Sponsored by the Waterloo Political Economy Group and the Waterloo Food Issues Group.
Please join us for a lunchtime conversation about Jennifer Clapp’s new book Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why it Matters. Professor Clapp will provide a brief overview of the book followed by a panel discussion with Prof. Sarah J. Martin (Memorial University of Newfoundland, and BSIA Global Governance PhD Graduate), Prof. Bruce Muirhead (University of Waterloo), and Anastasia Papadopoulos (PhD student, Global Governance, University of Waterloo).
The event will be held in-person, and a light lunch will be served for people who register. The event is open to the BSIA community, including all UW and Laurier faculty and students, and CIGI colleagues.
About Titans of Industrial Agriculture
Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although agricultural inputs are a huge sector of the global economy, the lion’s share of that market is controlled by a relatively small number of very large transnational corporations. The high degree of concentration among these agribusiness titans is striking, considering that just a few hundred years ago agricultural inputs were not even marketed goods. In her new book, Titans of Industrial Agriculture (MIT Press, 2025), Dr. Jennifer Clapp explains how we got from there to here, outlining the forces that enabled this extreme concentration of power and the entrenchment of industrial agriculture.
Dr. Clapp reveals that the firms that rose to the top of these sectors benefited from distinct market, technology, and policy advantages dating back a century or more that enabled them to expand their businesses through mergers and acquisitions that made them even bigger and more powerful. These dynamics matter because the firms at the top have long shaped industrial farming practices that, in turn, have generated enormous social, ecological, and health impacts on the planet and the future of food systems. Beyond analyzing how these problems have arisen and manifested, the book examines recent efforts to address corporate power and dominance in food systems and assesses the prospects for change.
About the Speaker
Jennifer Clapp is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability and the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. She has published widely on the global governance of problems that arise at the intersection of the global economy, food security and food systems, and the natural environment. Professor Clapp is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). From 2019-2023, she served on the Steering Committee of the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN) of the United Nations Committee on World Food Security (CFS) and was Vice-Chair of that body from 2021-2023.
