Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Tomato concentrate
Time to slice up the tomato industry?
Posted by Tom Philpott at 12:48 PM on 04 Dec 2008
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/3/134451/688

What happens when a few large buyers dominate a market?

Anyone who keeps up with my posts -- still there, mom? -- knows what's coming 
next: The buyers gain the power to dictate to dictate terms and conditions to 
sellers.

For farmers, the results of concentrated markets are devastating. As a few 
giant companies like Smithfield and Tyson came to dominate meat packing, they 
managed to drive down the farmgate price of chickens, pigs, and beef cows.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of farmers were driven out of business. 
Survivors took on debt and scaled up, in a desperate attempt to make up on 
volume what they were losing on price. The result: vast animal factories 
known as CAFOs (concentrated-animal feedlot operations), with their abysmal 
environmental, social, and animal-welfare records.

I often focus on meat to illustrate the ills of market concentration. But as 
this post from the Ethicurean's excellent Mental Masala shows, things are 
just as bad in produce markets. Riffing off an article in the San Francisco 
Chronicle, Mental invites us to consider California's mighty 
tomato-processing industry.

Here are some highlights.

    * Before World War II, California produced 20 percent of the nation's 
processing tomatoes. Today, it produces 95 percent. Commercial tomato 
processing outside of California has essentially disappeared -- even though 
tomatoes can be grown in all 50 states.
    * California's processing tomatoes are machine-harvested, an innovation 
that developed after the Bracero "guest worker" program ended in 1964, 
closing off a major source of cheap labor.
    * In the 1960s, 4,000 California farmers grew processing tomatoes. By 
1973, when investments in mechanical-processing equipment had becmme 
necessary to remain profitable, there were fewer than 600 growers. Today, 225 
farms in California grow nearly all of the processing tomatoes consumed in 
the United States.
    * In tomato-intensive Colusa County, just eight growers have 25,000 acres 
in production. That farm size -- more than 3,000 acres per operation -- would 
not be out of place in Iowa corn country.
    * Given these vast monocrops, pests and diseases are a huge problem and 
require regular application of poisons. Each year, the California Department 
of Food and Agriculture sprays malathion to limit bug damage on tomato 
fields. Malathion, an organophosphate, is nasty stuff.
    * Growers of processing tomatoes receive 3.5 cents per pound for their 
goods.
    * Three companies -- Heinz, Bayer CropScience, and Monsanto -- sell 90 
percent of the seed for the crop. (Heinz claims to be the "the market share 
leader in North America and the world.")
    * Growing these tomatoes is extraordinarily capital-intensive. "Long 
before harvest time, growers will have $2,700 dollars per acre invested in 
diesel, seed, labor, water and chemical costs," the Chronicle reports.
    * The industry is extremely water-intensive: each acre needs 
two-and-a-half feet of water.
    * The article contains surprisingly little information about the 
processors themselves. But according to this source, a single company -- 
Morningstar -- owns 30 percent of the tomato-paste market. Heinz claims to 
own 60 percent of the ketchup market.