Tag: big ag

Digital Harvest: BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street – Shareholders in the Shadows

They don’t sell seeds. They don’t own tractors. They don’t run warehouses or ship grain. But BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street are among the most powerful actors in global agriculture.

Together, these three asset managers control more than $26 trillion in assets—more than the GDP of the United States and India combined. They are shareholders in nearly every major agribusiness: Bayer, Cargill, ADM, Nestlé, Deere & Co and more. They don’t compete. They co-own. And through that ownership, they govern.

This is not capitalism as competition. It’s capitalism as quiet coordination.

These firms don’t need to dictate policy. They shape the terrain on which policy is made. Their influence is structural, not spectacular. It’s exercised through boardrooms, shareholder resolutions and capital flows. And it’s largely invisible to the public.

But its effects are everywhere.

According to the Food Barons 2022 report by ETC Group, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street hold dominant stakes across the agrifood chain—from seeds and chemicals to supermarkets and logistics platforms. In many sectors, they are the top three shareholders in all the major firms. This means that ‘competition’ between companies like Bayer and Syngenta, or Nestlé and PepsiCo, is often little more than a performance. The real power sits behind the curtain.

These firms don’t micromanage. They don’t need to. Their power lies in alignment—in shaping what counts as value, what counts as risk and what counts as acceptable behaviour. And increasingly, that behaviour is being framed through the lens of ESG: Environmental, Social and Governance metrics.

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It’s Not a Broken System: From Food to Development, It’s a Masterpiece of Control

Industrial agriculture is not a system in crisis. It is a system in command. Engineered with precision, it reflects the civilisational logic of industrial modernity: domination over cooperation, profit over sufficiency, scale over ecology. It is not malfunctioning—it is functioning exactly as designed.

Across three volumes—Food, Dependency and Dispossession (2022), Sickening Profits (2023) and Power Play: The Future of Food (2024)—I have mapped this critique in layered terms. What emerges is not a sectoral failure but a planetary regime of dispossession: a machinery that converts ecological life into economic assets, undermines autonomy under the banner of development and metabolises resistance into market-friendly reform.

The food system is not broken. It is a weapon. And it is intended as such. It concentrates power, severs people from land, deskills and displaces producers and commodifies nourishment. It benefits financial capital and corporate actors while externalising its costs—to health, biodiversity, labour and culture.

In the Global South, ‘development’ is the velvet glove of structural dependency. It arrives cloaked in the language of poverty reduction and climate resilience—while deepening indebtedness, consolidating proprietary seed systems and subordinating food sovereignty to export-driven logic. For all its rhetoric and well-laundered PR, Bayer is not saving Indian agriculture. It is enclosing it.

Behind the slick brand messaging lies a familiar pattern. Corporate contracts replace commons. Proprietary inputs replace knowledge. The land is enclosed—not always by fences, but by code, debt and bureaucratic abstraction. This is not progress. It is programmed disempowerment. Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of rationalisation is no longer metaphor—it is agronomic policy, algorithmic governance and institutional capture.

Post-development theorists like Arturo Escobar and Gustavo Esteva have long exposed ‘progress’ as a colonial narrative—one that erases plurality and imposes a singular vision of modernity. Barrington Moore’s study of agrarian class structures illuminated a deeper truth: the fate of democracy and dictatorship often hinges on how land is owned, who controls surplus and which coalitions form around agricultural production.

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Georgia Governor Signs Bill Granting Immunity for Harms Caused by Pesticides and Fertilizers

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed SB144 into law, which has also been referred to as an immunity bill for agrochemical businesses that sell pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. The bill states, “a manufacturer cannot be held liable for failing to warn consumers of health risks above those required by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.” The Georgia legislature passed the bill and was awaiting Kemp’s signature, which he finalized on Monday.

Georgia became the second state in the nation to provide manufacturer immunity for harm caused by pesticides after North Dakota signed a similar bill into law last month. Bayer has been handling tens of thousands of lawsuits related to cancer allegedly caused by Roundup, a product that Bayer owns after the agrochemical corporation purchased Monsanto in 2018. In April, The HighWire reported about Bayer’s recent court loss in which the company is required to pay over $2 billion for causing a man’s non-Hodgkin lymphoma, but the high payout amount is expected to be appealed. This case was conducted in a Georgia courtroom.

The EPA is still awaiting a court decision regarding its most recent evaluation of glyphosate’s effect on human health. The EPA currently states, “No risks of concern to human health from current uses of glyphosate.” The EPA website also states, “No evidence that glyphosate causes cancer in humans.”

Meanwhile, the passage of SB144 in Georgia means a farmer cannot sue Bayer for harms allegedly caused by Roundup because the product contains the label required by the EPA. The label states, “Keep Out of Reach of Children CAUTION See [back/ side] [panel/ booklet/ label] for [additional] first aid and precautionary statements. Alternative Text: [See container label for [complete] use directions, first aid and precautionary statements.]”

Bayer issued a statement applauding the Governor for signing the legislation. The statement said, “The signing of SB 144 by Governor Kemp demonstrates that Georgia stands with its farmers, who work tirelessly to produce safe and affordable food for communities throughout the state. We thank Governor Kemp and the legislators, farmers and ag groups that supported this important piece of legislation.”

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The Glaring Hypocrisy and Embedded Deceptions of the Global Food Giants

Bryce Martinez (18) from Pennsylvania is mounting a legal challenge against major food companies, alleging that their ultra-processed foods (UPFs) led to his development of Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease at the age of 16.

The 11 firms listed in the lawsuit are Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Coca-Cola, Post Holdings, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestle’s (US), WK Kellogg, Mars, Kellanova and Conagra.

UPFs have undergone multiple processing steps and often contain additives, preservatives and artificial ingredients. These UPFs have become staples in many households. Examples of UPFs are prepackaged soups, many breakfast cereals, sauces, frozen pizza, ready-to-eat meals, hot dogs, sausages, sodas, ice cream and store-bought cookies, cakes, candies and doughnuts.

Martinez’s legal team contends that the big food corporations have deliberately engineered their products to trigger addictive responses. His lawyers at Morgan & Morgan, a major US law firm, says the case is unprecedented and includes claims for conspiracy, negligence, fraudulent misrepresentation and unfair business practices.

Martinez had regularly consumed popular UPFs throughout his childhood. The lawsuit challenges the food industry’s argument that consumers have free choice in their dietary decisions. It argues that the notion of free choice is compromised by aggressive marketing tactics, especially aimed at children, and the addictive nature of these products.

UPFs are highly profitable for corporations. The same companies that dominate the UPF market are intertwined with investment firms like BlackRock and Vanguard, which also hold stakes in the pharmaceutical industry. This dual investment creates a cycle where investment firms profit from both the sale of harmful foods and the treatment of diseases associated with these products.

Furthermore, the prevailing economic system creates a paradoxical situation where workers, whose pension funds are often managed by these same investment giants, find themselves financially tethered to a cycle that undermines their own health and well-being.

There is a famous quote often attributed to farmer, poet and campaigner Wendell Berry:

People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.”

For a long time, that has served both industry’s interests very well.

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Pharma, Big Ag Lobbyists Help U.S. Scuttle Global Plan to Cut Antibiotic Use in Industrial Meat Production

Targets to cut the use of antimicrobials in animal agriculture were dropped from a key United Nations (U.N.) political declaration following pushback from the agriculture and veterinary drug industry and meat-producing nations comprising the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The declaration is meant to commit countries to address surging resistance to antimicrobial medicines — a problem that kills nearly 1.3 million people globally in a single year, topping deaths from HIV and malaria combined.

On Sept. 26, global leaders will meet at the U.N. where they are expected to adopt the declaration. But without concrete targets, scientists, global leaders and politicians are concerned that governments won’t effectively address the problem.

In particular, they will fail to curb the use of antimicrobials in farm animals, which is spurring the development of resistance to critical medicines, they warn.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who is campaigning for improved control of antibiotics in food-producing animals in the U.S., said in a statement, “The massive overuse of antibiotics on factory farms in the United States is a serious threat to public health.”

“Federal agencies have a troubling history of deferring to corporate interests on this issue, and I am very concerned about any role that the United States played in weakening international commitments to reduce antibiotic use in farm animals,” he adds.

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From Agrarianism to Transhumanism: The Long March to Dystopia

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain.

The big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.[1]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and big financial institutions, like BlackRock and Vanguard, are also involved, whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, pushing biosynthetic (fake) food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating and financing the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.[2]

The billionaire interests behind this try to portray their techno-solutionism as some kind of humanitarian endeavour: saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, ‘helping farmers’ or ‘feeding the world’. But what it really amounts to is repackaging and greenwashing the dispossessive strategies of imperialism.

It involves a shift towards a ‘one world agriculture’ under the control of agritech and the data giants, which is to be based on genetically engineered seeds, laboratory created products that resemble food, ‘precision’ and ‘data-driven’ agriculture and farming without farmers, with the entire agrifood chain, from field (or lab) to retail, being governed by monopolistic e-commerce platforms determined by artificial intelligence systems and algorithms.

Those who are pushing this agenda have a vision not only for farmers but also for humanity in general.

The elites through their military-digital-financial (Pentagon/Silicon Valley/Big Finance) complex want to use their technologies to reshape the world and redefine what it means to be human. They regard humans, their cultures and their practices, like nature itself, as a problem and deficient.

Farmers are to be displaced and replaced with drones, machines and cloud-based computing. Food is to be redefined and people are to be fed synthetic, genetically engineered products. Cultures are to be eradicated, and humanity is to be fully urbanised, subservient and disconnected from the natural world.

What it means to be human is to be radically transformed. But what has it meant to be human until now or at least prior to the (relatively recent) Industrial Revolution and associated mass urbanisation?

To answer this question, we need to discuss our connection to nature and what most of humanity was involved in prior to industrialisation — cultivating food.

Many of the ancient rituals and celebrations of our forebears were built around stories, myths and rituals that helped them come to terms with some of the most fundamental issues of existence, from death to rebirth and fertility. These culturally embedded beliefs and practices served to sanctify their practical relationship with nature and its role in sustaining human life.

As agriculture became key to human survival, the planting and harvesting of crops and other seasonal activities associated with food production were central to these customs.

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Sickening Profits — The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth

The modern food system is being shaped by the capitalist imperative for profit. Aside from losing their land to global investors and big agribusiness concerns, people are being sickened by corporations and a system that thrives on the promotion of ‘junk’ (ultra-processed) food laced with harmful chemicals and cultivated with the use of toxic agrochemicals.

It’s a highly profitable situation for investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group and the food and agribusiness conglomerates they invest in. But BlackRock and others are not just heavily invested in the food industry. They also profit from illnesses and diseases resulting from the food system by having stakes in the pharmaceuticals sector as well. For them, it’s a win-win situation.

Lobbying by agrifood corporations and their well-placed, well-funded front groups ensures this situation prevails. They continue to capture policy-making and regulatory space at international and national levels and promote the (false) narrative that without their products the world would starve.

They are now also pushing a fake-green, ecomodernist agenda and rolling out their new proprietary technologies in order to further entrench their grip on a global food system that produces poor food, illness, environmental degradation, dependency and dispossession.

The prevailing globalised agrifood model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt to benefit powerful interests, population displacement and land dispossession. It fuels export-oriented commodity monocropping and regional food insecurity.

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