Food, Land, and Money

The case for ending the Agribusiness Financial Complex and funding the Peoples’ Food Web

By Friends of the Earth, from the Food, Land and Money website

A food system dominated by a handful of large-scale extractive corporations does not “feed the world,” as the corporate logic claims — it feeds the concentration of wealth by the financiers, shareholders, and billionaire owners of the world’s largest companies.

By identifying the 100 companies with the largest revenue across global food and agriculture (the “Agrifood 100”), as well as the dominant firms in several key sectors (the “Agrifood 100+”) Food, Land & Money exposes the corporate concentration at the root of the food system’s corruption. But behind the companies is a deeper layer: an entangled group of financial giants owns huge stakes in nearly all of the Agrifood 100+ companies. Together, this network of industrial agribusiness corporations and global financial institutions — banks, asset managers, investors, commodity futures brokers, amongst many others — shape land use and food production and policy according to the imperatives of profit, financial speculation, and shareholder value.

We call this the Agribusiness Financial Complex

Climate shocks, the Strait of Hormuz shipping crisis, and soaring costs have pushed food security to the breaking point in many regions. This isn’t a supply problem – it’s a structural one, endemic to the Agribusiness Financial Complex and the logic that shapes land use and food production around shareholder returns rather than human need. Understanding — and confronting — the entirety of the Agribusiness Financial Complex is essential to any effort that seeks to build resilience into our food systems and to repair our relationship to land, forests, biodiversity, and one another.

Another Food System Already Exists

Despite the dominance of industrial agribusiness, most people worldwide, especially across the Global South, still get their food from outside the financialized industrial food system. Across much of the world, small-scale farmers, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, fishers, forest communities, urban producers, cooperatives, and local food enterprises already sustain decentralized food systems grounded in reciprocity, biodiversity, community governance, and ecological stewardship. On all continents, social movements rooted in land, labor, and mutual solidarity are strengthening and rebuilding people-centered food system.

The Food, Land & Money report uses the term People’s Food Web to encompass a global vision that both centers peasant rights, livelihoods, and food sovereignty where these systems remain foundational while also recognizing the diverse movements working to uproot and transform industrialized food systems and build more democratic, equitable, and ecologically resilient alternatives. While these communities differ in their histories, cultures, and relationships to markets, they are united by many of the same structural challenges around corporate concentration, low prices, loss of autonomy, and policies that prioritize industrial agriculture over people-centered food systems.

Local and regional community-centered food systems already nourish much of the world’s population while using a fraction of the resources consumed by industrial agribusiness. Yet they receive only a small share of public investment, research funding, policy support, and financial resources.

The challenge is therefore not to invent alternatives or to be misled by profit-driven “innovation,” but to redirect political attention and financial resources toward systems that already demonstrate greater resilience, equity, and ecological integrity.

Four Strategic Pathways for Transformation
Because the Agribusiness Financial Complex is maintained through interconnected political, financial, and cultural systems, meaningful transformation requires coordinated action across multiple fronts. Food, Land & Money proposes four mutually reinforcing strategic pathways:

1. Discredit the legitimacy of the Agribusiness Financial Complex by exposing its ecological failures, public health impacts, human rights abuses, economic fragility, and social license while challenging the dominant narrative that industrial agribusiness is necessary to feed the world.
2. Defund harmful industrial agribusiness by redirecting public subsidies, institutional investment, philanthropy, and private capital away from extractive corporations. Campaigns for divestment, stronger antitrust enforcement, windfall profit taxation, responsible procurement, and financial transparency are critical leverage points.
3. Definancialize food and land systems by removing the influence of speculative finance and restructuring public policy to treat food, land, and ecosystems as public goods rather than financial assets. This includes reshaping international financial institutions, debt regimes, taxation, competition policy, and development finance.
4. Repair and Rebuild through long-term support for agroecology, food sovereignty, Indigenous Peoples’ leadership, community ownership, territorial markets, public food infrastructure, land reform, and reparative justice. Undoing centuries of harm requires dismantling systems of oppression while envisioning, constructing, and strengthening just and equitable provisioning pathways for the future.
   

Together, these strategies move beyond incremental reform toward structural transformation.

A Call to Action

Food systems transformation is essential to addressing climate change, biodiversity loss, public health, economic inequality, and democratic decline. Yet these crises cannot be solved while the financial architecture driving industrial agribusiness remains intact.

Transforming food systems requires reclaiming public resources for the public good, democratizing economic decision-making, strengthening community control over land and food, and investing in systems organized around care, reciprocity, and ecological regeneration rather than extraction.

The resources and solutions exist. Social movements around the world are demonstrating that another food system is not only possible — it has been here all along. The task before us is to imagine that future and to organize the political power to bring it to life.