Prepared by PCFS. Presented by Gertrude Kenyangi, SWAGEN/PCFS Africa in Resisting tech-driven imperialist control over agri-food systems, the 2nd session of the Land & Liberation online education series of the Commissions 1 (National Liberation) & 6 (Peasant) of the ILPS held 22 August 2025.
Greetings to everyone joining us today. I am grateful to the organizers for this opportunity to discuss a critical topic: how imperialism has deliberately designed our food and agricultural systems to serve its own agenda. I hope this session will be an insightful and engaging journey for all of us as we explore these complex issues.
Earlier, we heard how transnational corporations have established themselves as indispensable actors in solving global hunger and the climate emergency through their market domination and significant leverage over technological innovations. This systemic corporate capture cannot be done by these corporations alone; elite-ruled governments have enabled the profiteering and land grabs that are exploiting our communities. At the global level, multilateral intergovernmental platforms play a crucial role in cementing this neoliberal order.
Many of us are familiar with the United Nations—the leading intergovernmental organization with nearly every country in the world represented. The international community expects a lot from the UN, by virtue of its supposed responsibility to address critical global issues. Effectively, in its 80-year history, it has also been the leading tool for imperialism to structurally facilitate monopoly corporate control and to reinforce imperialist rule. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a stark example of how the UN enables this corporate capture. While the SDGs highlight the UN’s failure to tackle global challenges, they also create a narrative where corporations are portrayed as benevolent heroes necessary for the world to achieve sustainable development.
This year, its tenth year of adoption, all 17 goals remain to be “far off-track.” Notably, SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), SDG 13 (Climate Action), and SDG 15 (Life on Land)—goals that directly concern and involve the rural sector—are the most behind, having seen very little to no progress, especially in the Global South. This is despite the campaign to “accelerate” the achievement of these goals since 2020 under the UN’s “Decade of Action” battle cry, including the reforms made in the 2023 SDG Summit and the actions outlined in the 2024 Pact of the Future.
To keep up with the 2030 target, the Sustainable Development Report 2025 stressed the “lack of fiscal space” for many developing countries, hence the need to reform the international financial architecture. This issue was supposedly addressed at the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) in Seville, Spain, from June 30 to July 3, 2025. Predictably, its outcomes aligned with neoliberal directives: pushing for “improved” tax policies—including the broadening of the tax base, which entails the increased tax burden on the common folk—while creating an even more favorable environment for private investors, to name a few. The position of the IMF and World Bank was also expanded in financing global public goods through a supposedly “kinder” form of debt servicing that merely perpetuates dependency. It is no coincidence that these initiatives are aligned with SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals), which, by its very nature of forging “multistakeholder partnerships,” serves as the perfect vehicle for this corporate capture.
This thrust would complement the outcomes of the 2024 World Bank Land Conference, which promoted climate change mitigation and adaptation in land use financing and governance—exploiting the current climate emergency to facilitate more corporate investments that will grab our lands and advance the false climate solutions peddled by corporations. International financial institutions, after all, are part of the multilateral neoliberal architecture set up for corporate profiteering.
Beyond the progress of the goals, we also criticize the UN’s development framework. Multistakeholderism inserts corporations with vested economic interests into policymaking processes and enhances their already augmented access and voice in decision-making. Through multistakeholderism, we have seen an increased normalization of corporate capture over the past few decades, growing the dependence of multilateral institutions on corporate funding.
We have seen this take place in the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), which in itself was a product of corporate capture. It targeted our food systems for the neoliberal sustainable development agenda, with corporate figures at its helm. Its Special Envoy, in particular, was Agnes Kalibata of the Bill Gates-funded Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa. Committee members also represented pro-corporate interests such as GM seed lobbyists like CropLife, land-grabbing enablers, cartel associations, and NGOs funded by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its members, including the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). This was no surprise at the time, following the 2019 strategic partnership between the UN and the WEF—the biggest corporate lobby of billionaires.
Four years later, the UNFSS continues to be the blueprint for multistakeholderism in action, in line with current trends in financing and so-called climate action. Its second stocktaking last month, the UNFSS+4, presented the continuing influence of corporations in the UN’s food systems transformation—with AGRA, GAIN, the WEF, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development among the 14 organizations primarily driving the process. They are also part of the mechanisms set up to de-risk corporate investments in the UN’s food systems transformation, working together with international financial institutions.
The Business Engagement Group of the UNFSS+4 even launched a Business Compendium that highlighted 15 investment-ready models. These include the $300 million Mobilizing Access to the Digital Economy (MADE) Alliance, a partnership between the African Development Bank and Mastercard to develop its Community Pass digital infrastructure for Sub-Saharan Africa. The compendium also featured the $10 billion Hand-in-Hand Initiative, which is using advanced geospatial modeling to identify and propose agrifood investments in 77 member countries.
A similar dynamic is playing out at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where multistakeholderism has taken center stage in climate governance. Lobbying efforts persistently favor the interests of carbon market actors over more ambitious climate action. These efforts also endorse ineffective and flawed climate solutions from major corporations while marginalizing genuine, community-led alternatives like agroecology.
This corporate influence is not only about policy, but also about finance. There is a push to scale up climate finance to $1.3 trillion by 2035, with wealthy nations continuing to argue that the responsibility for this funding should be shared by all countries with the capacity to contribute, including developing nations. Simultaneously, corporations like Bayer and Nestlé have been sponsoring the AgriZone Pavilion at COP30, an initiative of the state-owned Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), further highlighting their pervasive role.
The increasing entrenchment of corporations in multilateral platforms like the UN and international financial institutions reduces their accountability for the harm they cause to our communities. While many of us, particularly those in civil society, engage in these platforms, our voices are rarely heard. The outcomes are minimal: at best, we receive minor concessions—which are often voluntary for states to implement—and at worst, civil society is reduced to a rubber stamp for the corporate agenda. Multistakeholderism may pretend to create a level playing field, but we are never equals with governments, corporations, and their institutional agents.
A power struggle persists in multilateral platforms—but only among wealthy nations and their corporations. The imperialist United States is still a formidable force within this dynamic, and despite its declining superpower status, it continues to assert political and economic dominance through these forums. This influence is not separate from ongoing wars, like those in Ukraine and the Middle East, or the brewing conflicts in Asia. In fact, these conflicts are inextricably linked to the corporate capture of multilateral platforms, where corporate interests to profit and plunder often take precedence over humanitarian concerns—or actively exploit them.
The US, along with its allied states, institutions, and corporations, strategically uses its financial support for the UN and humanitarian initiatives to advance its imperialist agenda. This influence is starkly illustrated by the recent, significant reduction of aid to Palestine, which demonstrates the power to withhold support from regions that do not align geopolitically and economically with major powers. This stands in sharp contrast to the robust assistance provided to countries that serve their interests.
This troubling intersection of military aggression and corporate influence not only shows how humanitarian efforts can be manipulated and used as a tool for political leverage; it also raises critical questions about the priorities of global governance and its capacity to address the underlying causes of these devastating wars.
These platforms are spaces where the rights of the global 99% are on the line, but where the 1% actively seek to undermine our rights to maximize their profits. We must not allow this to happen. The truth is that realizing system change is not just about participating in meetings whose decisions are left on the shelf to gather dust—it’s about who holds power, whose voices are heard, and what ability we have to translate decisions into actions to build the future we want together.
The voices of rural people, especially peasants, hold power. In 2021, we directly opposed the corporate takeover of the UNFSS by holding our own Global People’s Summit on Radical Food Systems Transformation, a powerful counter-event organized despite pandemic conditions. Our momentum continued with the Global People’s Caravan for Food, Land, and Climate Justice, which resulted in the Rural People’s Development Agenda—our response to the acceleration of the SDGs.
We must continue building and strengthening our movements and militantly struggle against imperialism and its ploys—to protect our lands, assert our food sovereignty, and realize just, equitable, healthy, and sustainable food systems. If we, the global 99%, organize together, we can overcome these challenges.
Take action to stop corporate capture and monopoly control! Down with imperialism! ###