Food, Land, and Money

Despite record production of crops like corn, soy and wheat, hunger remains widespread. Nearly 8% of people worldwide went hungry in 2025, including 1 in 5 people in Africa. At the same time, large-scale industrial agriculture is a leading cause of tropical deforestation and contributes to the loss of biodiversity, healthy soils and the natural systems needed to keep producing food.

This model also consumes a disproportionate share of resources. It may use as much as 70% of the world’s agricultural land and resources, yet it feeds less than 30% of the population. Food, Land & Money argues that these outcomes are not simply signs of a system that needs to become more efficient. They reflect a model built to produce agrifood commodities, biofuel feedstocks and nutrient poor junk foods with the end goal of generating profit and shareholder dividends rather than nourishing people and caring for the land.

The world’s largest agrifood companies are only part of the story. Behind them are some of the world’s largest banks, asset managers and institutional investors. They provide financing, own huge numbers of shares and make money from food, farmland and agricultural commodities. Some major commodity traders now earn more from financial activities than from moving goods.

Food, Land & Money traces how these financial interests connect with large food and agriculture corporations, and how the pursuit of profit and shareholder returns influences what gets grown, how land is used and where money flows. The report calls this fusion of Big Agribusiness and Big Finance the Agribusiness Financial Complex.

The corporate model may dominate money and policy, but it does not produce most of the world’s food. Small-scale farmers, Indigenous communities, pastoralists, urban growers and fishers form a diverse, decentralized network that feeds up to 70–80% of the world’s population using less than 30% of agricultural resources.

While communities in different parts of the world 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.

Resistance to the corporate industrial agrifood system must encompass a global vision that 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. 

Food, Land & Money calls this the Peoples’ Food Web. Despite feeding billions of people, these producers receive only a fraction of public investment, while large-scale agriculture benefits from policies, subsidies and research that reinforce corporate control. Food, Land & Money argues that the alternative does not need to be invented. The question is whether we choose to recognize, protect and invest in what already works.