policy decisions down the road once he's in office? And then who's behind those people who you never see?
It gets you to think deeply about power, and the best kind of power is the behind-the-behind-the-scenes power that nobody even thinks about, much less sees.
Merchants of Grain also gets you thinking about where the real money is in an industry. Hint: it isn't actually in producing the commodity itself! Rather, it's in distribution, storage, transport, reselling and brokerage--all of which are business models based on earning spreads, commissions or rents (or all three!) off of someone else's asset. Not only is this business less asset-intensive, it's also more mobile: it can be moved to where the tax and regulatory burden is mildest, and it can't be seized quite as easily by, say, an adversarial nation-state (at least not in the same way fixed assets like land, factories or natural resources can be).
Another insight: it's striking to think of the sheer quantity of slack in global agriculture markets. For example in the very brief period between 1971 and 1975, global trade in various grains grew by some 50%, (from 114 million tons to 157 million tons a year), most of it covered by new capacity and production just in the United States! Imagine the idea that there can be that much slack capacity, in the United States alone, built up over just four or five growing seasons. It makes you consider the astounding amount of slack agricultural capacity likely available planetwide.
Finally, think of grain as an instrument of geopolitical power, even as an instrument of geopolitical dependency. Believe me, the USA exercised this power on quite a number of countries over the course of the 20th century. See for example how Iran gave away much of its agricultural sovereignty thanks to its elites engaging in grain dealings with the USA at the expense of Iran's domestic farmers. We all think of oil and the US petrodollar system as devices of global hegemony, but in many ways grain is an even more foundational resource than oil, or even money. Grain--either eaten directly or as a critical input for the meat industry--is the substrate for the world's entire food system. The author touches on this theme but could have gone much deeper into its implications. It might have made for a more interesting book.
[As usual, a friendly warning to skip the rest of this post, which is just a long collection of my notes and takeaways from the book. Don't even bother to skim the bold parts, life is short and there's a lot to do!]
Notes:
Introduction:
viiff: On new public awareness of the key five grain companies, thanks to the so-called "Great Grain Robbery," the controversial 1972 sale of American grain to the Soviet Union. The author discovers that there's no political or economic history of grain companies, grain routes, grain traders; any grain industry-related literature he finds all seems to focus on "countries and their rulers, rather than on the world and its resources."
x: Note how Cargill handles a congressional subcommittee by bringing in row after row of "experts" to defend the industry and accuse the subcommittee of smearing the grain industry. The hearings were quickly postponed indefinitely
xff: On the value of secrecy and discretion in the grain industry; a code of secrecy; one executive tells the author "Those Cargill boys are really secretive!" Also Bunge's in-house historian refused to speak to him.
xii: Families involved: the Fribourg family, the Hirsch family, the Born family, the Louis-Dreyfus family, the André family, also the Cargill and MacMillan families.
Chapter 1: Glenas, Inc., of Panama
1ff: On needing discreet, anonymous access to shipping; chartering a ship but not saying who the client is. [Interesting as I'm learning more about shipping these days how this was a much more shadowy industry back then, now the major shipping companies are publicly traded as well, although there is also still today a "gray" shipping industry around the edges.]
2: A "lakes fitted" vessel meaning one that goes through the USA's and Canada's Great Lakes region and thus gets to the wheat ports in Minnesota, Thunder Bay, etc.
4: On how middlemen need to be secret: they are also often blamed when there's a scarcity, people steal from their granaries, etc.
5: Cargill, Continental, Bunge were all privately held in the 1970s, they also diversified into banking, shipping, real estate, hotels, mining, milling flour, feed processing and commodity brokerage. in the 1970s Bunge already had 50,000 employees.
5ff: [Interesting here also to think about where the power is, a lot of these major international companies had their assets seized by various countries in Latin America and the Soviet Union and elsewhere; it turns out that actually growing grain or pulling oil out of the ground is less valuable than making sure that grain or oil (or whatever commodity) is transported to where it is needed and also brokered appropriately. (!) This is a much more asset-light industry, whereas owning the land, farming it and producing the commodity is asset-intensive and not as good a business (and can easily be seized). Farmland is more easily taken because it's fixed, unlike transport and brokerage assets! It's not like you can sail that land to another more friendly jurisdiction, or move your brokering business elsewhere.] Also note this structural advantage as well: "Farmers take the risks of falling prices, bad weather, and governmental policies... the grain companies, one stage removed from the production process, can make money whether prices are rising or falling."
6ff: The key grain companies tended to stay either private or largely controlled by family members, so you didn't always have the same kinds of agency problems that plague modern publicly-traded corporations, where ownership has to hire management with potentially different priorities. Also many of the best-run family-owned enterprises typically operate on a multi-generational or even centuries-long time horizon.
9ff: On US donations of grain as a mechanism of soft power, they only gave it to "friendly" nations.
10ff: Interesting stats here on Soviet agriculture: 37 million workers or 1/3 of the Soviet labor force was still involved in agriculture as recently as 1972, (!) they went through the ag-to-industry labor market transition in the 1970s that the United States went through in the first half of the 20th century. "The shortcomings of the Soviet food and agriculture system posed awkward strategic and political questions." The Soviet Union also bought large amounts of grain in 1972, causing grain hoarding all over the world, the author likens the price increase of grain then to the quadrupling of oil prices by OPEC in 1973. [Interesting since the 2020 pandemic we've seen prices of beef, pork, chicken increase at rates similar to the early seventies.]
13ff: [Seems like the author doesn't know or notice that "the cure for high prices is high prices": he's talking here about the belief in the United States that food supplies were virtually infinite and how this belief was shattered in the 1970s somehow. But obviously we're feeding our population quite competently today, 50 years later, when our population is more than 50% higher and we are actually using less farmland! Note that an increase in prices is an important signal, it signals the market to produce more of that thing. These are second-order ways of thinking about a problem that's typically thought of on the first order.]
19ff: In 1975 the Soviet bought some 12 million tons of North American grain from Canada, amounts much larger than the so-called "Great Grain Robbery" of 1972. A lot of people in the US were pissed, and the longshoreman's union announced that it would boycott loading grain bound for Russia; people were concerned about food prices going higher during an already inflationary period. The CIA also worked out that Soviet grain harvests during this period were calamitously poor. Other departments of the US government--despite having teams of people to estimate this stuff--had no idea how bad it was there.
22ff: Also striking here was the question whether there should be some sort of supra-governmental or bureaucratic system to allocate grain internationally, should there be stockpiles kept; and also the notion that maybe America's food supplies weren't as boundless as they were assumed to be.
Chapter 2: Bread and Dynasties
[This chapter goes back into the past to explore the growth and development of grain over the centuries in Europe]
25ff: Odessa as a key wheat port in the Black Sea, shipping a surplus from the manors/estates of Southern Russia to the West, unprocessed because there were no grain processing plants in the Odessa region.
26: "To Socrates, one mark of a statesman was the knowledge of how much wheat was needed to feed the population of Athens."
27: By the 1700s and 1800s there were remarkable feats of transport to handle moving grain around Europe to combat recurring famines; the agriculture market became diversified and internationalized. Note that most of the early trading across Europe was initially for luxuries for the rich: chocolate, coffee, tea, spices, etc.
27: On the democratization of bread eating by 1800, something that only the elites ate a century before. [Note here that the irony of bleaching and finely milling flour actually removes nutrients, the other thing that's interesting is many of the foods eaten by the peasant class such as porridge, lentils, chickpeas, acorn flour, etc., are ironically more healthy than hyper-processed white flour! Extremely ironic.] "By 1800, however, bread eating was on its way to being democratized... Bread was a staple food for the working man and his family, detached as he was from his old village or farm. Workers in Paris, London, and Manchester in 1800 paid half their wages for bread alone. Eating bread was a badge of attainment and social status." [This section here is a bit of a word salad, as the author is saying that bread eating is "democratized" yet it's still a component of status seeking. One heuristic we can possibly take away here: is that if you status-seek through your diet you will eat a worse diet! Eat like a peasant.]
28: Bread eating had spread across all elements of society by the late 1700s, leading to an international cereal trade in the 19th century.
29ff: On the 1846 repeal of the protectionist corn laws in England, a collection of tariffs that protected farmers and landed aristocrats domestically, but harmed everyone else via higher food prices. Also note the Irish Famine of 1844. Prime minister Robert Peel, importing American grain as a relief measure for Ireland, was denounced because of depressed grain prices: "Peel's Brimstone."
30: Interesting comment here. "But Parliament, with its stroke of repeal [of the protectionist "Corn Laws" in 1845], had changed the world. Repeal of the protectionist system had opened England to the wheat of all the world, created incentives for the settlement of vast territories across the oceans, and established the conditions for modern international trade, with new sea routes and modern trading empires." Is this actually true? And can it be that an island nation that's unable to feed itself creates this incredible marketplace indirectly just by opening itself up to importing grain and foodstuffs?
34ff: Various innovations in the grain industry since the mid 1800s: mechanization of flour mills, starting with windmills, later water power, and then steam; the steam-operated bucket lift invented in the United States in 1843; rodent-proof and weatherproof concrete storage silos, which replaced wooden warehouses; new canal and railroad systems which opened up new farming territory; iron-hulled ships and modernized grain ports in the late 1800s, which made transport costs decline so that distance became a minor factor in the cost of wheat; new farming machinery and then the transatlantic cable in the 1860s, which let suppliers and producers exchange information; in 1883 the development of the first grain futures, etc.
36: United States grain shipments to England were negligible until the Civil War, but by 1874 US grain overtook Russia's shipments to England; note also with the 1873 opening of the Suez Canal grain could more easily arrive from India to Europe; also Indian grain varieties were used and adapted to Canada which had a short growing season--interestingly, just like the between-monsoon seasons of India. See also development of farming in the southern hemisphere: Australia, Chile, Argentina, etc., which diversified international grain supplies.
37ff: The background of the Bunge family: starting out in Sweden during the reign of King Gustavus, then emigrating to the Netherlands and (some of the family) also to Buenos Aires, on how the company earned the nickname "the octopus"; also one of the Bunge family members had a role in extracting resources out of the Belgian Congo under "murky" circumstances, as the author words it. Also see this quote from Argentina: "Bunge gives the farmer his credit, sells him his seed, and buys his grain. And when the crops are in, Bunge sells the farmer the rope to hang himself."
Chapter 3: Grain Barons
42ff: Development of the grain industry in the United States, grain mills and grain elevators led to concentration of wealth among robber-baron type capitalists during the 19th century, note also California became dependent on the English grain market: see California #1, one of the standard varieties of grain traded in Liverpool in the 1880s, a striking feat of international commerce in that era. Note also the California position as a grain exporter was short-lived: by the 1890s most of the regions farmland began a conversion to other crops, basically California grain growing was displaced by the Midwest; note also prairie land was quickly adaptable to farming compared to forested East Coast land; note also the development of many labor-saving machines to reduce labor hours needed for farming.
48ff Minneapolis in the 1860s and the competition between the Pillsburys and the Washburns, both of which began milling businesses.
49ff: Various discussions here of milling technology and developments, based on different types of grain for different regions as well as different requirements in the milling plant to separate the bran from the wheat. Also Minneapolis flour specifically had a higher gluten content, which meant more loaves of bread per pound of flour, as well as bread that stayed fresh longer.
51ff: On the dangers of flour mills: see the 1878 mill explosion at the Washburn Mill in Minneapolis, technology on milling processes as well as ventilation.
52ff: Formation of buyers' cartels in Minneapolis to control distribution and extract more value from the milling process and control grading and sometimes pricing of grain.
53ff: Background on Will Cargill and Frank Peavey, who controlled grain elevators in this region, collecting and shipping farmers' grain; note that almost nothing is known about Frank Peavey and his history. Peavey and his development of the concrete grain silo in 1899, "Peavey's folly"; by his death in 1901 he had a huge enterprise across the United States, owning steamships, interests in railroads, banking, land, even a piano company, "the grain elevator king of the world."
57ff: The creation in 1848 of the Chicago Board of Trade: on speculation and market manipulation during the Civil War; the first big corner in 1888, when B.P. Hutchinson used futures during a poor global harvest that year; see also Joseph Leiter's failed corner in 1897; also the benefits and drawbacks of a futures market: clear prices that everyone could see, also the ability to sell grain at different times throughout the year, to also have commitments for delivering or purchasing crops in advance, etc.
61: On North America becoming a source of food at crucial times, when harvests failed or during the Crimean War in 1854, or during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, etc; and also that geopolitical events in Europe could also affect American agricultural markets and farmer prosperity.
Chapter 4: Living by Their Wits
64ff: Early grain merchants like the Fribourgs, handling all the volatility that happened during the 1920s with war, inflation, depression, the dust bowl, etc. See also changes due to World War I, which took Russia out of the running as a large wheat producer, while also seeing India start to consume its own wheat crop and become less important as a supplier to Europe. "Neither country's wheat was ever again a significant part of Europe's food supply." The growth of the Western hemisphere as a primary source of grain for Europe.
65ff: [Interesting aside here on wheat prices per bushel: there's a comment from the author about how US wheat went to an "unprecedented" price of $3.17 per bushel in may 1917, right after the US declared war on Germany. What's shocking, though, is the price of wheat right now is $6.98 per bushel, down from $9.18 a year ago. The idea that the price of wheat after a century of inflation could still be so low is literally astounding. Note also that here on page 76 the lows for grain prices were 32 cents to 50 cents a bushel in 1932.]
67ff: [Interesting comments here on another grain as yet another industry that makes a ton of money during war, note this quote from a European grain merchant: "The Allies bought huge quantities--and there were no taxes, good margins and small expenses!" War doesn't only make arms merchants rich...]
74ff: Also the 1929 market crash also screwed up the wheat market: per the author "the grain trade was never the same again." A lot of smaller trading firms were blown up and industry consolidated among a few large companies that survived. Likewise very similar thing happened in farming as well, the industry consolidated down as many small farms failed.
76: Note the different policies that different countries use to protect their wheat markets: how France would raise or cut tariffs depending on the market; Italy had a specific policy of food independence, using tariffs, import quotas and propaganda. The US in the 1920s didn't really have any policies at all to deal with changes in global agriculture markets. [Note however once Smoot-Hawlyy tariffs were passed in 1930, the USA began evolving into what is today one of the most protected and babied ag markets of all].
77: Interesting factoid here where Japan wanted to reduce its exposure to wheat imports for noodles, and in 1932 they began to increase domestic reproduction: in 3 years they increased by 60% and achieved self-sufficiency. The author then says "These phenomenally successful food production campaigns tend to be forgotten amid today's talk that the world is running out of food."
78: The Depression ushered in a period of tremendous government intervention in the grain industry, as well as many others. "The United States came out of the 1930s conditioned to farm price supports, wheat export subsidies, and farm programs that regulated the amount of acreage planted to certain crops."
81: The 1930s essentially oligopolized every segment of the grain industry: farming, distribution, transport, storage, to trading, commodity market activity.
82ff: Cargill Corp has succession problems: the founder died in 1909 and his son made some ill-advised "diworseifications." Control of the company essentially passed to a son in law of the MacMillan family, and away from Will Cargill's son William. John McMillan seen as a sound, sober and stubborn man. They managed to keep the company alive and shepherd it through a brush with near-bankruptcy in the years 1909-1916.
86: Another nugget here: during the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s, the Fribourgs' agents sold food to the Republican side. One way to think about food is to think of it as a type of arms, see the idea from Napoleon that an army travels on its stomach.
87: Also the Louis Dreyfus firm had passed on from Leopold Louis-Dreyfus to his sons Louis and Charles Louis-Dreyfus in the early 1900s; the firm had already diversified vertically into transport boats and ships out of Odessa, and then it started making real money with transport, not carrying just grain but other types of cargo.
88: There is a crescendo of grain buying from Germany in the winter of 1937, and when Germany invaded France the Fribourg family, Jews understandably concerned about their safety, drove to the Spanish border and walked across. [The reader can't help but imagine sound of music type scene here]. They then boarded a freighter owned by the company at Lisbon and sailed to the Dominican Republic, then months later entered the US.
Chapter 5: Rendezvous at Château Laurier
92ff "The United States emerged from World War II as the preeminent grain power of the world." [Just like with their industrial companies.] "The United States supplied half the world wheat trade from 1945 to 1949." But also during this period the key grain companies were largely under government directions so it was kind of like public utility, a lot less swashbuckling than in earlier days.
95: Anecdote here on the government in Argentina, which was acquiring cheap grain from its own farmers and selling it at heavily marked-up prices in Europe in the late 1940s; also the Argentine government was meddling in the industry overall, which was making life difficult for Bunge Corp.'s business there, thus the company began to turn towards Brazil and the United States.
97: In the late 1940s the grain market started to have surpluses every year, margins got a lot thinner up and down the industry, it lost its pre-war glamour.
98: On the post-World War II era of constant surpluses, note that acreage used for feed was no longer necessary in the "tractor era," this freed up millions of acres of grain land, also corn yields increased massively with hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers: yields per acre doubled from 50 bushels to 100 bushels from the 1940s to the 1960s.
99ff: Note also the discovery of soybeans as a miracle crop for protein which would help increase and speed up the weight gain process for cattle, hogs and poultry. Soybeans also grew well in the United States; note also the US exported a lot of its dietary habits to the rest of the world, e.g., bread and much more meat to Asians.
100ff: 1954: Congress passes Public Law 480, which created a permanent food aid program for "humanitarian" reasons (at least ostensibly), this helped enrich the farm belt, it did actually feed countries under famine conditions from time to time, it also disposed of constant US grain surpluses; something like one bushel of wheat out of every four and one bushel of rice out of every five ended up going abroad under this program in its first years. Typically the way it worked was foreign governments would get authorization from the US government to purchase (with American loans) quantities of American farm commodities, the foreigners handled the transaction but payment went from the US Treasury to the exporters.
103ff: 1962: The Middents Plan, this changed the ag subsidy system and paid money directly to farmers for planting less acreage, replacing the system that caused price supports at prices that made American grain uncompetitive internationally, this was nicknamed "Cargill's Bill."
105ff: On Soviet economic isolation and its desire to be self-sufficient between the wars and after World War II; note this quote from Yugoslavian communist politician Svetozar Vukmanovic-Tempo, "who had told American officials in Washington in the late 1940s that his countrymen would rather eat grass than accept help from the West with strings attached." See also the Soviet Union opening the Siberian steppes to agriculture, a risky venture. Their wheat output grew significantly but they were still importing food even during the 1960s.
109ff: Now discussing the phone call to Patrick Mayhew from Russia: Mayhew was working for a grain broker in London and his client was the American company Peavey. At the same time Russia used Louis-Dreyfus as an agent to purchase 200,000 tons of Canadian wheat. Later meetings in Ottawa ultimately resulted in Canada announcing a sale of 6.8 million tons of wheat to the Soviet Union at a price of nearly $500 million, "a watershed in the history of the post-war grain trade... Khrushchev was doing what other rich countries like Japan were doing: covering the [harvest] deficit with imports... Henceforth, the Soviet Union would be the 'X factor' in world grain markets."
111ff: The US government was nonplussed with the Canada deal with Russia. "A billion bushels of unsold grain were being stored in American stocks" when the Canadian announcement came out. Also note that this was less than a year after the Cuban missile crisis.
113: Kennedy finally wakes up and sees this is an opportunity to broaden a relationship between the US and Russia and lessen tensions. Kennedy authorizes up to 4 million tons of wheat and flour to be sold to Russia in 1963.
114ff: On Michel Fribourg, son of Jules Fribourg who died in 1944; On Michel coming out of his shell in New York City, using "divide and rule" to control management; aloof, shy and retiring but also a risk-taker who was more similar to his father than many initially had thought.
119: Khrushchev was actually harmed politically by these grain purchases and he never mentioned anything about these transactions in his memoirs.
Chapter 6: "Cram It Down Their Throats"
[This chapter is all over the place, covering different regions, different issues, there's no real central thread]
120: The [unfortunately named] Earl Butz, US Secretary of Agriculture, talking about the 1972 grain sale to Russia: "This is by all odds the greatest grain transaction in the history of the world. And it is certainly the greatest for us."
120ff: After 1963 and 1964 there were no more Russian buys of American grains on a meaningful level until 1972. 1972's trade was called the Great Grain Robbery, and there was likely significant collusion between the US government, Russia and the various companies involved.
123ff: The US would start dumping grain abroad in order to get it offshore and also to avoid needing to store all the unsold surpluses, and to get more foreign exchange into the US; the author gives an example of what happened in Iran to illustrate: there, both the US and Russia dumped food inputs like sunflower oil (in Russia's case) and soybean oil (in the USA's case).
127ff Note also that the United States never sells anything without strings attached, and in the case of Iran they sold grain to Iran to buyers who would set up dairy and poultry operations... that would lead to demand for still more grain. It also changed some of the dietary habits of the Iranians in the 1960s and 1970s and ultimately Iran "surrendered to the United States a good deal of its agricultural sovereignty." Iran was also expected to buy farm equipment and breeding animals. "The sooner John Deere company establishes itself in Iran, the sooner it will control much of the needed agricultural projects." [What's missing here is a discussion of why this happens. Michael Hudson discusses bluntly in his book: this is the nature of how the US controls other countries via client oligarchies in those countries who enrich themselves at the expense of their own people.]
130ff: The European common market develops CAP, a common agricultural policy: it had high duties for Canadian and American grain, involved price supports for European farmers and would limit European surpluses; note however that Europe became much wealthier in the 1960s thus their meat and poultry consumption required far more grain and soybeans. Plus the US was selling plenty of ag commodities to them anyway. Note also European climates were unsuitable for growing soybeans and thus this important source of vegetable protein for animals had to come from imports.
134: "Farm surpluses tended to occur in rich, industrial nations, where farmers had powerful, well-organized lobbies, rather than in developing countries where farmers usually were weak and underrepresented."
136: [As counterintuitive as the idea of paying farmers to not plant crops may sound, it's actually quite brilliant: you keep prices high--but not too high--in the marketplace so the economics makes sense for everyone, and then you have built in flex capacity in case there's a poor harvest because you've paid farmers to keep some land fallow; thus you can withdraw payment for that land and farmers will naturally plant it; automatic and adjustable protection from too much or too little of that crop.]
139ff: Now we're transitioning the chapter over to Russia and their grain purchases in 1971, repeating what happened in 1964; disputes with the longshoreman unions about shipping to Moscow, conflicts over the 50/50 rule that at least half of the grain had to be shipped on American flagged ships, etc. Here the Russians were looking for feed for livestock, the Soviet Union had bumper grain crops in 1970 and 1971 but still bought half a billion dollars worth of grain. "If they bought that much in good harvest years, what would happen when the inevitable occurred--when Russian harvests failed?"
146ff: Nixon Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz; courting controversy with an interview in the Washington Post where he said farmers should "adapt or die"; this is a cold reference to a decline in smaller ag operations across the country as more efficient commercial farmers started to dominate. [Interesting how agriculture itself begins to consolidate and oligopolize, just as the upstream industries did]; Note the author can't even hide his dislike for Earl Butz, he sees him as a standard "meanie" conservative. "Butz's heart did not bleed for consumers either at home or abroad. He wanted higher prices for U.S. farm products."
148: [There's an offhand reference here to Clarence Palmby, then-Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, who quit the federal government to go work for Continental, the author doesn't state this outright but this is a good example of the standard "revolving door phenomenon" that leads to regulatory capture. Today we see increasingly blatant examples between the pharmaceutical industry and pharmaceutical regulators.]
149ff: 1972: Russia makes a rather sudden request to buy 4 million tons of wheat and 3 million tons of corn, also durum as well as other commodities: tremendous amounts of grain; the author calls it "the most momentous events in post war agricultural history" and it would disrupt prices all over the United States and the world. When all was said and done the total commitments were 11.85 million tons of grain, a third of what the US normally sold to all countries in a single year--and then there was still more buying after that (!) as the Russian harvest deteriorated further. Also the scale of this was so large that shipping became a problem, Continental's shipping subsidiary was caught short on shipping capacity because of all the grain chartering.
153ff: Interesting comments here on how the CIA knew all about this stuff while it was happening, they knew about it long before the US farm community, and they may have even leaked some information to the media about it. The CIA learned this directly from the grain companies, as it kept in close touch with all the grain houses and with merchants returning from abroad. Per the author: "There was, in fact, a steady interchange between the agency and officials in dozens of multinational companies, whose information about all the most vital developments affecting the economies of countries often was far more accurate and complete than that of any government agencies. To the CIA, the multinationals were an informational gold mine." [Also extremely interesting to think about the implications here, if the CIA could be this well-connected with the grain industry back then, why would anyone doubt that they would be as well or even better connected inside any important industry today? Obviously I'm thinking of the key social media and internet hubs and major media companies that the CIA allegedly infiltrated during the pandemic. It's just another lever of power and control; of course a government is going to put it to use.]
155ff: While this tremendous grain export to Russia was being organized, there was "a new era of resource scarcity" per the author: droughts in Africa in 1971 and 1972, rice crop failure in Korea and elsewhere in Asia, a decline in the anchovy catch off Peru, a devaluation of the dollar which made US grain even more attractive to foreigners, and then the Russians making this huge buy. Note how once word spread about the Great Grain Robbery, tie-ups occurred in freight trains, traffic jams occurred in ports; Ultimately the US managed to unload 2/3 of its wheat surplus/stores in just a year. [It's interesting: this looks just like any other commodity cycle in the sense that the demand growth was visible and predictable but capacity increases come in quanta, in step functions, and these capacity increases become available only with a lag; thus when there's a demand shock, of course the price of that commodity may go up quite a lot very quickly; and then the price rise itself drives panic buying which makes the price go up still more, etc.]
157ff: Grain prices now were above the USA support prices; this was on some level great for American farms, but also it was one of the components of the inflation that accelerated in the 1970s; see also Nixon putting on wage and price freezes in 1971 right before his reelection; then letting them lapse and watching the CPI rise to some 10%, and then Nixon reimposed price controls, etc.
158: [You see yet another example of a commodity cycle here where beef prices start going up, then keep going up and then the cattlemen and the packing houses respond by holding back supply hoping for even higher prices, which drives higher prices, so on the supply side you can also get a recursive function.]
158: [Also an interesting blurb here about how in 1974 there was more grass-fed beef sold as a result of higher corn/feed prices, but the author here operates under a presumption that corn-fed steaks were juicier, more marbled, considered much higher quality, while grass-fed steaks were considered lower quality. Intriguing how things change...]
158: [Yet another aspect of recursion: high corn prices affected the price of pork in idiosyncratic ways, once corn got so expensive farmers would sell the grain rather than feed it to their hogs, then they would butcher the hogs and take them to the market and this actually may lower prices in the short run as all that meat comes to market. But later since there were fewer sows and fewer new litters the capacity of the market was depleted, thus pork prices skyrocketed much higher a year or so later. Fascinating. Note also from the perspective of a consumer: there's a sort of a cheat code here in that their will often be unusual or idiosyncratic movements in prices in different directions of different foods. Thus the empowered consumer will adjust his or her protein intake accordingly to be both efficient with spending and also to eat healthily.]
160: "For the grain companies, this was an embarrassing moment to be earning unprecedented profits." You see some striking moves here in companies; earnings, Cargill earned $19 million in 1970 to, but then earned $150 million in 1973 (!) [This is an astounding increase for an ag company and it shows what kinds of investment leverage you can get owning these types of companies when the price of their underlying commodity moves.]
Chapter 7: "Big Grain"
161: On the grain industry's invisibility: Cargill boasting that "99 per cent of our customers have never heard of us." Fribourg at Continental would "rather lose a million dollars than get his name in the papers."
162ff: The Bunge/Born grandsons Jorge and Juan Born were captured/abducted by student Peronistas in Argentina, 1974. Exchanges of gunfire, a whole abduction, Latin American style. After this Bunge became even more secretive. Bunge ends up paying off the Montoneros some $60m (a tremendous sum in those days, the author equates it to 1/3 of Argentina's defense budget at the time), also it revealed a lot about the inside politics and power of Bunge within the government and the establishment in Argentina.
165ff: On the extensive diversification of many of these big grain companies, note also that from the mid-1950s to 1972 the grain industry wasn't that good a business; most of these companies moved into more vertical and horizontal activities. Also there was more and more government regulation of the grain industry over this time period.
167ff: [One thing that's a little bit sad is how all these grain companies got suckered into the diversification fad of the 1970s, just like so many other corporation. Super example here: Cargill buying an insurance firm, two steel companies, etc. Even the greatest families and greatest entrepreneurs see their companies eventually being led around by management consultants!]
172ff: Discussion of Cargill's evolution into other food commodities like tapioca/cassava or sugar, and then making a larger point about these types of more fruitful, lateral diversifications of the key dominant grain companies.
175: [One interesting nuance here is where you can substitute ingredients for feed, and a marketplace like Europe doesn't have duties on, say, tapioca/casava because it's not grown there, then if the price of corn or duties on corn change or the economics of a corn-based feed mix change you can substitute tapioca into the feed and underprice (or get better margins) than your competitors.]
176: Interesting nugget here on shipping in France, an exchange between Pierre Louis-Dreyfus and Charles de Gaulle, where Pierre sarcastically said, "France can do without a shipping industry, after all, Belgium does perfectly well without an automobile industry." De Gaulle responds, "I think I get your point." Soon France began to subsidize the French shipping industry and the country built a number of ships, etc. [What's interesting here is that it's almost certain that within a decade or two France stopped building ships, and today all of the major shipyards are either in Korea or China... It makes you think what's going to happen with the shipping industry going forward when clearly we are constrained in terms of ships.]
177ff: Discussion here of some of the grain companies expanding into banking, both for the better and for the worse depending on the company.
Chapter 8: Merchants of Grain
[This chapter covers various similarities and differences across the various families; their penchant for privacy and staying invisible; control issues at some companies; other family histories.]
180: "The families are all basically paranoid. Wouldn't you be?" A former Cargill employee.
180ff: Fallout from the Born/Bunge kidnapping: the Hirsch family left for Madrid, the Borns moved to Sao Paulo; note also in 1978 another Bunge grandson was kidnapped and murdered in Argentina.
181: Note also the idiosyncrasy that these grain companies are still under control of the same families, unlike most modern corporations, and no industry looks like the grain industry in the sense that all of the leading companies are still family owned.
182ff: On the so-called interregnum at Cargill between the death of John McMillan and his brother Cargill McMillan; when John died and Cargill stepped down Whitney and Duncan, sons of both men, were too young to take over, but then later Whitney became president. "If there's any question in somebody's mind about who runs Cargill, that's somebody won't be at Cargill for long." Thus even this company remained a two-family hybrid company.
185ff: Note here the structure of Cargill, with a family foundation in Switzerland that took a 30% interest in Cargill's Panamanian subsidiary Tradax, and then held that money in a tax shelter until distribution to family members; Also on how the family maintained a sort of standoffish demeanor in the Minneapolis establishment; they have the main headquarters hidden away in the woods outside the city. [Here also it's amusing how the author talks about how the Cargill-McMillan families who were of Scottish descent did not mingle well with the Pillsburys and other Minnesota families who were British/Yankees, Germans and Scandinavians; it all seems like distinction without a difference today, now that Minneapolis is increasingly Iraqi and Eritrean!]
186: Note also with the Louis-Dreyfus family: Louis Louis-Dreyfus had been in politics and owned a newspaper in the 1930s in France, but it made his family too visible at a time when anti-Semitism was on the rise; also Gerard Louis-Dreyfus showed up on Nixon's "enemies list" because he contributed money to George McGovern's campaign.
193: Interesting discussion here of international barter for countries that don't have hard currencies to buy commodities; how it can be done by exchanging commodities with a book entry-like "clearing units" that let you buy grain in one country, then you might accept Argentine "clearing units" but at a discount and then use those units to buy the grain that it was designed for. This way you can earn the discount right back if you match the commodities and the buyers and sellers properly.
193ff: Discussion here of the exploits of former Fribourg employee Marc Najar and all of his crazy dealmaking, his wins and his losses; and then he died with his family in a private plane crash that he was piloting.
196ff: The rise of Ned Cook, a Tennessee-based guy who went from cotton into grain, and up-and-comer competitor in the grain industry; Cook Industries did an IPO and filed financials, which annoyed the rest of the industry, Cook was a Najar-type risk taker. [It looks like this company failed in the mid-70s note also the author picks up this thread again in Chapter 13].
Chapter 9: Catch-22
202ff: On how the dominant grain companies have tremendous informational advantages; also the ability to sell to themselves via transfer pricing across different vertical aspects of their business; the author likens it to Milo Minderbinder in the book Catch-22 where he buys and sells eggs at what looks like a loss but actually produces a gain. Also there are certain tax benefits and currency exchange control freedoms involved here.
208ff: Story in the mid-1970s of a group of Italian grain commodity traders in Milan who were very speculative in their behavior, who then blew up in 1975 with the collapse and grain prices after the early 70s bull market in prices. Some of the Italians refused to take delivery of contracted grain.
213: On the question "what is the price of wheat?" There are hundreds of prices at any given time depending on hundreds of factors: grade, quality, protein content, its location, whether it's in oversupply or undersupply, water levels or an early freeze on the Mississippi, etc.
220ff: Discussion here of who sets grain prices, whether it's done at the different exchanges or if those prices are just reflections of large commercial contracts set by the major companies instead. Also, governments, including the US, either do not track or are not able to track grain prices; on different laws set in the 1970s requiring disclosure of grain transactions above a certain amount, but the US has no legal authority for tracking grain transactions outside the United States.
Chapter 10: Pyramid of Power
226ff: On the 1973 Continental company flour mill established in Zaire; on and all the problems it had: two of the twelve concrete silos collapsed two months after constructionm (!) an uncle of President Mobutu was importing flour under a government license to compete with it; there was a currency collapse, and Continental decided to reduce grain shipments to the factory, leading to hoarding and lines at bakeries in Zaire; the government caved right away and Zaire's central bank paid for all subsequent shipments in dollars. "It has long been recognized that oil for energy and capital to buy technology are necessary for a country's development. As the Zaire episode showed, a third resource recently has become necessary: adequate amounts of imported grain." [Interesting hear how the author frames it as a company exercising significant power over a nation state, but in reality Zaire's government cheated, didn't stick to the deal, and Continental had all the right in the world to stop delivering grain and cut them off, and they didn't even do that, they just modestly reduced shipments.]
229ff: The author frames it this way, improbably: because it was cheaper to import flour to feed rural and urban migrants (than it would have been to increase agricultural production and improve rural transportation and distribution), yet despite that a new network of bakeries appeared all over the country... and then suddenly Zaire became dependent on foreign wheat.
229: Also an interesting blurb here about how bread became like a "constructed preference" a type of aspirational good; since it was part of the diet of the "colonial masters" it was adopted by the local elites, and then everyone else started eating it too via imitation and aspiration.
232: Interesting here how the author argues that economic recolonization is happening with the grain industry as also with other types of food processing, as these major corporations set up things like flour mills in various developing countries. The irony is that these industries were thought of as "advanced" in 1979, but now they're not advanced at all! And most of the stuff can easily be done by third world countries with their own companies, in fact most of these major companies probably have sold off these assets anyway, judging by the asset-light business models of most of these companies in today's era. In any event all these products are commodities anyway.
238ff: Discussion here of hybrid seed, most prominently with corn, but the issue here is the farmers have to buy new seeds every single year, and they can't produce their own seed or save seed from one year to the next. Yields tend to be 20-30% more with hybrid corn seeds and the following year those hybrids will not produce seeds that will duplicate the same results, in other words the hybrids don't pass on these higher yields to the next generation. This way the seed maker controls the supply and has kind of like a subscription model. Note also this is much different from wheat because wheat is self-pollinating and once a hybrid is developed it can be self-perpetuating.
239ff: Dr. Norman Borlaug and the development of wheat hybrids; crossing Japanese dwarf wheat varieties with Mexican wheats, they didn't lodge, or fall over, during harsh weather, and this is a big part of the Green Revolution.
242: Interesting and nuanced discussion here on multinational corporations as go-between between countries and regimes--in both positive and negative senses: in the positive sense the Russians went to grain companies directly in 1972, not to the US government. Had they gone to the US government there would have been some sort of political linkage or a demand for concessions, or either government would have made political mileage out of it, thus embarrassing the other; the companies on some level could be neutral go-betweens simply meeting a need. The author argues that multinational oil companies serve a similar purpose that is possibly even more politically important. Interesting conceit here.
243-4: Interesting sidebar here on Rhodesia and how it avoided embargoes on maize as well as on exports of the metal chrome, as well as other exports by essentially laundering them through Mozambique and South Africa, also followed by shipments to Venezuela that Venezuela denied any knowledge of; you can kind of see how sanctions on Iranian or Venezuelan oil are destined to fail once you learn about these techniques for circumventing them.
245: "The impression that governments are running the system is false--neither the governments nor anybody else knows what's going on." [This is an OECD official commenting on the grain industry, but he could be just as easily commenting on any other global industry! The impression of control comes from the idea that every country has its own grain (or whatever industry) authority to supervise export and import of things.]
248: Discussion here of the veritable explosion of soybean production in Brazil beginning in the late 1960s, anchor tenants here were Europe and Japan who wanted protein for animal feed. Major multinationals started to build multi-million dollar processing plants and transport infrastructure, but then some of the land used for soybeans was taken from land used for corn and black beans and as a result food prices went up in Brazil.
250ff: Discussion of the Canadian wheat board, a significant power in world grain markets, more than you would think given Canada's size. Interesting blurb here on the bumper 1976 harvest where there was a surplus of grain that Canada managed to sell all over the world, sneaking into markets well ahead of the United States.
Chapter 11: The Food Weapon
255ff: Discussion here of under Secretary of State Charles Robinson in Moscow trying to extract oil from Russia at below OPEC prices in exchange for grain that Russia needed to make up for a poor harvest. This was the USA's way of working around an OPEC embargo/price increase.
257ff: Examples from World War I and then throughout the 20th century of the US using surplus food as a sort of carrot and stick of geopolitics, supporting Marshall Tito's drive for independence from Soviet influence in the 1940s; using it as both a carrot and a stick with Chile during and after Allende's overthrow. [This section also gets you thinking about self sovereignty both in the sense of a nation's soveriegnty, but also for peoples' sovereignty anywhere, especially if they live in small countries: Chile actually had bread lines and shortages of meat products in the early 1970s in the final years of Allende's regime, as an individual you couldn't think of a better time to have some of your own chickens or your own long-term multi-month supply of your own food.]
262: Henry Kissinger's gift for understanding the politics and realpolitik of raw materials, basic goods, oil, etc., using the lens of 18th and 19th century diplomacy. Financial details "bored him" but "he quickly mastered the politics of global resources." [The reader here gets a long-winded telling of a story where Kissinger try to extract discounted oil from Russia in return for the grain sales of 1975, but this deal flopped, as the Russians refuse to sell their oil at a discount; Kissinger comes off kind of sounding like a clown here, even though the author probably didn't intend to give this impression.]
Chapter 12: The Diplomatic Crop
280ff: [This is a chapter on the global rice industry, everything from Japan, Indochina/Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Malaysia, as well as US rice farmers growing much more rice than the US market requires; also a discussion of a type of "Koreagate" controvery that happened in the 1970s.]
282: Interesting point on how decades ago individual villages would be isolated and helpless and dependent on their own rice, whereas modern infrastructure and roads and world trade makes massive famines much less likely; however even small shortfalls like a 5% decline in world rice production (which happened in 1973) drove a 300% increase in rice prices, from $200 a ton to $600 a ton.
284: Establishment of price supports in 1941 for rice crops in the USA; also yields in the US are triple those of ordinary Asian farms. Rice farming became a very powerful small club in the US.
284: See also Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, Chairman of the House Way and Means Committee in the 1950s and 60s: "Wilbur Mills never wrote a tax bill without getting something for rice."
286ff: By the 1960s Japan was self-sufficient in rice and its government subsidies to rice farmers were far larger than US subsidies to its farmers. Interesting blurb here about fighting over the Okinawa rice market: the US in those days still controlled Okinawa under the terms of the Japanese surrender.
288: Nixon tried to use loans to buy food, mainly rice with Korea, in return for their voluntary restraint on textile exports to the US. [It's quite striking how the US government used to actually care about domestic industries: today--uhhhh, unless you're a defense or pharmaceutical company--it feels like it's all just fend for yourself: we practically encourage buying everything outside the US it seems.]
290: See 1930s-era Korea when it exported rice to Japan but at the cost of its own starvation; "starvation exports" as Japan forced Korean to meet export requirements.
291: Blurb here on the Japanese model of modernization after World War II, which both Korea and Taiwan emulated; it involved the movement of millions of rural people to urban areas and an increase in food imports, usually from the United States.
293: The author openly admits he can't even figure out who the major players are in the world rice trade, he can't even find out people's last names! Also the price of rice is difficult to know, a much more mysterious commodity then wheat or corn. Also the majors don't dominate rice; there are too many varieties and too many markets and far too many regional, specialized preferences.
296ff: After a very long-winded introduction, finally we get to Tongsun Park, a Korean; then another sidebar on Korea's CIA, which suppressed all domestic opposition to Korea's 1960s-era regime of Park Chung Hee (abducting Koreans in West Germany who were suspected of being communist sympathizers for example); Tonsgsun Park was a sort of Korean Great Gatsby, living large in Georgetown, collecting commissions on rice sold to Korea, all during a time when Korea was more and more "needed" by the United States as the US was winding down its war in Indochina.
300ff: Park also playing a role in "invitational diplomacy", organizing junkets for influential legislators to make trips abroad.
301: On Congressman Otto Passman, from Louisiana, who served from 1947 to 1977. "Son, I don't smoke and I don't drink. My only pleasure in life is kicking the shit out of the foreign aid program of the United States of America." See also Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, when he was running for governor in 1970, wanted to pull off a political coup and sell Louisiana's tremendous rice surplus from that year overseas. He turned to Otto Passman and Tongsun Park, they traveled to Korea and ultimately arranged a rice deal with Nixon. Park earned big commissions from this transaction, and it appears he kicked some of that money back to the politicians themselves, he got involved in Edwards campaign (although Edwards didn't need any contributions), and worse Park gave $10,000 in cash to Edwards' wife.
305: Park becomes increasingly well known around DC, showing up in the social news of the Washington Post, handing out cash to different organizations and campaigns.
307ff: Park has his cover blown, "more or less by accident" as the author (along with fellow Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer) stumbles onto Park and his rice connection while they are working on a series of articles on foreign aid food program PL-480. After these articles come out in the Post, Dan Morgan (again, the author) gets a call from a man who hints that he works for the CIA, asking if Morgan knew "that Park was a conduit for millions of dollars of Korean money pouring into US politics." Park gets caught when he failed to declare a watch at a US customs entry point, and in the course of a search the customs official found a piece of paper listing the names of congressman with figures next to them that were apparently amounts of money. [This whole story is cool as heck, and it's a good example of reporters actually doing their job, teasing out something, trying to get at the truth, rather than what appears to be the modern journalist practice of covering up the truth.] Ultimately the Post runs a story talking about Park's use of rice commissions to pay congressmen and the game was over; it resulted in a whole congressional inquiry in 1976. There was also a parallel Justice Department investigation that began just before the story broke.
308: Park quick leaves the US and hides out in Seoul; California congressman Richard Hanna was indicted for 40 counts, including mail fraud and bribery, he ultimately pled to one single count and then left Congress; Otto Passman unexpectedly lost his seat in 1976, and then was indicted in 1978 for taking cash and watches from Park in return for influence; Ultimately nobody knew really what Park was trying to do. He was probably a self promoter trying to get rich and wasn't really involved in international intrigue. [Again, big kudos to the author for actually uncovering this controversy: once again, this is how journalism should be done--this is the Seymour Hersh and Daniel Ellsberg model of journalism, not the gross modern version where journalism is an extension of State propaganda.]
308ff: [Park and Koreagate seem also to be an interesting example of a foreign person working a client oligarchy in the USA rather than other other way around, as Park made direct payments to American politicians for the benefit of his country's economic and foreign policy.]
Chapter 13: The Least Forgiving Business
311ff; [This is a chapter on Ned Cook, president of Cook Industries; first a little bit of history of the lower Mississippi, where all the grain elevators are; on "river rats," small-time pirates who would help themselves to grain from open barges on the river back in the day; on the measuring and loading of grain which is very inexact; how grain elevators work, inside its a labyrinth pipes, ducts, ventilators and lifts that will blend grains so that the customer gets the proper ratio of permitted broken kernels as well as other stuff, straw of course the pure grain itself; on the lack of competent grain inspection, even fraudulent inspection, see certificates in 1969 in Louisiana elevators as the quality of American barley, wheat, rice and corn received complaints.
316ff: A tawdry sidestory here of bribes of grain inspectors caught by the FBI; witnesses talking about how samples would be pulled and then "cleaned" before the inspector graded them, also scales could be put on hold and manually adjusted, allowing you to ship excess grain to a subsidiary without it being weighed and recorded (and taxed); also radically different levels of sophistication around the world: grain is unloaded using incredibly advanced infrastructure in a Rotterdam port versus zero-tech manual unloading by men and women in Cambodia, where workers would hide rice from punctured sacks in their clothes.
319ff: Cook Industries was indicted in a conspiracy of grain lifting, grain skimming; nobody knew how much Ned Cook knew or was responsible for, but there were suspicions. Also Cook Industries was publicly traded so they had to file reports about these indictments and trials as well as of the underlying economics of their business.
323ff: The author describes certain kickback arrangements that he was told were fairly typical in the industry, like an Iranian government buyer who bought rice from a New York dealer at a higher than market price in return for the difference going into a Swiss bank account. The mechanics worked like this: the rice merchant, after receiving payment from the Iranian government, then transferred part of that payment to his wife, who then transferred that amount to the designated Swiss bank account, which belonged to the Iranian agent.
325ff: Ned Cook makes his foreign agents all swear that no money from Cook Industries would be used for illegal payments and bribes, but this is just the beginning of the trouble that Cook Industries began to experience.
327ff: Back to 1972 now, during the volatility that happened in the corn and grain markets due to Russian buying; During this time Continental was actually "caught short" having committed to deliver corn to the Soviet Union when it had not actually acquired the commodity itself.
332ff: Cook Industries and mistakes in the soybean market: Cook Industries decided, fatefully, in 1976 to hold their abundant stocks of soybeans at harvest until the following year and then go short soybeans as well [I think what the author means here is they sold futures short against their supply, kind of like selling a covered call, but perhaps they sold more calls than they had in the underlying position? It's not clear and the author doesn't seem to understand these transactions well enough to describe them clearly]; the strategy did not work; also the Mississippi River had a later than normal thaw and water levels were too low for certain barges to get through, so Cook became caught even more "short"; it also appeared that somebody was betting against Ned Cook, likely it was Bunker and Herbert Hunt from Texas, the Hunt Brothers.
334ff: Sidebar here about the Hunt Brothers and how Bunker Hunt got started with oil but then moved on to various other commodities, including silver and even sugar futures, and then moved on to soybean futures; Ned Cook and his people finally learned that they were up against the Hunts in the soybean pit; the author doesn't explain it very well yet again, but basically the Hunts had exceeded individual position limits and were possibly going to be forced to unwind their holdings; it looks like they had used agents and intermediaries to get around position limits; soybean prices went much higher and then word got out that Cook Industries was badly mispositioned.
337ff: Cook Industries starts getting margin calls from the commodity exchange; lenders wouldn't extend the company credit and the company basically collapsed; Cook ended up being bought by Mitsui, the Japanese trading company which wanted an upstream foothold in the United States.
340: Brief mention here of the explosion of Continental's grain terminal in December, 1977, on the Mississippi near New Orleans, killing 36, followed by another grain elevator explosion in Galveston that Cook Industries had just sold to The Cooperative Farmers Export Company.
Chapter 14: Blood Brother to the Earthquake
342ff: This chapter gets into what drives hunger and starvation; the nature of the "food dependence" that the United States has created, ironically, by exporting so much of its food to the rest of the world; the author argues that this was not because of any American generosity, rather it was to deal with the domestic problem of our food surplus; also on the vicious circle that can happen when countries import foodstuffs and then use that foreign exchange to invest in agriculture that produces only-for-export crops like sugar, coffee or cocoa; the end result is there are still people in that country that are not fed, especially if they are poor.
347ff: A bit of a malthusian lecture here talking about population growth going forward, the author writes "virtually all serious agricultural economists believe: the world is not running out of food and is not likely to in our lifetimes." obviously nothing any close to what anybody feared even came close to happening now that it's 45 years since this book has been published. [Today the problem is battling obesity in many countries that just two or three generations ago were struggling with hunger!] The author discusses various concerns: import dependence of countries like Poland, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina and Pakistan, on topsoil loss; on the loss of family farms, etc.
350ff: This chapter contains a lot of "on the one hand on the other hand" type discussions: saying that dependence on imported food need not be a bad thing, citing England throughout the 19th century depending on imports but also having tremendous influence globally, likewise see Greece and Rome during their prime eras.
352: Interesting point the author indirectly makes here, talking about Morocco which exports phosphates to generate most of its wealth rather than allocating resources to growing more food; the problem per the author is that the phosphate reserves are finite whereas food production is annual and thus not finite in nature like natural resources are; thus one way to think about this is Morocco is exchanging a fixed resource for an unending need for food. This is an interesting way to think about it: it's sort of an inter-generational transfer of a liability (or of a dependency) if you think about it.
352: The author's "solutions" discussion here offers blindingly obvious and insight-free ideas like "countries need to make agriculture a national priority" and "third world corruption needs to be reduced" and so on.
356: China here as a notable contra-example which has made itself self-sufficient in food.
To Read:
[This is one of these really good bibliographies where the author actually says which books are fun, which books are boring, which books are good, bad, etc. Well done.]
***Edward Bernays: Biography of an Idea
Cecil Woodham-Smith: The Great Hunger
Nikita Khrushchev: Khrushchev Remembers
George Calhoun: Business Life of Ancient Athens
O.E. Rolvaag: Giants in the Earth
***Frank Norris: The Pit
Frank Norris: The Octopus
Edward Jerome Dies: The Wheat Pit
Gary Paulsen: The Farm: A History and Celebration of the American Farmer
***John Houseman: Run-Through
***James Trager: The Great Grain Robbery
Paul Kuznets: Economic Growth and Structure in the Republic of Korea
Distant Thunder, 1943 Indian film by filmmaker Satyajit Ray