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Source: Food industry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Traditionally, over thousands of years, food production was centered around two ... Chiquita Brands International, another US based fruit company, ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_industry - 35k - Cached - Similar pages Food industry From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search The food industry is the complex, global collective of diverse businesses that together supply much of the food energy consumed by the world population. Only subsistence farmers, those who survive on what they grow, can be considered outside of the scope of the modern food industry. The food industry includes: Regulation: local, regional, national and international rules and regulations for food production and sale, including food quality and food safety, and industry lobbying activities Education: academic, vocational, consultancy Research and development: food technology Financial services insurance, credit Manufacturing: agrichemicals, seed, farm machinery and supplies, agricultural construction, etc. Agriculture: raising of crops and livestock, seafood Food processing: preparation of fresh products for market, manufacture of prepared food products Marketing: promotion of generic products (e.g. milk board), new products, public opinion, through advertising, packaging, public relations, etc Wholesale and distribution: warehousing, transportation, logistics Retail: supermarket chains and independent food stores, direct-to-consumer, restaurant, food services Contents 1 Overview 2 Definitions 3 Industry size 4 Agriculture 5 Food processing 6 Wholesale and distribution 7 Retail 8 Food industry technologies 9 Marketing 10 Regulation 11 Labour and education 12 Research and development 13 Prominent Food Companies 14 References 15 External links Overview Essentially, the food industry involves the commercial movement of food from field to fork. The modern food industry is the result of technological and cultural changes that have occurred over the last 150 years. Traditionally, over thousands of years, food production was centered around two activities: Labor-intensive agricultural activities, the farming of grain, produce and livestock; Personal food preparation, where individuals and families acquire raw and minimally processed ingredients, and prepare them for their own consumption. A significant percentage of the population was directly involved in farming, and in the process, many people actually fed themselves, from field to table. By contrast, the modern food industry relies far more on technology, particularly on mechanization and biochemistry, than on human and animal labor. In this way, food is raised, manipulated, preserved and moved around, resulting in a food industry that is to a great degree global in nature, with food and related resources travelling great distances. For example, farm machinery and parts from Europe and agrichemicals from the US may routinely travel to farms in South America, where farm products are raised and shipped to North America for fresh market consumption, or for use in processed foods which may then travel to further points around the world. The point at which foods are gathered and prepared has also become fragmented: much of what we eat has already been assembled for consumption. This modern food system relies heavily on technology, transportation, management and logistics for physical fulfillment, and on marketing and government regulation for maintaining an efficient consumer market. An incredibly wide range of businesses and individuals are employed by and profit from all aspects of this huge and complex system. A tremendous amount of governmental regulation and administration is also involved in this continual flow of materials, food products, and related information. Definitions Food industry is not a formally defined term, however, it is usually used in a broadly inclusive way to cover all aspects of food production and sale. The Food Standards Agency, a government body in the UK, describes it thus:"...the whole food industry – from farming and food production, packaging and distribution, to retail and catering."[1] The Economic Research Service of the USDA uses the term food system to describe the same thing:"The U.S. food system is a complex network of farmers and the industries that link to them. Those links include makers of farm equipment and chemicals as well as firms that provide services to agribusinesses, such as providers of transportation and financial services. The system also includes the food marketing industries that link farms to consumers, and which include food and fiber processors, wholesalers, retailers, and foodservice establishments."[2]. Industry size Processed food sales worldwide are approximately US$3.2 trillion (2004). In the U.S., consumers spend approximately US$1 trillion annually for food, [3] or nearly 10 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Over 16.5 million people are employed in the food industry Agriculture Main article: Agriculture Agriculture is the process of producing food, feed, fiber and other desired products by the cultivation of certain plants and the raising of domesticated animals (livestock). The practice of agriculture is also known as "farming", while scientists, inventors and others devoted to improving farming methods and implements are also said to be engaged in agriculture. More people in the world are involved in agriculture as their primary economic activity than in any other, yet it only accounts for four percent of the world's GDP. Food processing Main article: Food processing Food processing is the methods and techniques used to transform raw ingredients into food for human consumption. Food processing takes clean, harvested or slaughtered and butchered components and uses them to produce marketable food products. Wholesale and distribution A vast global transportation network is required by the food industry in order to connect its numerous parts. These include suppliers, manufacturers, warehousing, retailers and the end consumers. Retail With populations around the world concentrating in urban areas,[4] food buying is increasingly removed from all aspects food production. This is a relatively recent development, taking place mainly over the last 50 years. The supermarket is a defining retail element of the food industry, where tens of thousands of products are gathered in one location, in continuous, year-round supply. Food preparation is another area where change in recent decades has been dramatic. Today, two food industry sectors are in apparent competition for the retail food dollar. The grocery industry sell fresh and largely raw products for consumers to use as ingredients in home cooking. The food service industry offers prepared food, either as finished products, or as partially prepared components for final "assembly". Food industry technologies Sophisticated technologies define modern food production. They include many areas. Agricultural machinery, originally led by the tractor, has practically eliminated human labor in many areas of production. Biotechnology is driving much change, in areas as diverse as agrichemicals, plant breeding and food processing. Many other areas of technology are also involved, to the point where it is hard to find an area that does not have a direct impact on the food industry. Computer technology is also a central force, with computer networks and specialized software providing the support infrastructure to allow global movement of the myriad components involved. Marketing As consumers grow increasingly removed from food production, the role of product creation, advertising, publicity become the primary vehicles for information about food. With processed food as the dominant category, marketers have almost infinite possibilities in product creation. Regulation The smooth flow of international trade is critical to the functioning of the modern food industry. Government regulations have to be synchronized to some greater degree to allow this. Labour and education Until the last 100 years, agriculture was labor intensive. Farming was a common occupation. Food production flowed from millions of farms. Farmers, largely trained from generation to generation, carried on the family business. That situation has changed dramatically. In North America, over 50% of the population were farm families only a few decades ago; now, that figure is around 1-2%, and some 80% of the population lives in cities. The food industry as a complex whole requires an incredibly wide range of skills. Several hundred occupation types exist within the food industry. Research and development Research in agricultural and food processing technologies happens in great part in university research environments. Projects are often funded by companies from the food industry. There is therefore a direct relationship between the academic and commercial sectors, as far as scientific research. Prominent Food Monsanto is a leading producer of pesticide, seeds, and other farming products. Both Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill process grain into animal feed and a diverse group of products. ADM also provides agricultural storage and transportation services, while Cargill operates a finance wing. Bunge is a global soybean exporter and is also involved in food processing, grain trading, and fertilizer. Dole Food Company is the world's largest fruit company. Chiquita Brands International, another US based fruit company, is the leading distributor of bananas in the United States. Sunkist Growers, Incorporated is a U.S. based grower’s cooperative. Tyson Foods is the world’s largest processor and marketer of chicken and the largest beef exporter from the United States. Smithfield is the world's largest pork processor and hog producer. Nestlé is the world's largest food and beverage company. The Altria Group owns 88.1% of Kraft Foods, the largest U.S. based food and beverage company. Unilever is an Anglo-Dutch company that owns many of the world's consumer product brands in foods and beverages Sysco Corporation, mainly catering to North America and Canada, is one of the world's largest food distributor. References Economic Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture ^ "Industry", Food Standards Agency (UK). " Food market structures: Overview", Economic Research Service (USDA) ^ Food Industry Overview, Plunkett Research. Retrieved 17 February 2006. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revision, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (United Nations). External links Agribusiness, Food Industry and Forest Industry Associations on the Internet (1998) Food processing knowledge portal Food Business Review Portal for the Food Industry Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_industry" Category: Food industry Cite this article This page was last modified 16:04, 31 March 2007. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.) Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a US-registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity. Privacy policy About Wikipedia Disclaimers

WikiPedia Agricultural Policy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_policy

Subsidies

main article: agricultural subsidy Governments pay subsidies to encourage domestic production of a good. Such subsidies are necessary when a government wants to alter the free-market outcome in product markets. The subsidies transfer some costs of production from producers to the government, allowing production at above-market costs. The effect of Western food subsidies [360$ billion] is overwhelmingly to reduce world prices. For decades the 3rd world has earned only half the free market price for food, its primary product. Consumption subsidies can also be used to alter markets. A consumption subsidy offsets a portion of the purchase price of a product.

Price controls

Price floors or ceilings set a minimum or maximum price for a product. Price controls alter free-market outcomes by encouraging over-production by a price floor or over-consumption by a price ceiling.

Import barriers

A government can erect trade barriers to limit the quantity of goods imported (in the case of a quota) or enact tariffs to raise the domestic price of imported products. These barriers give preference to domestic producers.
...

Objectives of market intervention

National security

Some argue that nations have an interest in assuring there is sufficient domestic production capability to meet domestic needs in the event of a global supply disruption. Significant dependence on foreign food producers makes a country strategically vulnerable in the event of war, blockade or embargo. Maintaining adequate domestic capability allows for food self-sufficiency that lessens the risk of supply shocks due to geopolitical events. Agricultural policies may be used to support domestic producers as they gain domestic and international market share. This may be a short term way of encouraging an industry until it is large enough to thrive without aid. Or it may be an ongoing subsidy designed to allow a product to compete with or undercut foreign competition. This may produce a net gain for a government despite the cost of interventions because it allows a country to build up an export industry or reduce imports.

Environmental Protection and Land Management

Farm or undeveloped land composes the majority of land in most countries. Policies may encourage some land uses rather than others in the interest of protecting the environment. For instance, subsidies may be given for particular farming methods, forestation, land clearance, or pollution abatement.

Rural poverty and unemployment relief

Subsidising farming may encourage people to remain on the land and obtain some income. This might be relevant to a third world country with many peasant farmers, but it may also be a consideration to more developed countries such as Poland. This has a very high unemployment rate, much farmland and retains a large rural population growing food for their own use. Price controls may be used to assist poor citizens. Many countries have used this method of welfare support as it delivers cheap food to the poorest without the need to assess people to give them financial aid.

Organic farming assistance

See green economists. Some argue that small gardens and greenhouses should be favored, especially if produce is consumed locally. Some argue for tax, tariff and trade rules to exempt such production for local use, especially family farm or farm co-op production, and strongly deny that agricultural and industrial policy should be linked, or should be subject to the same law. One rationale is that local production of organic produce by families in their own gardens for their own consumption is not taxed or regulated, and that little or no use of the energy-and-land-intensive transport system, or energy-and-labor intensive regulation system is required for these same people to sell the same product to neighbors.

• Safe trade rules to encourage organic farming and self-reliance, led by opponents of genetically modified food and monoculture. See Greenpeace.

• Fair trade rules to ensure that poor farmers in underdeveloped nations that produce crops primarily for export are not exploited to put local farmers in developing nations out of work - which advocates consider a dangerous "race to the bottom" in agricultural labor and safety standards. Opponents point out that most agriculture in developed nations is produced by industrial corporations (agribusinesses) which are hardly deserving of sympathy, and that the alternative to exploitation is poverty.

U.S. food imports outrun FDA resources - USATODAY.com

Late in October, a truckload of cantaloupes was stopped as it crossed the Mexican border near here. http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2007-03-18-food-safety-usat_N.htm - Cached - Similar pages

(FDA is struggling to ensure safety of imported food-(USA net import society)
deseret news ^ | By Craig Simons | By Craig Simons

Posted on 04/16/2007 6:19:47 AM PDT by Flavius
Edited on 04/16/2007 6:27:26 AM PDT by Lead Moderator.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1818084/posts
[history]

Cox News Service BEIJING —

The U.S. pet food scare has raised the specter that surging imports from China and other nations with poor sanitary standards are outpacing U.S. inspectors and could threaten food safety for humans. China's chief food exports to the United States include shrimp, fish and apple juice, and China sells increasing amounts of food ingredients incorporated into other products.

To improve its export controls, Beijing has added food inspectors in recent years, but officials examine only a tiny fraction of exports, Chinese experts said. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced last week that wheat gluten contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical used in plastics and fertilizers, had been imported from the southern Chinese city of Xuzhou and ended up in dozens of pet food brands sold in stores across North America. At least 16 cats and dogs have died in the United States, and thousands more have been sickened. As food imports to the United States have risen in recent years, the FDA's ability to monitor incoming shipments has plunged.

"The FDA does not have the resources or the up-to-date surveillance system that's needed," said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. "This is the Achilles' heel in our system."

In China, hundreds of millions of farmers toil on small plots that are difficult to regulate. Poorly educated in agricultural science, Chinese farmers use more fertilizer and pesticides than American farmers do to coax growth from over-cultivated soil. The result is that "China has one of the world's highest rates of chemical fertilizer use per hectare, and Chinese farmers use many highly toxic pesticides, including some that are banned in the United States," a U.S. Department of Agriculture report published last November stated.

While many of the whole foods exported from China to the United States come from farms under contract with foreign companies that are likely to maintain higher standards than small Chinese farms, "there's always risk that some products in the domestic market end up in the export stream," said Isabelle Meister, a Beijing-based pesticides expert for the environmental group Greenpeace. Chinese exports to the United States have surged. China's agricultural exports to the United States reached $2.26 billion in 2006, up from $453 million in 1993, according to the USDA.

Globally, Chinese exports of wheat gluten, which is used in many products including cereals and pasta, have more than quadrupled since 200,1 and demand currently exceeds supply, said Ren Yongzhen, a sales manager at Henan Lianhua Monosodium Glutamate Co., Ltd., an international trading company in Henan province. In the past five years, total food imports to the United States have risen by about 50 percent while the number of FDA food import inspectors has fallen by roughly 20 percent, said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University.

The FDA is able to inspect less than 1 percent of imported foods they are tasked with monitoring, "and even then they're mostly just looking at paperwork," she said in a phone interview. At the same time, the agency has to cope with more varied contaminants, including many pesticides banned in the United States, unusual bacteria and falsely labeled products, Doyle said in a telephone interview. More than 80 percent of the nation's seafood, 45 percent of fresh fruit and 17 percent of fresh vegetables are now imported, Doyle said.

The FDA refused 215 food shipments from China in March, second only to 278 shipments refused from India. Among rejected shipments were "dried fungus" judged to be "filthy," fish tainted with salmonella, a potentially lethal bacterium, and a container of plums containing unlisted ingredients and unsafe additives, according to an FDA report. In January and February, more refused shipments came from China than any other country. But because the FDA can inspect only a small fraction of imports, increasing amounts of contaminated food enter the United States, experts said. "The centralized, globalized food system that now exists is great for making cheap food, but if there's a problem, then it's a problem big time," because of the wide distribution of ingredients and the difficulty of tracking them, said Nestle, who is writing a book about pet food.

In economies where people eat food produced near their homes, contamination outbreaks can be handled quickly,
but in a global economy "they affect many, many people," she said. A Greenpeace investigation of Chinese fruit exports to Hong Kong in January found that four of five samples tested "were confirmed to be contaminated by highly toxic pesticides," including the insecticide DDT, the group said in a report.

The United States banned DDT for most uses in 1972 because it "posed unacceptable risks to the environment and potential harm to human health," according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Because low exposure to pesticide residues is unlikely to cause immediate reactions, the chemicals are often overlooked as health threats, but chronic exposure could cause long-term health problems, Meister said.

The intentional sale of fake and adulterated products has also become widespread in China, where salesmen have been caught dyeing meat to make it look fresh and adding toxic chemicals to products to improve shelf life. In 2003 and 2004, at least a dozen Chinese infants died after eating knock-off baby formula with little or no nutritional value. Chinese officials announced last November that farmers in China's northern Hebei province were feeding ducks a carcinogenic dye to make them lay eggs with red yolks because the variety demanded a higher sales price than typical eggs.

The adulteration of food products has become more serious as the number of small Chinese companies has proliferated in recent years, increasing competition and making regulation difficult, said Hu Xiaosong, a food safety expert at China Agricultural University.

The FDA is currently investigating the possibility that melamine was intentionally mixed stating that the FDA's food safety programs "are woefully underfunded to adequately accomplish the tasks required to verify the safety of the U.S. food supply" and calling for an FDA budget increase of $75 million. Doyle called the pet food scare "a wake-up call to the nation that the FDA is underfunded." "We're going to become a net food import country, so we'd better have a good monitoring system in place.

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KEYWORDS: food; shame

HUGE List of Food Importers

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