The chocolate industry is worth over $100 billion per year. Most of that chocolate is manufactured and consumed in the USA and Europe, although the raw cocoa from which is produced is grown thousands of miles away on the west coast of Africa. The biggest exporter of cocoa is the Ivory Coast. When the Ivory Coast achieved independence, back in 1960, a quarter of the country was covered in dense […]
In the past twelve months some 2,000 square miles of the Amazon rainforest has been lost to clearing – equivalent to 50 football pitches every minute. Although some of these losses are due to illegal logging, much of it has been to meet the demands of the cattle industry. In 2009 the multinational food giants McDonald’s and Cargill were named and shamed by Greenpeace for their role in the clearance […]
Last month a rather bizarre court case commenced and ended abruptly in Los Angeles, USA. On one side was the refined sugar industry, represented by a group of major sugar refining companies. On the other was a consortium of manufacturers of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), including global giants Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. The lawsuit brought by the sugar manufacturers claimed that the HFCS manufacturers were guilty of “false […]
In a relatively short period of time high fructose corn syrup has replaced natural sugar as a sweetener right across the food industry. It is now widely used in products such as cereals, breads, cakes, crackers, soft drinks, soups, yoghurts, baked beans, ice creams, ketchups and salad dressings. In fact, so pervasive is this product that it might be just as easy to list those commercial food products that don’t […]
Cargill may not mean a great deal to most of us. But it is a major player on the world food stage. Just as Monsanto has a growing stranglehold over the seeds and chemicals used for growing our food, so Cargill looms large at the other end of the global food business conveyor belt. As the company boasted in a corporate brochure a few years back: ‘We are the flour […]