A new analysis has found that geopolitical turmoil has handed agrifood corporations a windfall, while driving hunger, deforestation, and rural poverty worldwide.
Global food corporations have used the cover of geopolitical disruption to squeeze higher profits from consumers by raising prices, consolidate market power, and push smaller competitors to the wall, according to a new report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).
The report, The New Geopolitics of Food, documents how trade wars, military conflicts, and the breakdown of international institutions have not simply raised costs, they have created opportunities for dominant firms to widen their margins at the expense of the public.
Since 2008, a wave of mega-mergers has shrunk the number of leading seed and agrochemical companies from six to four, while concentration has risen across virtually every other segment of the food supply chain. As food price inflation surged after 2020, some of those dominant firms appear to have raised consumer prices beyond what their own cost increases warranted, due to thin competition in those markets.
The evidence was striking in part because some companies have effectively admitted it. The report gives the example of US grocery giant Kroger attempting, unsuccessfully, to acquire rival Albertsons, and acknowledging in proceedings that it had inflated the consumer price of milk and eggs beyond the level of its own cost increases.
Grocery retailers in the US, Canada, and Japan all recorded profit increases between 2020 and 2022, suggesting widespread use of market instability to pad margins.
The disruptions are rooted in a cascade of geopolitical shocks: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 destabilised global grain supplies, US trade wars have upended agricultural export markets across the Global South, and recent military strikes on Iran and Iran’s retaliation across the region have threatened shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, through which over a third of the world’s fertiliser exports pass.
The pattern repeated itself in fertilisers: the spike in prices during 2021 and 2022 coincided with rising profits for leading firms in the sector, and fertiliser giant Nutrien explicitly stated in its 2021 annual report that it had raised prices beyond the increase in its own production costs.
The consequences ripple far beyond supermarket shelves. Trade disputes between the United States and China have pushed Beijing to seek alternative soybean suppliers in South America, spurring Brazil to expand production into the Cerrado — one of the world’s most biodiverse savannas. The report links that expansion directly to deforestation, increased agricultural chemical use, human rights violations, and rising local food prices that squeeze the very smallholder farmers the expansion nominally benefits.
The global food import bill hit a record $2.2 trillion in 2025, with the sharpest increases concentrated in developing countries already struggling under debt: the Least Developed Countries saw their food import bill rise from US$41 billion in 2020 to US$59.4 billion in 2024. Net Food Importing Developing Countries (NFIDCs) went from US$108 billion to US$155.9 billion over the same period.
The report traces this vulnerability back to structural adjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank across the Global South in the 1980s, which systematically dismantled domestic food production capacity and made countries progressively dependent on imports. Decades later, that dependency is being ruthlessly exposed. Food price inflation has remained more than 35 per cent above 2019 levels since 2020, and the World Bank found that between May and August 2025, food price inflation exceeded 5 per cent in roughly half of all low-income countries, compared to only one in five high-income countries.
The human cost is governments being forced into impossible choices — whether to pay for food, education, and healthcare, or to service debts to international creditors. The report calls debt relief not just desirable but imperative, particularly for Sub-Saharan Africa, which became a net food importer in the 1980s and now faces some of the world’s highest hunger rates.
The report argues that governments must respond by building what it calls resilient self-reliance — strengthening domestic food systems and reclaiming policy tools capable of stabilising markets and protecting food access in an increasingly unstable world.
Central to that agenda is the revival of market management tools that were largely dismantled under the free-market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Public food reserves, supply management systems, marketing boards, and production quotas are all now receiving renewed attention as practical ways for governments to buffer their populations from global shocks, and the report argues the evidence for their effectiveness is already there, in countries that never abandoned them.
It gives the example of India’s public stockholding program which offers a compelling case study: when global rice prices surged 75 per cent between 2007 and 2008, wholesale rice prices in India rose by just 14 per cent, shielded by a government system that buys grain directly from farmers and distributes it to nearly two-thirds of the population at subsidised prices.