To Transform Food Systems, We Need to Transform Finance 

“Our obsessive desire to make and have and do and say and go and get—six of the seven most common verbs in English—may ultimately steal away our ability to be, the most common verb in English.” 

John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed 

Financial systems are playing an increasingly decisive role in shaping global food and land use, but much of that influence continues to reinforce extractive models based on the financialization of land and the treatment of food as a commodity rather than a human right. Across food systems, capital is still largely directed toward industrial agriculture, corporate consolidation, and short-term returns, often at the expense of ecological health and, with it, community resilience.  

Friends of the Earth has documented what that can look like on the ground, from land grabbing in Brazil’s Cerrado to ongoing efforts by civil society to hold companies accountable for rights violations in Liberia’s palm oil sector. 

This tension reflects a divide between financial systems that prioritize short-term returns and corporate consolidation, and agroecological approaches focused on long-term resilience, equity, and ecological health. To explore this tension, Friends of the Earth organized a recent peer learning session with an emerging alliance of organizations focused on advancing non-extractive finance in food and land systems. The discussion sought to explore how responsible investment initiatives and strategic finance campaigns can fundamentally shift the terms of investment to better support agrological food systems and land justice. 

A Disconnect Between Finance and Agroecology 

Rex Raimond, speaking from his work with TIFS, described a core challenge in the persistent disconnect between transactional, deal-focused finance and the systems-building work already being led by agroecological and food sovereignty movements. 

Raimond emphasized that the task is not simply to move more money, but to narrow that gap — translating what producer-led movements actually need from finance into forms that financial actors can engage with, without compromising the integrity of those systems. 

He also pointed to a critical reality often overlooked in investment conversations: external finance is not always necessary. In many cases, farming communities and land stewards are already building wealth through local institutions, cooperative structures, and long-standing organizing efforts. When finance does enter, Raimond argued, it must do so in ways that preserve natural resources, recirculate value locally, and avoid the extraction embedded in mainstream return-on-investment models. 

What Gets Measured, And What Gets Left Out 

Jen Astone, drawing on her work with the Agroecology Fund and Collective Action for Just Finance, framed the issue differently but pointed to the same underlying problem. 

Astone emphasized that finance must be reoriented around three principles— building the new, inclusive finance, and centering agroecological values. That includes asking who is excluded from financial systems, who makes decisions, and what kinds of knowledge and practices are prioritized. 

She noted that investors often focus on the aspects of agroecology that are easiest to quantify while overlooking governance, fairness, participation, co-creation of knowledge, and land and resource control. But these less measurable dimensions, she argued, are essential to agroecology’s transformative potential. 

Once agroecology is reduced to a set of technical indicators, it becomes easier to fit into existing financial models, and easier to strip away the social and political relationships that define it. 

Astone pointed to efforts like the Agroecology Fund’s participatory, trust-based grantmaking model, which has supported hundreds of grassroots collaboratives across more than 100 countries, as an example of how finance can begin to align more closely with community-led systems. 

Challenging Dominant Definitions of Profitability 

Kevin O’Neal-Smith (Yaa sh kanda.ets’), Director of Impact at Adasina Social Capital, spoke about both the potential and the limits of working within traditional public equities markets. 

O’Neal-Smith made it clear that there are highly extractive companies listed in public equity markets. That’s why Adasina identifies companies tied to harmful industrial agriculture practices and removes them from the investable universe to create investment products aligned with social justice values. They also mobilize investors to hold extractive agribusiness companies accountable through investor mobilization campaigns. 

At the same time, he emphasized the importance of reframing how risk and profitability are understood. What are often treated as external costs — soil degradation, water depletion, labor exploitation, biodiversity loss — can be understood instead as financial risks, from constrained land assets to supply chain instability. 

This shift in framing, O’Neal-Smith argued, is part of a broader need for narrative change to reflect the reality that what mainstream investment sees as “externalities” are in fact unpriced liabilities. A perspective change is needed. The first question investors should be asking is how to get from a system that prioritizes efficiency to one that prizes resilience.  

These concepts move outside the realm of mere theory when we treat land as a living system.  

A living, breathing, complex, durable, ever-changing system. 

A Shift Underway 

Across the discussion, speakers pointed to a growing ecosystem of alternatives, from participatory funds and community-rooted enterprises to investor coalitions and alternative lending models. 

Astone highlighted examples such as FINAPOP in Brazil, which supports cooperative-based production and value-added processing, and regenerative agriculture loan guarantees in the United States that help reduce risk for farmers and lenders. These models aim to ensure that value remains closer to producers, rather than being extracted outward. 

At the same time, speakers were clear that this shift remains uneven. Much of the global financial system continues to reward extraction, and existing institutions often lack the accountability needed to prevent harm. 

Even where attention to agroecology is growing, Raimond noted that meaningful change often comes from those whose money they manage.  

Astone described the current moment as one of gradual movement.  

Going Forward

The role of finance in shaping food systems is unlikely to diminish.  

Can it be reshaped? 

Our speakers described a shift toward finance that is more relational and more accountable, repositioned as a tool that supports rather than dictates. That includes everything from community-based financial institutions and territorial markets to broader changes in how risk is assessed and how successes are defined. 

Ultimately, transforming food systems is about changing the financial structures that determine what gets funded, what gets scaled, and who benefits. 

Without that shift, capital will continue to flow toward the systems it already understands even when those systems are driving the crises they claim to solve.