Extreme weather, conflict, and rising prices drive today’s global food polycrisis — but at its core lies inequality and a lack of care for those suffering. From billionaires’ wealth to corporate control over seeds, pesticides, and markets, the system is stacked against farmers, workers, and communities.
Professor Molly Anderson, Professor Emerita in Food Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, Research Associate Professor at University of Vermont, and member of the Advisory Board of the European Horizon FEAST 2030 initiative, discusses.
At the heart of today’s food polycrisis, driven by extreme weather, conflicts, and rising prices, lies a deeper moral failure — inequality and a lack of care for those suffering from its ill effects. Approximately 673 million people are chronically food insecure, primarily due to poverty, according to the latest estimate from UN agencies. At the same time, the number of billionaires has reached 902 in the US alone, followed by 450 in China and 205 in India. This staggering imbalance both fuels human inequality and affects planetary decline.
The planet itself bears the cost of excess. Extravagant spending by the wealthiest 1%, from greenhouse gas emissions of private jets and yachts, contributes inordinately to global warming. Biodiversity is lost when wealthy investors buy up land, sometimes displacing Indigenous populations with long-standing reputations for environmental stewardship or traditional communities that have lived there for centuries.
Corporate concentration and its impacts
Inequality among human populations is clear in the gap between the rising concentration and profits of multinational food companies and the inability of many to purchase healthy, nutritional food for their families, now experienced by 2.6 billion people globally and 72% of the population of low-income countries. Large corporations control every sector of the food system, from input production through retail, and they are rapidly concentrating. For example, just four firms — Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and BASF — control over half of the global commercial seed and pesticide markets.
This degree of concentration eliminates competition. Small-scale companies are bought up or squeezed out of the marketplace, limiting the selection of products available to farmers and customers to those most profitable for the company. Large firms can fix prices above operating costs, as happened during the COVID-19 emergency, and prices often do not fall once the ‘emergency’ ends. Farmers also bear the consequences of agribusiness consolidation: they may have limited places to sell their products, and the company may demand a particular quality or amount of product that is difficult for the farmer to meet.
Control over politics and policy
Among the worst consequences of concentration in food system industries is the growing control and influence of agrifood corporation over political processes and policies. This is happening in forums such as the Committee on World Food Security, the UN Food Systems Summits, and in UN agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Only a clear conflict-of-interest policy, preventing industry from participating in negotiations affecting its financial returns, would allow policies favouring the public interest to be agreed and implemented.
The World Health Organization (WHO) stands out among UN agencies for its conflict-of-interest policy, preventing tobacco and alcohol producers from participating in related policymaking that seeks to restrict their use. Makers of ultra-processed food are likewise required to declare a conflict of interest with public health goals, given the clear evidence of harm these products cause.
Industrial agriculture and environmental harm
Very large agrifood industries prefer to buy products from very large producers to reduce transaction costs. The only producers who can successfully sell to the largest companies are those using industrialised agriculture practices to maximise production — synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, irrigation and mechanisation — practices linked with the dramatic decline of bird species, loss of habitat for other animals, and contamination of soil and water. And, of course, agribusiness companies produce the toxic pesticides and fertilisers used by these farmers and resist any efforts to regulate their sale and use or to support transitions to agroecology.
Exploitation of workers
Worker exploitation is another tremendous problem of concentrated agribusiness. In every sector, workers are often treated poorly, paid substandard wages, and forced to work longer and harder to keep their jobs. Agribusinesses can evade laws that would prevent exploitation because they control so much money and power. The International Labor Organization guidelines on 'decent work in agricultu're offer a framework, but public pressure is required to enforce them.
Long-term health consequences
Agricultural and food industry concentration can be reversed with anti-trust legislation, which is supposed to protect the public interest. However, this is not implemented consistently, and the full array of harms caused by industry concentration — reliance on few sellers, reduced competition, reduced choice for customers, worker exploitation, and environmental damage — are ignored. Even if concentrated industries are broken up, many problems remain. Harms to human and ecosystem health from failure to respect, protect, and fulfil the right to healthy food are long-lasting: eating ultra-processed foods and foods high in sugar, fat, and salt produced and sold by large food manufacturers leads to a host of diet-related diseases, including obesity, diabetes, and dementia.
Fighting corporate concentration
There are many other ways to resist concentrated agrifood industries in addition to legislation, starting with the simple act of avoiding their products. People with higher incomes and access to diverse shopping options can do this more easily, leaving economically disadvantaged and marginalised groups with fewer choices. Growing your own food is also only an option for those with sufficient land, time, and knowledge.
Industrialised agriculture and agrifood concentration can be fought at every scale, from communities to international forums. The pervasive lack of care for the effects on local environment and communities must be overcome first for people to be willing to engage at wider scales. Information alone is never sufficient to encourage people to move toward a proactive stance of care and stewardship. When people act collectively, they can reinforce such practices. At a local level, these include sharing food, mutual aid to those who lack what they need to live comfortably, shopping directly from farmers who use organic or agroecological practices, shopping at farmers’ markets and cooperatives that allow farmers to get fair prices, and supporting caregivers, including women cooking food for their families and raising children.
The Holy Heart Square Living Lab in Ghent, supported by the City of Ghent (Stad Gent), brings residents, local farmers, and researchers together to rethink the city’s food system. Urban gardens, cooperative markets, and participatory workshops connect people directly with where their food comes from while promoting sustainable and agroecological practices. The project is part of the Horizon Europe FEAST 2030 initiative, which supports several living labs across Europe experimenting with inclusive, resilient, and sustainable food systems. Initiatives like this show how collective care at the local level can ripple out into broader change, demonstrating that communities do not have to wait for governments or corporations to act.
Local action builds global momentum
Local collective action can readily build to the state level and from there to the international level, unless blocked by undemocratic governments that refuse to follow the will of the people. While such governments are growing in number now, local and sub-state actions can still make a big difference to the wellbeing of those lacking money and other resources.
At the international level, the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism of the Committee on World Food Security brings together the voices and passion of local and state civil society, directly confronting the biggest corporations and governments that are in their pockets. Only a global tsunami of resistance can truly overcome corporate power, and every local act of care and solidarity adds to it.
Professor Molly Anderson
Molly D. Anderson is a Professor Emerita of Food Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont, and Research Associate Professor in the Department of Agriculture, Landscape and Environment at the University of Vermont. She works on food system transformations toward greater sustainability and justice at the local, state and international scales. She is especially interested in human rights in the food system, agroecology, narrative change, overcoming corporate capture, and post-capitalist food system alternatives. She is a member of the International Panel of Experts in Sustainable Food Systems, and recently published Transforming Food Systems: Narratives of Power.