Report: Grow-ing disaster: the Fortune 500 goes farming

The world's largest agribusiness corporations are rolling out a public-private partnership programme to take control of food and farming in the Global South. The programme is called Grow, and it is part of the "New Vision for Agriculture", an initiative of the World Economic Forum (WEF) that was launched in 2009 and is led by 31 of the WEF's "partner" companies involved in the food business. Ninety per cent of these companies are based in the US and Europe, and none of them are from China, Brazil, Japan, Korea, Thailand or South Africa. Yet the "New Vision for Agriculture" and its Grow programme is focused entirely on Latin America, Africa and Asia—the main growth markets for the global food industry. The main emphasis of the "New Vision for Agriculture" initiative is on contract farming linking smalll farmers to multinational companies (and less, for instance, on corporate plantations). The English version of the report published by GRAIN is available at:  https://www.grain.org/article/entries/5622-grow-ing-disaster-the-fortune-500-goes-farming . French and Spanish versions will be available soon.