This is quite a claim, but it's too vague for me to research independently. Where would I even start in exploring the "enormous body of law" that "incentivizes a top-down corporate business structure?" I am not asking rhetorically -- this is news to me and I'd like to know the details.
Of course, co-ops aren't common in the US, but they do exist (like REI) so I'm just curious about the details of this criticism of the legal landscape in the US but without further information am unable to research the claim.
Arguably that's exactly the problem. There's so much law applying to farming that you'd need a sizable legal department to know it all. That favors centralization.
That applies to every field as corner cases are covered. Restricting it to what is actually relevant to the domain is sufficent to "consultation with relevant country lawyer" as opposed to entire law firms.
I can't speak for France specifically but if it's anything like the UK and Ireland then farming families are dis-incentivized to sell land because its costs nothing to hold, and always increases in value. As a farmer you might not even own the land you work on but rent it for the season, and large corporations don't work well with that kind of uncertainty.
NZ used to have subsidies but they got rid of it. Good for them. Fonterra is their big co-op. But with Chinese investment/ownership, most of it is going towards milk powder for export. They posted a loss for the first time last year. Canada has subsidies but different from American. They use a system called Supply Management. They make smaller family farms work better and will survive unlike American dairy. We have more CAFOs and factory farms that are not ecologically and environmentally sustainable in the long run. It’s a mess.
I would be very careful in trying to attribute something as complex as corporate structures to human nature. We have seen massive changes in all parts of society throughout the last 10k years. I don't think the human genome has changed so rapidly as to cycle through slavery, feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism, etc.
It's always such a convenient and supremely lazy explanation. It's human nature for blacks to be servile. It's human nature for peasants to be ruled by the lord of the manor. And so on.
Of course, co-ops aren't common in the US, but they do exist (like REI) so I'm just curious about the details of this criticism of the legal landscape in the US but without further information am unable to research the claim.