Product Description

The first and only book to describe the seven secretive families and five far-flung companies that control the world's food supplies. Little has changed their central role since Morgan's best-selling book first appeared in 1979.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53496 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 424 pages

Review
Cargill, Continental, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge, and Andre - who would have recognized these names before the 1972 Russian wheat coup? But the five major grain companies not only control the international trade in everything from cooking oil to animal feeds, Washington Post reporter Morgan discovered; they also operate as the private fiefdoms of seven all-powerful families. Morgan starts with some 1975 Russian wheat deals (In scenes that might have been lifted out of a thriller), then flashes back to chronicle the growth of the grain trade from British industrialization and repeal of the Corn Laws forward. The stroke of repeal "opened England to the wheat of the world"; prompted settlement of vast territories in Russia, the Argentine, Australia, the American West; and sent shrewd traders from the commercial Rhine - several of them Jews, barred from established occupations, and all from close-knit families - out to Bessarabia or Minnesota, "where surpluses were a problem as early as 1860." It's a feature of Morgan's engrossing book that he does well by these globe-girdling, globe-shrinking buccaneers - even as he documents, in later days, their connivance with the U.S. government to solve the perennial grain-surplus problem by inducing everyone to eat like Americans. But equally important in tipping the balance from excess to shortage was Khrushchev's 1962 decision, for the first time in Soviet history, to compensate for a poor harvest by buying grain abroad: "Henceforth, the Soviet Union would be the 'X' factor in world grain markets." By 1972, the Russians too were buying grain not to bake bread but, in the American way, to feed livestock; and with the dollar shrinking and the balance of payments deficit soaring (not, says Morgan, because of "corporate lobbying"), Nixon decontrolled grain exports to Russia, setting the stage for the massive inflationary sales of 1975. Morgan carries the story through the trafficking of Tongsun Park, whose rice link he and a colleague uncovered, and the fall of Cook Industries, the one big public company. Altogether, he's managed an exemplary synthesis that gives us the whole world in a grain of wheat. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Dan Morgan has been a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent for the Washington Post for more than 30 years. In addition to Merchants of Grain, he has written Rising in the West, the story of an "Okie" family and the making of the modern Sun Belt.

Customer Reviews

The Grain Industry has it's own OPEC
I am a captain on Mississippi River towboats. I have pushed millions of tons of grain down the Mississippi River for years. But I never really understood the gobal impact of the world's grain company's until I read this book.

Now I understand the real power behind families such as Cargil and ADM's Andreas.

A Must Know for Everybody
An excellent work detailing how only a handful of families have controlled the worlds grain trade for centuries. A great piece for families that till the soil, but one that is even more important to the people who live in the city; and have no idea of the power and control that these families wield. Reading this book will show you how these families control the cheap food policies as well as the commodities markets and other products world wide.

Eating is a fundamental reality to citizens and politicians
I first read this book 20 years ago and was awed by the importance of the distribution of grain to the world, and particularly to one-party dictators. Anyone who understands political power knows that a small number of soldiers can control a much larger populace of people i.e. the German SS figured one storm trooper for roughly every 1000 plus people. However, when those people are all hungry at the same time it becomes another matter entirely, as in more difficult.

This book shows how a few big companies control the distribution of grain throughout the world. In so doing they are not prone to accept "aging receivables" from dictators, tin-pot or otherwise. Every political leader must understand the importance of grain or face a coup. Of course, one can find those who have lasted longer than others, but only at the cost of so weakening their state that it ultimately crumbles from internal implosion.

Read this book to understand history and more importantly the origen of our food supply and how it reaches our table.