• xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    30 days ago

    This is just Trump screwing over the MAGA-supporting farmers and allowing for their consolidation by the big Ag corporations.

    The multinational agricultural capital aren’t losing anything. Brazil is also barely gaining anything, for apart from its farming sector, almost the entirety of its supply chain has been dominated by foreign multinational conglomerates:

    From Transparency in Global Agribusiness: Transforming Brazil’s Soybean Supply Chain Based on Companies’ Accountability

    In Brazil, 91.8% of the soybean cultivated is transgenic and the German multinational Bayer controls 90% of Brazil’s transgenic market share. Although Brazil has companies that dominate soy genetics, transgenics are controlled by multinationals that receive royalties from Brazilian companies licensed to use their technology in seed production. Domestic seed producers such as Tropical Melhoramento and Genética (TMG) who have created their own germplasm improvement programmes and pay royalties for the use of transgenics, hold 25% of the market share. Studies show that multinationals that own the characteristics transferred to local germplasm make about 65% of the profit from the final price of soybeans, while the other 35% of the profit is shared between the germplasm developers and seed multipliers [45]. Thus, in the segment of the chain related to the production of seeds, domestic capital would be equivalent to only 8.7% for the agricultural year of 2019/2020 (35% of 25% market share), as described in Table 2.

    The machinery sector is a worldwide oligopoly as a result of mergers and acquisitions headed by the following major international groups: John Deere, CNH (holder of the brands Case and New Holland), and AGCO (holder of the brands Massey Ferguson and Valtra). In Brazil, the three companies together control 99.6% of tractor sales and 100% of combine harvester sales [39]. The national capital share for the agricultural year of 2019/2020 was estimated at 0.2% when including the Brazilian company Agrale, see Table 2, which produces tractors rarely used for soybean due to their relatively small size.

    The results reveal that the market share held by Brazilian groups as a whole dropped between 2015 and 2020. In this time span, there were changes in the share held by domestic companies in the segments of seeds (from 16.5 to 8.7%), fertilisers (from 33.5 to 19.2%), pesticides (from 4.3 to 5.8%), machinery (from 1.9 to 0.2%), and in the trading sector (from 30.7 to 16.1%). Proportionally, the market share held by Brazilian groups as a whole dropped from 40% in 2015 to 34.6% in 2019/2020. The share of domestic groups in the capital and technology intensive sectors (excluding the farming sector) dropped from 12.5% in 2015 to 7.1% in 2020.

    In other words, the petty bourgeois farmers fell for Trump’s rhetoric, when it should have been obvious that he would listen to the lobbyists from big Ag corpos than the peasants he despises.