Multinational Agribusiness, Market Selection, and Animal Health: The Case of Cargill

As global agricultural supply chains evolve, multinational agribusinesses increasingly combine traditional commodity distribution with precision nutrition, biosecurity practices, and specialized services. This thesis examines the factors associated with the foreign market presence of multinational agribusinesses and whether that presence is systematically associated with animal-health outcomes, using Cargill as a case study. The analysis combines corporate case studies with econometric evidence. Two Cargill case studies connect theories of market selection and servitization to corporate practice. An evaluation of the small-ruminant sector illustrates the factors considered in foreign-market selection, while Project Trinity provides descriptive evidence on nutritional interventions and animal-health outcomes and motivates a potential mechanism linking multinational presence to animal health. The empirical analysis uses a cross-sectional country-species dataset for 2024. The first exercise examines the correlates of Cargill's direct productive and commercial presence. Population, business freedom, and integration into international trade networks are positively associated with Cargill presence in the cross-country specifications. In the more demanding specification with country and species fixed effects, which exploits variation across livestock sectors within countries, the positive associations with sector-specific trade flows remain. The second exercise examines the association between Cargill presence and reported veterinary disease outbreaks. Cargill presence has a negative and statistically significant association with reported disease outbreaks in the preferred Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) specification, which incorporates species-specific indicators of screening, monitoring, and surveillance to account for differences in diagnostic and reporting intensity, as well as country and species fixed effects, thereby comparing livestock sectors within the same country. While the cross-sectional design does not permit a causal interpretation or eliminate self-selection across country-species markets, the result is consistent with the hypothesis that multinational agribusiness presence may be associated with improved animal-health outcomes.