Agro Industrialization Examples

The term agro-industrialisation refers to the industrialised production of livestock, poultry, fish, and crops. It is typically large scale and capital intensive. Industrial agriculture by itself, is heavily dependent on oil for every stage of its operation. The most obvious examples would be: fuelling farm machinery, transporting produce, and producing fertilisers and other farm inputs. Agro-industrialisation is positive in some aspects and makes a huge part to producing food for the whole world, but at the same time it contributes to environmental degradation such as: massive deforestation, land degradation and desertification, air pollution, increasing concerns about the long term health of local workers. This essay therefore, will explain

Even though not all farms or regions involve displaying these characteristics, an example of extraction of palm oil in Indonesia includes characteristics like: use of pesticides, control of big companies over local population and its area, deforestation, extinction of biodiversity. Due to the ambissions of large companies to make as much profit as possible, it attempts to make the food industry more efficient in economic sense. TNC companies like Starbucks who also exploit oil mainly in Southeast Asia, routinely destroy tropical forests and peatlands for plantations. Large agricultural companies are always seeking of producing a new product as fast as possible, increase market shares, and reduce costs in order to increase competitiveness. Ownerships of big companies like PT Lonsum, Pepsico or DUTA Palma Company, in Indonesia lead to overcultivation of crops for export, and the dictation of land used to produce palm oil. There has been an increasing concern among local workers about the use of pesticides on the crops, primary and secondary rainforests are being cleared up for palm oil plantation. Deforestation, is one of the most important factors as 60 to 90% of people depend on these forests for their

Due to heavy competition among big TNCs companies like: Starbucks, Nestle, Walmart, Whole Foods, there’s a heavy production, increases in market shares, and reduction of cost of foods like fast food. “Agro industrialisation is a consequence of the globalisation of agriculture” (Global Interactions Textbook). Agro industrialisation led to mostly negative outcomes from short to medium term, and the practices used in it proved to be not sustainable and not efficient. In many parts of the world nowadays agro industrialisation has a negative impact like: deforestation, Co2 emissions, land degradation, salinization contaminated water, air pollution, declines in biodiversity. In a case study of Indonesia it was clearly shown that, agro industrialisation led and contributed to environmental degradation, as large areas of tropical forests and other ecosystems with high conservation values have been cleared to make room for oil palm plantations, destroying critical habitat for many endangered species, and also questioning the sustainability of agro industrialisation