Spotlight

Cargill is the largest privately held company in the United States. According to Forbes, Cargill has missed this number one ranking only once in the last 33 years. The company grew from a single grain storage facility to one of the largest privately-owned business in the world. Operating in 70 countries across six continents, Cargill has tremendous leverage in the global food system. Cargill has highly diversified business operations, and provides products and services which include: supplying food ingredients and non-food applications to foodservice companies and beverage manufactures, developing animal feed, the processing of beef and poultry, supplying salt for home and industrial use, metals and iron ore trading, as well as providing services to connect producers and consumers along the agricultural supply chain. Cargill is one of the biggest suppliers in the US for McDonald’s, one of the largest meatpackers in the US, and the company controls 25% of all US grain exports. The company reported $55.8 billion in total assets for fiscal year 2017.

• Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus, commonly referred to as the “ABCD companies,” control up to 90% of the world’s grain trade.

• Cargill strategists, along with the USDA, devised a solution to the grain surplus problem of the US: get the rest of the world to eat like Americans. The dumping of grain around the world culminated in the passage of PL-480 “the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act” of 1954, commonly known as the “Food for Peace” program. The passage of PL-480 facilitated the use of surplus grains from American farmers as a political weapon throughout the Cold War. By 1963, PL480 had generated nearly $1 billion in sales for Cargill.

• Cargill’s early success was deeply dependent on, and intertwined with, the establishment and expansion of the US railroads at the end of the 19th century, without which, their grain trade would have failed.

• Cargill produces more than 20% of US beef and pork (Excel), ships more than 6 million tons of sugar a year, and is a world leader in cocoa and chocolate (Gerkens, Wilbur, Peter’s). It has leading positions in animal feeds (Nutrena), seeds (Renessen), ingredients (Degussa), salt, flour, malt, sweeteners, starches and many other products. The company also raises and sells beef cattle and turkeys.

• Cargill’s 66%-owned Mosaic unit is the world’s top producer of phosphate fertilizer. It is also one of North America’s largest physical shippers of natural gas and electric power.

• The Cargill family has continually held ownership of the company for over the last 150 years, and still possess 88% ownership of the company. The Cargill-MacMillan family alone has 14 billionaires, more than any other family in the world.

• Since 2005, Cargill and Nestlé have been embroiled in an ongoing lawsuit filed by a leading human rights watchdog and civil rights firm, charging the companies of trafficking, torture, and forced child labor. According to the lawsuit, in the 1990s, the six plaintiffs were kidnapped from Mali as children and sold to cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast. They were forced to work 14-hour days six days a week without pay, lived in deplorable conditions, and were tortured. This is a historic case by allowing formerly enslaved individuals to sue in the US courts over human rights abuses that took place outside of the US. What’s more, the case has the ability to reverse years of US Supreme Court rulings which continue to shield corporations, such as Chevron, Coca-Cola and others, from accountability. If the case doesn’t get thrown out, other companies might face lawsuits over misdeeds and abuses.

• Bunge and Cargill are the primary forces behind deforestation for soy across Latin America, and both companies are among the largest exporters of soy from South America to Europe.

Explore this map to discover in which countries this corporation operates around the globe.

Explore this page to unmask the illusion of control you have as a consumer and see which brands this corporation owns.

On this page you will find a list of lobbyists who had been hired by Cargill, the issues they lobbied for, and a list of federal bills they lobbied to pass. Bills that Cargill lobbied against are not included on this page.

Search the page to see which US federal agencies have contracts with this corporation.

Explore how this corporation wields influence in education and academic research through targeted financial contributions to schools and universities across the United States.

This information is not available as Cargill is a privately held company and does not disclose information about compensations.