Presents the Archer Daniels Midland Co. (ADM), an international food processor that produces food ingredients, including corn syrup, soy protein, and corn starch. Discusses the challenges of feeding the growing population and the nutritional value of the company's products. Provides information about new food sources and the innovations in farming. Offers financial information about the company and lists employment opportunities. Posts contact information for the Decatur, Illinois, headquarters via mailing address.

The world's most comprehensive, well documented and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographic index. 189 photographs and illustrations, many in color. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.

The Informant is Mark Whitacre, a senior executive with America's most powerful food giant, who put his career and his family's safety at risk to become a confidential government witness. Using Whitacre's secret recordings and a team of agents, the FBI uncovered the corporation's scheme to steal millions of dollars from its own customers. But as the FBI closed in on their target, they suddenly realized that Whitacre wasn't quite playing the game they'd thought ... This is the gripping account of how a corporate golden boy became an FBI mole and went on to double-cross both the authorities and his employers in one of the most extraordinary cases of global corporate corruption of the last thirty years.

Beneath the wholesome image of Archer Daniels Midland lie some of the dirtiest practices in American business: price-fixing, bribery, and cover-ups. Unfolding like a legal thriller, Rats in the Grain portrays the crime and punishment of ADM during the largest white-collar criminal trial of the 1990s. James Lieber profiles the witnesses, the defense lawyers and federal prosecutors, the inner workings of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, and the unpredictable mole Lieber had access to. "A detailed account of how an influential corporation can go rotten." -- The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Some books get written, others write themselves. This book is the latter type. I have devoted myselfto studying the economic organization of industries related to food and agriculture for almost twenty-five years. It has been my good fortune to work at places that tolerated my gadfly approach to research. So long as I produced a few publications each year and wooed a few graduate students to share those interests, I was free to pursue an array of topics: why firms diversifY, the competitive role of advertising, strategies for selling in overseas markets, measuring market power, and many others. Although firmly anchored in the eclectic analytical framework of industrial economics and focused on the food system, I traversed a wide field at will. Some years ago, I had pretty much convinced myself that naked price fixing was not a high priority for scholarship in these industries. True, collusion was rife in a few food industries, such as bid-rigging among suppliers of fluid milk to school districts in isolated rural districts. Ripping off milk money from school children is reprehensible enough, but the size of the economic losses from localized price fixing paled besides other sources of imperfect competition.