Bunge Limited

The authors explain how control over the global food supply has become a weapon of geopolitical influence.

The so-called ABCD companies, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis-Dreyfus, controlled the vast majority of the world's grain trade for decades.

They could decide who eats and who starves.

and they used that power to shape the destinies of nations.

Who pays for that? Are those costs passed on to the customer, let's say an international customer buying soybeans? Is it absorbed by the grain handler, the shipper, uh, whether it's a large company or a, or a cooperative or an elevator? Or are those costs passed on to the farmer in the form of a lower price at that point of sale? And one of the things that we've, we've examined, that we've reviewed for many years, and this is not a secret, is disproportionately, those costs are passed on to the farmer in the form of a lower price or a more negative basis, the, the term that farmers utilize.

And so this is not just when you have these fuel surcharges, you, a, a farmer can't just say, "Well, that's Archer Daniels Midland's problem, or Cargill's problem, or Bunge's problem, or the elevator's problem." It- it's a problem that actually gets mostly passed on to the farmer.

Because if, if a, if a agricultural shipper or an exporter tried to pass those costs on to their international customer, what the international customer would likely do is say, "Well, I'm gonna buy more soybeans from Brazil today if you're gonna try to pass those costs on to me." We operate in a very competitive environment.

And as a result, those costs are passed on to the farmer.

Russia struck one of Ukraine's biggest sunflower processing plants in Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine, killing two people and injuring five.

Bunge, an American company, owns the facility.

The attack is the latest blow to an important Ukrainian export industry.

Vegetable oils brought in five point two billion dollars last year.