China is home to 700 million pigs — one for every two inhabitants. That is equal to half of all the pigs raised worldwide. To feed these animals, which live locked in cages inside industrial sheds, Beijing imports 80 million tonnes of soya every year, mostly from Latin America, and in particular from the Brazilian Amazon, where the vast monocultures of this legume are destroying one of the places with the highest rate of biodiversity on Earth. Soya itself — a crop that was once one of the defining cultivations of the Chinese empire. The picture just described is only the beginning of the journey that the book I signori del cibo by journalist and writer Stefano Liberti takes the reader on. A picture that highlights how the food system has by now become — unfortunately — a branch of finance that decided to bet on the business of demographic growth (the overpopulation business; the projection is 9 billion inhabitants by 2050, compared with the 7.4 billion at the start of 2017) following the bursting of the property market bubble. In this interview, Liberti reveals the behind-the-scenes story of this old-school piece of reportage, which took him around the world for two years to reconstruct the supply chain of four symbolic foods at the heart of this far-from-sustainable phenomenon.

How did I signori del cibo come about?
I began thinking about I signori del cibo while I was working on Land grabbing, especially when I started noticing the presence of groups with no background in the agri-food system taking part in the process of land acquisition — financial groups, or multinationals of various kinds. In particular, I noticed an interest aimed at controlling the entire supply chain, from production to processing to commercialisation. So I tried to follow the supply chain of four paradigmatic products, among the most consumed in the world: pork, soya (which is also feed for pigs), tinned tuna and concentrated tomato. To reconstruct the supply chain I travelled around the world and met many different people, such as the small producer crushed by the large industrial player achieving economies of scale. The book's final thesis is that many of the mechanisms operating today are absolutely not sustainable in the long term.

What is the overpopulation business phenomenon and how does it work?
My initial intuition, later confirmed by field research, is that when the stock market went into crisis in 2008, speculation shifted from the property sector to the agri-food sector because the latter was considered a safe investment, a safe haven that would allow for greater profits — less volatile ones — in the face of demographic growth, which means a consequent increase in food requirements. The system was therefore "financialised", pushing costs downwards and giving rise to enormous industries that made economies of scale their objective. And swallowing up smaller producers in the process.

How does the acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer fit into this picture?
The director of Bayer, like other similar entrepreneurs, believes he can feed the world through a closed system, controlled in all its parts. These people think they can increase production and feed a constantly growing population. But this model does not appear to be sustainable because it is extractive in nature — it exploits territories to their limit, as though they were infinite, as though they were gold mines. But in doing so they destroy the lands where monocultures are grown or pigs are raised, and the oceans where tuna are caught. The concentration of power and wealth that this creates crushes every other kind of actor and standardises consumption. So much so that 80–90 per cent of products are controlled by a handful of large groups. Seeds, for example, are managed essentially by three companies. And the same fate is befalling the market for meat and tuna.

Are the concentration of power and land grabbing related?
Not necessarily. In reality, the groups that carry weight in the global agri-food market are not interested in the production phase — they don't get their hands dirty. They prefer to outsource it: for example, they supply seeds, agrochemicals and various pesticides to Brazilian landowners and then take care of commercialising the product. It doesn't suit the multinationals to acquire land because it isn't part of their business model, and it doesn't make economic sense either. The consumption of meat on an industrial scale is unsustainable because animals are locked in sheds and isolated from the environment. But nature intended these living beings to live freely, feeding on whatever they found along their way. Their excrement was supposed to act as fertiliser for the soil: in nature, it is not waste. On the contrary, if you lock pigs in a shed to increase productivity, you have to deal with how to source the feed — such as soya or maize, generally grown on the other side of the world — and how to manage the waste which, rather than being virtuous, turns into something to be disposed of. In the United States, particularly in North Carolina where this model was born, actual lagoons of excrement form in front of the sheds. I saw them myself from the air, as I describe in the book: they are essentially small lakes full of shit that are periodically emptied by spraying the slurry over the surrounding fields. In this case, however, the manure no longer acts as fertiliser for the soil, because it also contains chemical residues such as antibiotics and hormones used during rearing to prevent the livestock from falling ill. So much so that these lakes are not brown. They are pink.

If this system was already unsustainable in America despite the availability of vast expanses of farmland, exporting it to China — for example — also meant importing raw materials, such as feed. This means transporting millions of tonnes of soya from the remote north of Brazil, where it is produced, all the way to China, where it is processed and fed to the pigs. The world must now be imagined as islands of intensive farming surrounded by seas of soya and maize. The problem is that the seas and the islands are disconnected from one another. My view is that there are far too many irrational movements of resources that are unjustifiable from a sustainability standpoint. The tuna we eat in Europe, for example, is imported from the Pacific and Indian oceans — we no longer take it from the Mediterranean Sea. It would be one thing if we were talking about "luxury goods" typical of a particular territory, but in this case we are dealing with a product caught on the high seas on the other side of the world, and yet the tin in our supermarkets still costs just 1 euro. This is because large groups achieve economies of scale. In doing so they crush small producers and pursue an exclusively extractive model that has an impact far exceeding the reproductive capacity of the tuna themselves, which are headed for extinction. This is a short-term vision over which public authorities no longer have any control.

This system has held together so far because the major producers have encountered no obstacles in terms of profit. Have you identified a weak link that could bring down this clearly unsustainable system?
If you go to a supermarket and try to find out where a product comes from, you can't, because the packaging almost never states the origin, let alone where it was processed. The tuna that is caught in a Pacific atoll and undergoes initial processing on site is then sent to Thailand or Spain to be processed again, before being dispatched to various countries for sale. But none of this is written on the product. Conscious consumption is therefore impossible. The fundamental point is to stop thinking of food as a commodity. Food also carries other values within it — quality, flavour, origin, tradition. I don't know whether there is a weak link in this system, but my work has identified a trend defined by extremes. I think the ideal solution would be to make food more expensive in industrialised countries and to demand greater transparency across supply chains. When the profit margin is slim, it is easy to fall into undeclared labour or other forms of incorrect or unfair production. That is why a bottle of tomato passata cannot cost 40 cents. An extra 30 to 40 cents would be enough to distribute throughout the entire supply chain and make it a virtuous one.

Let's close with a final reflection on land grabbing, since, for you, that is where it all began. Now that it has been included on the list of offences classified as crimes against humanity, have you formed an idea of how it might be regulated?
What is needed is an awareness-raising effort directed at the governments directly involved, because they are the ones granting land concessions — they are the ones who must reach an awareness that allows them to put a stop to this mechanism of selling off land at a discount. A ruling by the International Criminal Court is therefore very welcome if it can help increase pressure in that direction. But the real change must happen on the ground: the actors directly involved must become aware of the environmental and social consequences of this practice.