Who Controls the Global Food System? New Report Maps the Corporations and Financiers Behind It

WASHINGTON — As food prices skyrocket and the global food system faces a collision of overlapping crises – geopolitical conflicts, extreme heatwaves, severe droughts, and massive supply chain disruptions – a new report names the largest companies spanning the agrifood system and their financiers. 

The report, Food, Land & Money: The Case for Ending the Agribusiness Financial Complex and Funding the Peoples’ Food Web, identifies the 100 largest companies by revenue across global food and agriculture. The report also reveals that a small group of financial giants owns huge stakes in nearly all of the “Agrifood 100” and argues that a system so fundamentally driven by profit and financial speculation is more appropriately referred to not as a “food system,” but as “the Agribusiness Financial Complex.”

“The Agrifood 100 do not feed the world. They feed the concentration of wealth by corporate elites while driving the collapse of global ecosystems,” said Jeff Conant, Deputy Director of Food, Forests & Finance at Friends of the Earth U.S.

The report is produced by Friends of the Earth U.S. and co-published by A Growing Culture, ActionAid Brazil, ActionAid USA, Adasina Social Capital, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, Amazon Watch, BankTrack, Brazilian Network for Social Justice and Human Rights (Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos), Foodrise, Liberating Investment in the Food & Farming Ecosystem (LIFE), Rainforest Action Network, and Seeding Reparations.

KEY FINDINGS

• The Agrifood 100 collectively generated $4.5 trillion in agrifood revenue in 2022. The top 10 alone (including Walmart, Cargill, Nestle, and Pepsico) made up 28% of that total.

• A handful of asset managers owns the food system. Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street collectively own 22% of the shares in the Agrifood 100. Just 20 asset managers and one sovereign wealth fund control 41% of shares across this group.

• Shareholders win while people go hungry. In 2021-2022, just 20 grain, fertilizer, meat, and dairy companies paid shareholders $53.5 billion — more than the UN estimated $51.5 billion it would cost to feed the world’s 230 million most vulnerable people.

• Walmart, the world’s largest agrifood company, posted almost $22 billion in profit in 2025 — about $5 billion more than the World Food Programme needed to feed 110 million people that year.

• Many of today’s biggest agribusiness firms grew powerful thanks to a long history of colonialism, land seizures, and unequal access to capital and credit — patterns of exploitation that still shape who controls farmland and food systems today. Public subsidies, tax incentives, and global financial institutions are making this concentration of power worse.

“This seminal report demonstrates that the global food system is designed to serve the intertwined interests of corporations and financiers,” said Carina Millstone, Executive Director of Foodrise. “It is this ‘agribusiness financial complex’ that has warmed global temperatures and driven the extinction of species. Now, in perilous times, those of us who care for a liveable future would do well to act on the report’s insights: Food must be definancialized and corporations replaced by food commons.”

“These big corporations threaten our socio-biodiversity, food sovereignty and the future of the planet through their efforts to transform the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado into monoculture plantations and our vital rivers into dead commodity corridors,” said Pedro Charbel, Amazon Watch campaigns advisor and coordinator of the Enough Soy Alliance, a broad coalition of movements and communities resisting agribusiness expansion in Brazil. “Brazil’s social movements, Indigenous peoples and local communities are fighting tirelessly to prevent this greed-driven project from advancing, not only by opposing the expansion of the industrial agribusiness complex, but also by promoting agroecological and social-biodiverse alternatives. We must all unite in the struggle for good food and living territories; we cannot be doomed for the profit of a few billionaires.” 

“Africa’s farmers do not need another corporate-led transformation imposed through debt, subsidies and patented technologies,” said Million Belay, General Coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa. “They need public finance and policy that support what they are already building: agroecology rooted in farmers’ knowledge, diverse seeds, secure land rights and territorial markets. The People’s Food Web already feeds our communities. It is time governments and funders backed it with the resources they have given industrial agribusiness.”

Media contact: Lindsay Tice, Friends of the Earth U.S., [email protected]