The following comments were submitted on June 12, 2025 in response to the Call for Input from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food for the forthcoming thematic report to the UN General Assembly: Concentration of corporate power in global food systems and its implications for the realization of the right to food.
This is a joint submission from the following civil society organizations: Friends of the Earth U.S., Foodrise, BankTrack, Rainforest Action Network, and Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
Download a PDF of the full comments here.
RESPONSES TO KEY QUESTIONS
1. How does the concentration of power in the hands of a relatively small number of corporations affect food sovereignty and the right to food in your country or region?
As highlighted in a recent scoping paper from the UN Development Programme’s Food and Power Initiative, concentration of power works on multiple dimensions to erode food sovereignty and the rights and dignity of peoples. Visible power operates through formal decision-making processes, such as laws, policies, budgets and institutional mandates; hidden power shapes policy agendas by allowing corporations, banks and other elite institutions to influence policymaking in their favor; invisible power shapes societal norms and beliefs to exclude, divide and control; and systemic power underpins all relationships through entrenched structures of domination, such as patriarchy, extractive capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy, which limit alternative ways of thinking and organizing. These four types of power, wielded explicitly and implicitly by a handful of global entities, are the greatest obstacles to the achievement of food sovereignty, locally, regionally, nationally and globally.
Below we describe two interlocking elements of this concentration of power: corporate dominance across the food chain; and financial incentives that entrench and enable these corporations to hold such dominance.
Buoyed by the multiple dimensions of power, corporations effectively lobby governments, resulting in further financial incentives, technological lock-ins, and skewed regulatory environments. This limits other duty bearers’ and rights holders’ abilities to implement necessary changes in support of healthy, just and sustainable food systems.[1]
Part One: Corporate dominance
Each stage of the food supply chain is dominated by a handful of companies. This concentration results largely from horizontal and vertical mergers that reduce competition, and typically increase market share or control over related markets.
Key areas of corporate concentration, as highlighted by the UNDP Food and Power Initiative, include:
- Field to point of sale: A few multinational corporations control most of the global market for seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, farm equipment and machinery, leading to high costs for smallholder farmers, reduced autonomy, loss of local food sovereignty, and increased economic disparities. Meanwhile, a handful of international commodity traders and processors dominate the middle of the industrial agri-food chain, exerting outsized influence on market structure and pricing. These processes work hand in hand with big data, biotech and digitalization strategies being rolled out across the industrial food chain, favouring the interests of a small number of large data companies, alongside the field to point of sale industrial agribusiness players.
- Retail: Major supermarket chains and fast-food restaurants dominate food retail in many countries, exercising monopsony power to undermine small producers' livelihoods, displacing local and territorial markets, influencing prices and product availability, and advancing policies favoured towards big business. Retail concentration also reduces people's access to local, healthy and culturally appropriate diverse food, and shapes food environments towards less healthy options such as ultra-processed foods and beverages.
- Ultra-Processed Food and Beverages (UPFBs): Large corporations control significant portions of this market, impacting consumer preferences through marketing and the shaping of narratives that support the consumption of UPFBs, contributing to the ballooning of chronic disease, favouring (heavily subsidized) monoculture commodities, and undermining local food systems.[2] Corporate actors also exert significant pressure on lawmakers, using lobbying to shape legislation and policies in ways that serve their interests—often at the expense of public health and social well-being, particularly for the most vulnerable. Asian markets have been particularly targeted by transnational food and beverage corporations due to market growth potentials.[3]
- Land markets: Interconnected trends of land grabbing and increasing land inequality have led to the emergence of a select group of transnational landowners who own and control huge amounts of land around the world. According to new research by FIAN, the top ten institutional landlords control over 400,000 km² globally – an area roughly the size of Japan, Zimbabwe, or Paraguay. The ownership of vast tracts of land by distant corporate entities for the sake of global supply chains or global financial capital flows, undermines state sovereignty and people’s self-determination. Land inequality and associated extractive uses are major drivers of climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem destruction, and undermine just transitions to more equitable and sustainable food systems and economic models.
Beyond yielding power over these parts of the food chain, corporate concentration of land is a major part of the problem. Due to investments, landgrabs, and continued expansion of large-scale industrial farming and economic and trade policies that prioritize global commodity production, 70% of the world’s farmland is now controlled by just 1% of the world’s largest farms. Meanwhile, farms smaller than two hectares account for 84% of all farms but operate only 12% of the world’s farmland.
To continue reading, please download a PDF of the full comments here.
[1] In 2024, there were 736 child labor law violations in the United States, according to the Department of Labor. Two large meat companies, Tyson and Perdue, have been investigated for illegal child employment, and immigrant children have reported the dangerous and exploitative conditions in meatpacking plants. The combination of corporate lobbying, subcontracting to avoid responsibility, and various states loosening child labor laws results in these human rights violations flowing from concentrated corporate power. See: https://sentientmedia.org/agricultures-child-labor-problem/
[2] “The production of UPFDs utilizes only a limited number of ingredients (ultra-processed flour, sugar, vegetable oil and milk) and a few crops, such as wheat, soy and corn. This focus and over concentration on a few crops to make UPFDs has been at the cost of biodiversity — other crops and a range of animals and microorganisms that have been traditionally used as food that had helped make a more wholesome and healthier diet — and public health.” https://www.iatp.org/rethinking-food-systems-southeast-asia
[3] “According to a 2019 study of total food and drink volume sales per capita in 80 countries during the period 2002‐2016, the increase in volume sales of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) were highest in South and Southeast Asia (67.3%) followed by North Africa and the Middle East (57.6%), while for ultra-processed drinks (UPDs), the increases in volume sales were highest in South and Southeast Asia at 120%, with Africa ranking next at 70.7%.” https://www.iatp.org/rethinking-food-systems-southeast-asia
