“The world faces its fourth wave of global food price crises in just 20 years.”
That’s the sobering line that opens the 2026 Agribusiness Atlas, a collaborative effort between food system experts, researchers and NGOs, that digs deep into the handful of companies that have our food systems in a chokehold.
The concentration of power in the agrifood sector is nothing new. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the sector has steadily consolidated, creating dependencies and fault lines that run through almost every part of the global food chain. But we are now reaching new heights of this, according to the Atlas, which warns corporate concentration is at “unprecedented levels”.
For instance, just four corporations have their fingers in nearly all the pies feeding much of our food system – 61% of the global pesticide market, 56% of the commercial seed sector, 43% of farm machinery production, and 24% of the global fertiliser market, respectively.
As Imme Scholz, President of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, put it, this means just a handful of companies dictate what we grow, what we eat, but also, fundamentally, “the future of our planet”.
Riding the crisis wave
Yet when crisis comes, the companies ride the wave while farmers and consumers struggle to keep their heads above water.
Take Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It sparked global food fears, yet ultimately this resulted in a “marginal physical deficit” of “less than 1% of global crop production”, according to the Atlas. It was speculation – not supply – that drove wheat prices up by 50% in the first month of the war alone, generating an estimated US $1.9 billion in profits for hedge funds from wheat, maize, and soya bean trades.
In 2022, the world’s five largest agricultural trading corporations tripled their profits compared with their 2016-2020 average, while the nine leading fertiliser firms increased their profit margins to an average of 36%. Yet as corporations and investors amassed unprecedented gains, food prices around the world soared. The number of people facing acute food insecurity rose by 65 million in a single year. Likewise, the fertiliser shortage triggered by the US-Israeli war in Iran saw major firms reap windfall profits, while farmers struggled with soaring input costs.
For Scholz, it is clear that the system as it is organised now “does not reward those who feed us”, with farmers are “trapped in a race to the bottom” and consumers left to shoulder the costs. And farmers are getting a particularly small slice of the pie.
In Europe, less than 10% of profits reach farmers’ pockets, according to Morgane Ody, a farmer and representative of European Coordination Via Campesina. Farmers, she says, are often “powerless in the food system”.
“Huge food inflation is not so much driven by the increase in the agricultural price, but very much by the margins of the retailing sector and the agribusiness. And the big problem is that these margins are not controlled by the public authorities anymore,” she says.
Atlas authors stress that policymakers “should be alarmed” by the widening gulf between record corporate profits and rising global hunger during periods of crisis. Yet the policy response at the EU level has been to loosen the purse strings to allow the flow of more public money into private pockets.
Take, for example, the EU’s Fertiliser Action Plan, which focuses, in the Commission’s words, on “ensuring fertilisers’ affordability, predictability in supply and resilience for agricultural production”. In June of this year, it levied some €540 million in financial support to farmers impacted by the Middle East crisis due to increased fertiliser and energy costs. While these farmers will be able to keep their heads above water for another season, much of this public money will ultimately go to top up the profits of the fertiliser companies.
For social justice writer and food systems expert Raj Patel, the concern is that these crises lay the blueprint for future crises to come, including “climate inflation”. “We’re just being told, it’s climate change, so that’s why the prices are going up. Whereas in fact, we need to observe that El Niño and the shocks that are coming with it are the opportunity, the excuse, for companies to jack up their prices beyond the input costs,” he warned.
The shrug of supply and demand?
Often talk of market power is met with the shrug of “supply and demand”, as if the sails of the agrifood world are buffeted by geopolitical shocks, climate crisis and changing political winds and we have no power to lower the sail or change course.
Patel calls this a “mystifying” way to talk about it. “When you talk about supply and demand, you’re not really able to talk about who controls supply or who has enough purchasing power to have effective demand, and who sets the terms on which these things meet,” he said.
Calling food a “chip in a global casino,” Patel argues that food prices are “not natural”. “They don’t fall from the sky. They come through these institutions. And if these institutions are human-made, and if we choose to make them differently, we can,” he points out.
There are plenty of examples of this action in practice, as detailed in the Atlas. This ranges from top-down action, such as stronger anti-trust policies designed to halt further consolidation and break up dominant firms, to regulations that strengthen farmers’ bargaining power and secure fairer prices.
But it’s action rooted in local systems that most inspires experts like Ruth Nabaggala, from the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA). Her work focuses on strengthening so-called territorial markets – local markets which are “determined by the community”. “The demand, the supply, the quantity, are determined by the communities that are producing,” she explains.
In these markets, she argues, power sits with the people who actually make up the food system. “You’ll find that the power within the territorial markets is by the community themselves, the power, the decisions that are made within the territorial markets are decisions made by the community, people within the community,” she said.
Meanwhile, public procurement is singled out as a powerful tool in re-shaping food systems while supporting family farming and agroecological production: from public buffer stocks to stabilise prices during crises to large-scale school meal programmes and even publicly owned grocery stores.
“The tools needed to curb corporate power already exist. What is missing is the collective power and political courage to deploy them,” the Atlas concludes.
Agriculture Atlas 2026 is now available to download from the Heinrich Böll Stiftung website.
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