The trend right now is to frighten ourselves with Brazil’s huge agricultural potential: they have millions of hectares of undeveloped fertile soil, the ideal climate, three harvests per year, and farm workers who cost little more than the paper their paycheques are printed on. This is all true. But they also have some big problems, such as infrastructures and sanitary controls, which will certainly keep them from fully developing this potential for some years to come.

In fact (and curiously enough), of all the countries that could hurt us, there is one we rarely talk about, yet it’s slowly taking over the world. What country, you ask? The United States of America of course!

Americans are feeling pretty good with their huge multinationals. Case in point is Smithfield, a company I’ve already talked about; it is growing at breakneck speed and owns, outright, 900,000 sows and production plants capable of slaughtering about 27 million pigs annually. This represents more than all of our great country’s total slaughtering capacity! And that’s not all. It recently laid its hands on Swift & Co., the third largest group in the United States, with the intention of adding 11 million (!) more pigs to its already staggering bottom line. I get dizzy just writing this.

Thanks to a weak dollar, which is the company’s main source of fuel, Smithfield is increasingly exporting all over the world. It now has offices in Spain, France, England, China and Brazil. It intends to build sites to accommodate 200,000 sows in Hungary and another 100,000 in Poland.

Smithfield is a reflection of American Agriculture. Statistics show that with as little as 6 or 7% of America’s 2.1 million farms, Americans make 85% of their production. And this percentage is not about to change for the better, it just marches on. In Minnesota, for example, where 95% of the 8,000 dairy farms can still be considered family size, there are no new cow houses being built unless they can fit a minimum of 1,200 cows, all included! This, it seems, is the ideal size when taking into account management capacity and current technology. These new and very latest farms are already responsible for 35% of Minnesota’s dairy production!

Americans and politicians alike enjoy their small-size farms. But this bond stems more from their notion of the American dream and life’s little pleasures than conquering markets.

However, Americans aren’t invincible. Although Smithfield is scary, the efficiency of its farms is not as good as ours. In fact, it has the bad habit of wanting to impose a homogeneous and bland product – like McDonald – instead of responding to the increasingly finicky tastes of consumers, which is what Europeans have successfully accomplished and what we are doing better and better with our concept of contractualization and our Coop Certified Pork.

This provides a strategic advantage to Smithfield and its associates; they’ve mastered the little details that make up the subsidiary better than us: less transaction fees, less middlemen, less fixed costs. For them, the whole is more important than the sum of its parts. But this is not insurmountable.

As far as I can remember, people in my family admired the indomitable ability of America’s farmers. We heard they had huge tractors. We’ve always lived next to this giant, but we were able to find our way out by getting organized, sometimes by imitating them, but never by attacking them head on.

A subsidiary battle is in the making over the next few years, not a fight over farm production costs. There is no single universal model. Quebec, Danish and even French examples have shown us that a network of small, well-organized family entrepreneurs, who are consistent and motivated and can properly control their subsidiary costs, can be just as successful as those huge multinationals with their bulging bellies.