Summarized by cleangov
Introduction:
This book is about five huge multinational companies, Cargill, Continental, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge, and André, which are privately-owned by a total of seven families. [At the time the book was written.] One consequence of this private ownership is that they are not required to issue much information about their operations to the public, which a publicly-traded company would have to do. Since they are dealing with nearly astronomical amounts of intelligence data, collected by them directly, security and secrecy about their operations has been developed to a high level. One oil company executive, with a well-deserved reputation for secrecy, said that the grain companies were really secretive. Senator Frank Church once said, “No one knows how they operate, what their profits are, what they pay in taxes and what effect they have on our foreign policy—or much of anything else about them.”
After World War II it developed that more and more countries around the world who had previously been able to grow all the food they needed, found themselves importing increasing quantities of food from other countries, much of that food provided by America. They were basically shifting more of their population into the cities and other types of work, so they had less people producing the food. Most of the food traded internationally that is the subject of this book is grain. That is, wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, oats, etc. The five companies above do not produce the grain, but they buy it, store it, transport it to ports, (often in their own boxcars, by rail) ship it across oceans in their own ships, and sell it to other private companies or to governments directly. They export and they import. They will buy and sell on behalf of any entity which has sufficient money.
All of these companies were started by individuals over a hundred years ago. They are the survivors, operating in a very unforgiving arena which has swallowed up and forgotten hundreds of lesser companies. Survival of the fittest very much applies to them, in your summarizer’s humble opinion.
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