ActionAid is calling for national and international legal obligations on companies to promote, secure and protect human rights and the environment as well as reform of global food markets to stop the abuse of buyer power by transnational food corporations so that farmers and producers get a fair deal.

ActionAid’s report, Power Hungry: Six Ways to Regulate Global Food Companies , highlights the growing power of many global food companies.

Multinationals such as Nestlé, Unilever, Monsanto, Parmalat, Cargill and Wal-Mart have gained control of the global food chain - all the way from seed to supermarket shelf and are threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of poor farmers and undermining their basic rights.

Our research from Brazil shows that 50,000 dairy farmers have been forced out of business, after a series of takeovers by Nestlé and Parmalat.

In Peru, twenty-four children died after they were contaminated with a poisonous pesticide that is sold by a subsidiary of Bayer and was poorly labelled.

In India, an estimated 12,000 children worked last year on cotton seed farms supplying subsidiaries of Bayer, Monsanto, Syngenta and Unilever. Many children were also exposed to dangerous pesticides.

These cases provide condemning evidence of the impact of increasing corporate power within the global food chain. The statistics are alarming:

• Trade within multinationals accounts for about 60% of all global trade
  
• Three companies control 85% of the world’s tea market
  
• Two companies handle 50% of the world’s trade in bananas
  
• In the Ivory Coast, four multinationals control 95% of cocoa processing
  
• In Peru, Nestlé controls 80% of milk production.