Global Capital and Big Livestock

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The flow of global capital administered by corporate regimes and international financial institutions has created asymmetries of power and increased corporate concentration, shifting the way animal-sourced foods are produced and consumed, giving rise to “meatification of diets”. This takes takes the example of poultry as a livestock commodity to show case how global capital flows have transformed the poultry industry globally, followed by the case of India and Bangladesh.

The talk will answer the question, “Is there any thread leading from financial markets and/or neoliberal policies to the stomach?”. It explores (1) the role of international finance and liberalisation in the rise of industrial poultry production, and (2) how the global poultry industry facilitates corporatisation of the Indian and Bangladeshi poultry sector. It will look at the power laden financial linkages and disjuncture between global capital and South Asian rise in chicken production as being enabled by a set of variegated and incoherent neoliberalising processes of state absence and policy restructuring, co-constituted between national and state governments and corporate poultry agribusiness giants.

Mehroosh Tak is a political economist at the Royal Veterinary College UK interested in investigating how agricultural production systems are changing our diets. Dr Tak particularly focuses on the role of public and private sector in creating conditions for corporate expansion and concentration of industrialised livestock production systems. Her most recent research has looked at financialisation and corporate concentration in livestock genetics markets and how they are shifting provisioning practices for animal source foods in India and Bangladesh.

Dr Tak is the principal investigator of the Critical Research on Industrial Livestock Systems (CRILS) Network https://www.crils.org/