Pre-competitive alliances are common in the corporate world. Such alliance brings together competitors who share common interests. For example, all fast food businesses compete with each other, but share interest with respect to some food policies.
*Disclaimer – This blog reflects the current state of my knowledge. It does not reflect the opinion of any institution, and my understanding will change as I learn more. The purpose of this blog is to summarize information, stimulate thought, raise conversation, and serve as a basis for further studies.
Pre-competitive industry alliances
Pre-competitive industry alliances are extremely powerful around the world – not just in agriculture and food. Climate Denial business networks are one example, or the chemical industry. Studying their strategies helps elucidating how power works at a global scale.
- In Europe, governments and a pre-competitive alliance of European chemical corporations have agreed to promote a positive list of chemicals that are allowed to have contact with water. A similar positive list was established for chemicals with food contact. Such lists put significant requirements on chemical companies: to reveal ingredients, and to restrict the use of many questionable or new chemicals. Why did the industry group approve of such progressive environmental policies, depite the costs? Well, the European Union also imposes trade restrictions on foreign companies who are not complying with this positive list, effectively banning the EU market for US competitors. So the corporate chemical alliance agrees to progressive policies, because the costs from compliance are smaller than the benefits from excluding international competitors.
- The US corn industry, extremely conservative and mostly denying the relevance of climate change (or at least the human contribution to it) has embraced ethanol biofuel for climate mitigation. They often align with climate advocates who call for reducing the CO2 footprint of transportation. Otherwise, the same industry is against any climate-related restrictions (including soil health policies). How comes? Ethanol policies have other benefits to the industry – they create an artificial market demand for corn that drives up global corn prices. It also triggers a large conversion of new wilderness into corn monocultures (directly from bush to fields, or by pushing the grazing land frontier further into the Amazon forest). So land investors celebrate the increase of land values in the name of climate.
- Recently, the push from the Aviation industry to include “Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs)” – corn- and canola-based oils – is promising a similar push in prices of grains and land. Not surprisingly, the most conservative grain farmers, otherwise against government market interventions and mostly deny human-caused climate change – are aligning with aviation industry and climate advocates to lobby governments for imposing climate mitigation policies that intervene in the market.
These examples showcase alliances of competing companies that collaborate to influence governments, and change public perception. To do so, industry establishes “Narrative Networks” for influencing public opinion and policy.
Pre-competitive alliances in Food & Agriculture
Historically, food was always tightly linked with government – nothing is more disruptive to institutions than hungry people. As long as private companies existed, they tried to lobby government decisions…
Today, all major food corporations participate in the global Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) as a “pre-competitive alliance” that lobbies globally for shared industry interests and establish that members embrace the “sustainability” narrative. SAI was founded in 2002 by major food companies, including Nestlé, Unilever, and Danone, to drive collaboration across the industry and develop practical solutions for sustainable sourcing. On their website, SAI describes its focus on improving environmental, social, and economic sustainability in agriculture through tools, resources, and partnerships that address issues like soil health, water management, biodiversity, and farmer livelihoods. By fostering a collaborative approach, the platform helps companies integrate sustainability into their supply chains and support long-term agricultural resilience. In practice, however, SAI intervenes when governments consider restrictions on sugar and highly processed food in schools, or ensure that subsidies for climate-smart ag benefit the status quo.
Food safety regulations are the most powerful leverage for ensuring the dominance of the industrial food system. Corporate lobbyists are active internationally at the Codex Alimentarius and other international institutions, or write national food safety policies. Resulting standards create minor burdens for large companies, but they also create insurmountable barriers for small, independent producers. In Canada, local food producers especially struggle with the insurmountable costs of frequent inspector visits, or stipulations that only make sense for very large operations. Local abattoirs, egg grading stations, and many independent food processing businesses went out of business, leaving markets to the members of the lobbying alliance. So some “red tape” is not accidental: insurmountable barriers for small businesses are “by design” to shut independent competitors out of the market.
In Canada, the industry unfolded a powerful corporate lobbying network after Ontario’s government attempted to regulate and drastically reduce the practice of coating seeds with neonicotinoids in 2014. With pesticides producers under pressure to avoid a precedent case, they hired communication strategists on how to change public attitudes around pesticides. Marketing company Edelman was hired “to increase the public’s acceptance of the use of CropLife Canada members’ products“. Their study recommended that chemical companies encourage farmers to speak to the public on their behalf, also in the form of ‘reality videos’. Edelman recommends focusing on a group they call “persuadable greys”, who do not yet know or care enough to support or oppose (pesticides), but may be converted with the right message and the right messengers – typically urban dwellers without any connection to farming and with concerns around the cost of food.
By 2019, Food & BigAg coalitions had formed an entire ecosystem of nonprofits. This network’s goal is to sway the public opinion about “CropLife Canada members’ products” (speak: agrochemicals) in an orchestrated manner:
- Farm & Food Care and their provincial sister organizations for policy work and lobbying,
- AgScape for education in the classroom in Ontario,
- Agriculture in the Classroom Canada for a national of pro-agrochemical education, and
- Canadian Centre for Food Integrity is a think-tank that conducts research, does public outreach, an holds annual “public trust summits” (Tickets start at $650).
- They also launched a video series that showcases conventional farmers in a positive light, called Real Farm Lives.
Initial funders of the education initiative AgScape were only two sponsors Bayer and Syngenta, both agrochemical giants. Others quickly joined. AgScape offers free education materials and in-person speakers to schools and the general public. These education materials are all pro-corporate, pro-processed food, pro-chemical, and promote the narrative that environmental destruction is necessary to feed the growing world population (try searching “organic” or “agroecological” …). Today, friendly farmers promote – often unaware – the story that chemical companies like to establish, making it extremely difficult for critical citizens to raise systemic issues, including environmental degradation. By establishing their narrative with school children, through ‘educational’ videos, and by ensuring that research proposals also reflect this industry narrative, these pre-competitive alliances cement the dominant narrative: If humans want to eat, there is no option but to use practices that ultimately destroy nature.
Supporters of Canada’s “Agriculture in the Classroom”, a nonprofit educational group to sway the public opinion about agrochemicals (July 13, 2023)
Within these industry-led initiatives, structures ensure that corporate sponsorship remains largely invisible. Initially, the two sole sponsors of AgScape were the corporations Bayer and Syngenta – now, these corporations are more hidden. The Canada government is now the largest sponsor, because AgScape was designed as a grant-fundable charity group! Likewise, Farm & Food Care and AgScape updated their branding: the top “platinum” sponsor category now no longer lists corporations but only a handful of industry-aligned farmer organizations (many of which are financially supported by the same corporations), while there are dozens of corporate “gold” sponsors. This is excellent branding initiative with immense narrative power – and a 100% corporate-driven initiative that was instigated by the two chemical giants Bayer and Syngenta, designed to maintain the industrial farming model and hush all criticism.
Sponsors for Ontario’s AgScape AGM (2019)
The following math example shows how narrative work happens in our schools. This exercise states that students “know” that GMO corn and non-GMO corn have the same nutrition content, and GMO corn requires less spray than the non-GMO alternative. This way, students learn that GMO corn is the best option from a financial, environmental, and health perspective. And the production of GMO corn also maximizes the profits of the input industry, which owns patents on seeds and agrochemicals associated with these seeds.
Example of a math problem from the AgScape curriculum (2018).
Corporate narrative networks not only influence consumers – they define the self image of farmers. Have you seen a sign that “Farmers Feed Cities”? The Farmers Feed Cities campaign was started by Ontario’s Grain and Oilseed Farmers to “lobby the government”, and now “continues as a consumer awareness campaign” (source). The campaign slogan also offers cash croppers a Card Blanche for the environmental destruction that comes along with industrial mono-cropping: The more land I farm, the more urban people I feed! Feeding cities simply requires some ecological sacrifices! This slogan nicely aligns with the “Keeping up with the Jones’s” mentality of those who want to “farm in the big league” of working 10,000 acres or more. This slogan eases farmers’ conscience around their role in the planetary crisis, and is used to dismiss any attempt of promoting ecological farming methods. Whenever organic agriculture or agroecology is mentioned at a larger farmer meeting, you can be sure that some old white fellow will stand up and remind the audience that “Farmers must feed cities – we have more important things to bother with than butterflies and birds.”
An interesting aspect is the relationship with the organic movement, and especially research funding. The food system is often framed as “conventional vs. organic” – a ridiculous framing, because organic ag has about 3.3% market share in Canada by value, and 2.2% by area in production (Statista). This inequality is even stronger if looking at (public and private) funding for Research & development – in the US, Rodale Institute’s retired CEO Jeff Moyer pointed out that total funding for organic in the US hovered around $20 Million per year, whereas chemical farming received approx. $10 billion per year – only 0.2% of the research funding is organic. Most public research requires significant cost share funding “by the industry”, and the industry is driven by expected profits from investing in research. It is not surprising that most conventional University research is driven by large input suppliers (chemical, machinery, etc) who captures the major part of the public cost share funding, and that research mostly drives more and more inputs. While solutions that reduce the reliance on profitable inputs are massively underfunded, despite benefits for farm profitability and the environment. The practice of cost-share funding of research leaves two movements equipped with hopelessly unequal resources. Finally, in the polarized Ag world, the term “organic” has become a trigger with many players that is driving non-organic farmers away – partly due to the perception of undue red tape, perceived intrusion in personal matters, and partly simply partisanship. Called schismogenesis, the polarization of society along certain “schisms” reflects a failure of social institutions to ensure basic equity – the use of chemicals in food production is certainly one of these schisms.
How successful are these narrative networks? Around the Great Lakes, the summer of 2023 was unusually cool and moist. Grain producers (especially soybeans) struggled with heat units, and a moist fall leaves farmers with a need for drying their harvests. Drying capacity is stretched, after many farmers have converted grazing pastures into annual grain fields for feed and ethanol. With high costs of fossil fuels, the Grain Farmers are currently pushing for carbon tax exemptions from farm fuel use for grain drying (Bill-234), without acknowledging how our increasing reliance on annual grain crops is exasperating this dependence on fossil fuels. Yet, they receive unprecedented public support – an indication on their success in building narrative power.
In Ontario, some organizations work outside this corporate narrative network and are raising awareness for more regenerative production methods and a different production narrative. These include the Innovative Farmers Association of Ontario (IFAO), the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario (EFAO), the Organic Council of Ontario (OCO), and the Ontario Soil Health Network (OSHN). These organizations work tirelessly to increase awareness for non-destructive production methods, and showcase farmers who have found ways to farm regeneratively within the mainstream food system. These groups help farmers to regenerate soil health and biodiversity in the very area where they produce food – they transform fields that are ecologically degrading into fields that are regenerating. These initiatives do not direct their communication at all farmers, but rather target those who are open to exploring new, innovative practices that are environmentally sound and offer financial benefits. Funding for these organizations is precarious: the entire agricultural sector relies on private funding that is mostly provided by the input industry. Because deeply regenerative farming uses far less chemical inputs and fewer inputs in general, there are only few corporations to back up a deeply regenerative movements.
Yet, lets remain aware – most new corporate branding around regenerative practices is applauding some form of greenwashing, some “Business As Usual Plus”!
At one time, Ag in the Classroom (at that time it was called Ontario Agri-Food Education) funded school gardens. I think they got funding through environmental penalty fines. Anyway, we worked with them and tried to draw them into a broader network advocating for school gardens – common ground, we thought. But any mention of organic set them off.