ABSTRACT
To understand who is responsible for these nutritional failures, it is fi rst necessary to ask: Who rules global food systems? By and large it’s “Big Food,” by which we refer to multinational food and beverage companies with huge and concentrated market power [7],[8]. In the United States, the ten largest food companies control over half of all food sales [9] and worldwide this proportion is about 15% and rising. More than half of global soft drinks are produced by large multinational companies, mainly Coca-Cola and PepsiCo [10]. Three-fourths of world food sales involve processed foods, for which the largest manufacturers hold over a third of the global market [11]. The world’s food system is not a competitive marketplace of small producers but an oligopoly. What people eat is increasingly driven by a few multinational food companies [12].
