Becoming a Market Society 4 prices pushed people into poverty was not part of the investors’ financial
objective or moral calculation.
As sophisticated financial strategies are grafted onto the modern
food system, more mergers and acquisitions by ever-larger multinational
companies follow. Food is no longer valued for its ability to sustain life,
but only for its ability to generate profits. Whether higher returns come
from squeezing farmers under contract to grow pigs or poultry, creating
a monopoly on seeds that can by doused with chemicals, or selling food
laden with cheap calories makes no difference.
“We all blew it” applies not only to futures markets but to a cavalier
acceptance of markets. The phrase “free markets” is bandied about as if
questioning free markets is on par with challenging gravity. The plain fact
is, though, that free markets are more illusion than reality. As Dwayne
Andreas, the former CEO of ADM (one of four largest grain traders
in the world) unabashedly put it, “There isn’t one grain of anything in
the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see
a free market is in the speeches of politicians.” The closest America
has come to free markets were the competitive conditions outlined by
Adam Smith, which, at least in the modern food system, no longer exist.
This is not to say that markets have no role. A market economy
can help organize productive activity. In a food system, a market
economy helps assemble the biological drive for food, the resources to
produce it, the governance to regulate shared interests, and the science
to spur advancement. A market economy can span geography, national
boundaries, languages, and cultures.
But when the utilitarian mindset of a market economy takes over and
absorbs peoples’ outlook on life, the whole of society is in trouble. When
market-oriented thinking becomes so ingrained in peoples’ psyches that
they rationalize away once-important values, then a market economy
has become a market society.
In a market society, everything is for sale (if you have the money to buy
it) and anything without a price tag is deemed unimportant. No market,
no price, no value—which includes the contributions of nature. With
no market for wild honeybees, for example, their value is unimportant
and wild bees are forgotten. In their place have come monoculture