False solutions, real profits: agribusiness’ tactics uncovered

In this blog, we take a deep dive into how false solutions are a pillar of the corporate agribusiness model. The first part explains the agribusiness model and analyses how false solutions fit into it. We then outline eight characteristics of false solutions and provide examples of how they function to perpetrate the agribusiness model. 

Between 2010 and 2020 chemical and biotech companies Bayer and Syngenta went from being relatively benign brand names, to making headlines for their role in mass bee and insect deaths due to one of their best selling pesticides, neonicotinoids. On the back of solid scientific evidence, they became the subject of NGO campaigns, lawsuits and a EU wide ban on neonicotinoids. Meanwhile, Bayer’s merger with Monsanto resulted in high profile multi billion dollar class action lawsuits due their cancer causing pesticide Roundup. 

Yet fast forward to 2024 and these agribusinesses are both active members of the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative, which champions “regenerative agriculture” and places itself at the center of sustainable value chains. Syngenta is active in discussions on regenerative agriculture at climate summits and champions its (pesticide fuelled) version of food security. At an interpersonal level this would be called cognitive dissonance and gaslighting, but we are seeing this calculated strategy implemented at scale by corporations as the promotion of false solutions. 

False solutions are a key strategy to preserve the corporate model 

Along with many other civil society organizations, Friends of the Earth International has found ourselves increasingly fighting on multiple fronts to analyze and expose the multitude of false solutions that have arisen at pace with the rising climate and biodiversity crisis in particular, but also in other areas like hunger or plastics. So we set out to try and understand these false solutions a bit deeper, to see what connects them and the role that they play in allowing the destructive industrial agribusiness model to continue. 

Our investigation,  False solutions, real profits: agribusiness’ tactics uncovered, found promoting false solutions is a vital pillar of the current corporate agribusiness model to maintain its status quo. In the face of increasing evidence and public awareness of their outsize impacts on the environment and peoples, false solutions are a key part of their offensive to protect their economic and political interests. False solutions do this by reframing public understanding of the problems caused by agribusiness; ensuring new avenues for profitability and expanding their grabbing of resources on which the survival of communities depend. But most importantly, false solutions ensure we do not challenge the structural elements of what drives the destructive industrial agribusiness model, including deepening neoliberalism and commodification. 

By understanding the fundamental characteristics of false solutions, we can change the narrative about them – from being a flawed attempt at a solution to rather, simply, the latest strategy of the corporate agribusiness model.

What is the agribusiness model? 

The industrial agrifood system is underpinned by a “network of large agricultural commodities and input producers (eg.Bayer), intermediaries (e.g. Archer-Daniels-Midland), processors of industrial food products (e.g. Unilever and Nestle), distributors and retailers of those products and commodities (e.g. Walmart), as well as a layer of financial entities (e.g. BlackRock) that provide credit and direct investment and in reality control a large part of key corporations.” 

Each of these sectors creates the conditions for industrial food production and consumption but also work together in tandem to create the system of profit and destruction. At the beginning of the food chain, for example, farmers are compelled to cut production costs and increase yields by agribusiness food processors that demand cheap agrocommodities to produce highly processed food. Input corporations that provide seeds and pesticides promise yield benefits and lock farmers into certain production models. Distributors and retailers dictate farmers and consumers behaviour by exercising market power and via advertising. 

The system is held up by a favorable regulative, policy and financing environment, which corporations lobby to ensure. For example the United Nations (UN), currently the most democratic and appropriate global institution for international negotiations, has been progressively captured from the “Green Economy” agenda in 2012 at the Rio+20 Summit, to more recently with the “Nature Positive” concept in 2022 at the COP 15 Biodiversity COP in Montreal. 

This system is also reproduced through historical and current systems of oppression between and within countries for example eg. colonial economic and resource distribution, precarious migrant and female work forces. 

Friends of the Earth International describes some of the key characteristics of the agribusiness model as:

• Agrocommodities – an essential input: large-scale, intensive production of agricultural crops, livestock and poultry, the use of agrotoxics, and the exploitation of low-wage labour to decrease production costs. The resulting agricultural products are mainly utilised to produce highly processed food and feed, which are then transported (often great distances) for distribution and retail.
• Profit Maximization and Economies of Scale: A focus on reducing or externalizing costs and labour and increasing yields per unit of labour. A capital-intensive system that tends to take advantage of economies of scale and monopolisation through horizontal and vertical integration along the production value chain. In search of constant growth and profits, this production model requires increasing amounts of land, and often leads to the expropriation of land through land grabbing. 
• High Input: Labour replacing inputs which are promoted as cost saving, but in reality simply externalize the costs onto workers, consumers and society as a whole. At production end these are chemical inputs, GM seeds, digital and other management technologies. At the consumption end, processing companies and retailers use food additives and flavour enhancers to help make their highly processed food products cheaper and more attractive. The result is so called Ultra Processed Foods. 
• Export-Oriented Overproduction: Export led growth is promoted as the way for the farming sector to grow and stay profitable in the face of declining prices, increasing risks and price gouging by corporations. In many cases, exports are subsidised and subject to favourable conditions imposed by trade agreements and phytosanitary rules.

Once we can understand how the different parts of the industrial food system work together as a whole, we can better analyse how false solutions and the narratives that underpin them interact with this model.

False solutions: from a greenwashing strategy to an essential mechanism to preserve the model

Yet we are facing an avalanche of false solutions across many sectors, from carbon offsetting for fossil fuels to “green” hydrogen fertilizers, “deforestation-free” plantations to tradable permits for plastics. In our research, False solutions, real profits: agribusiness’ tactics uncovered, we drew upon our experience across all these. But we investigated in detail three false solutions related to agribusiness and its impact on biodiversity, climate and deforestation: Sustainability and deforestation voluntary free certification; Sustainable Intensification and Regenerative Agriculture. 

We found many similarities across false solutions that seem very different on the surface. Unsurprisingly, all false corporate solutions fail to challenge the underlying logic of profit maximisation, externalization of costs and continuous expansion, and leave the structural problems generated by the system intact. In addition many of them result in new opportunities for profitability and expansion through new forms of resource extraction and grabbing.

False solutions maintain the viability and expansion of the agribusiness model with the pretense that it can be reformed by agribusinesses corporations themselves. 

Characteristics of false solutions 

We define eight characteristics of false solutions in the agribusiness sector. But these can be equally extrapolated to many other sectors. 

• False solutions reinforce the power of agribusiness 
• False solutions are used to perpetuate and disseminate false narratives 
• False solutions undermine small-scale food producers 
• False solutions shift the blame to the product and the burden to the consumer 
• False solutions embrace the market and commodify nature 
• False solutions promote corporate social responsibility to avoid regulation 
• False solutions promote corporate technologies and techno-utopianism 
• False solutions channel public and private money towards agribusinesses

Profit, power, political clout 

Agribusinesses´ false solutions, respond to external events and pressures such as climate change or public condemnation of harmful practices in a way designed to perpetuate their power and control over the food system. For example, by creating market advantages and opportunities that they can exploit to ensure growth, and by ensuring the profit margin and shareholder value remain unaffected or increases. Many false solutions promote corporate-owned technologies marketed and sold by agribusiness corporations themselves. For instance, biogas digesters have been proposed to deal with the problems of manure pollution from factory farms in the United States. Millions of dollars in public subsidies are currently being funnelled towards the country’s biggest farms to stimulate the use of this technology, a gift that simply incentivises the recipients to grow. In fact, many false solutions also channel more money into destructive agribusinesses.  The Food and Land Use Coalition, a corporate business platform, calls for “new investment of between $300 billion and $350 billion a year” to transform food systems so that businesses can capture $5.7 trillion in returns by 2050. These enormous promised returns on investment come from an array of false solutions: commodifying and trading carbon and nature for profit; offsetting carbon instead of reducing emissions; and corporate technologies like selling digital platforms to farmers for data collection. 

By portraying themselves as saviours who can solve problems caused by their own model, false solutions allow corporations to place themselves at the centre of institutional governance at the highest levels. This strategy has allowed corporations to enter the UN system as decision-makers via multistakeholder platforms that are replacing multilateral state-led governance.

Leaving the environment to “the market”  

False solutions also perpetuate the longstanding myth that the private sector can produce more efficient and cost-effective solutions through the market, in order to sidestep the need for regulation. Over the past decade, the discussion on how to protect nature and stop climate change focused a lot more on solutions that work within a neoliberal political and economic model rather than regulation or stopping destructive activities. Nature has become a lucrative profit-making enterprise as market-based approaches continue to commodify nature and ecosystems. This involves placing monetary values on biodiversity, ecosystems, forests and other natural goods in order to bring them into the marketplace, and then allowing them to be traded and sold to the highest bidder. This approach ignores other values like cultural or spiritual, making value a synonym of price, which it is not. 

Today, for example, agribusinesses engaging in carbon and nature markets can continue to benefit from the old profit streams by externalising the costs of the industrial mode and selling their products. But now they can also access new profit streams by grabbing resources and selling the associated carbon or biodiversity credits to offset their destruction; and by demanding public financial investment for the creation of public goods benefit. 

Bayer, one of the world’s top pharmaceutical, agrichemical and seed companies, has also been pushing regenerative agriculture (RA). For Bayer, regenerative agriculture has meant the continued use of GM seeds, chemical pesticides and herbicides as well as the promotion of No-till farming. It has also involved the creation of a carbon initiative for farmers who are enrolled in their proprietary digital agriculture platform, Climate FieldView. This platform is used to track farm level data to allow the better targeting of products to individual farmers. At the same time, Climate FieldView is creating a source of carbon offsets for Bayer to use for its own emission offsets, or to sell or speculate within the carbon market.

Deflecting blame, Reframing the narrative 

False solutions are used to avoid structural change by diverting attention from the overall model of agribusiness production and focusing on the product that is consumed. For example, the agribusiness livestock sector is increasingly under pressure for its negative impacts on workers, the environment, and Indigenous and rural peoples. Yet critical discussion is largely directed at the livestock sector as a whole, which includes not only agribusiness but also pastoral and small-scale systems. By shifting the focus, agribusiness uses the legitimacy of small-scale livestock systems to promote its own false solutions. 

This approach also redirects the focus towards the ‘responsibility of the consumer to buy the right product’, rather than addressing the functioning of the model. Corporate certification schemes are almost entirely self-implemented and self-monitored by the involved companies or industry associations. These schemes lack legal and public accountability, since no law or government agency is able to implement penalties. But since consumers are purportedly receiving market signals about ‘sustainable’ products, the final decision of whether or not to consume unsustainable products is placed upon the consumer. This is why after 15 years of creating and participating in various certification schemes Unilever, one of the biggest sorcerers of palm oil is still sourcing conflict palm oil that is responsible for deforestation and human rights abuses. 

The public relations and marketing around false solutions also plays a key role in creating myths and fake narratives such “we need agribusiness to feed the world” or “small scale producers are inefficient”. 

False solutions ensure business as usual 

A powerful economic, political, media and advertising machine presents the existence of agribusiness, and the associated industrial agri-food system, as an indisputable fait accompli and not the result of impunity for injustice, exploitation, oppression and destruction. False solutions are a central pillar to legitimise, legalise and advance this machinery by portraying transnational corporations as the central actors to solve the multiple crises that they have created and continue to profit from. In doing so, it is necessary to let them advance without control and therefore the State and Democracy lose relevance. 

False solutions and their proponents can be said to follow the theory of propaganda. In trying to counter this trend, we have offered here an analysis of false solutions that can allow FOEI and our allies to construct strategies that go beyond combatting every false solution on its own terms. But rather understand their role and attempt to undercut it. 

Doing so must form a part of our demand for system change and real solutions. The crises we face demand real solutions – such as the ones defended by Indigenous Peoples or peasants, whose rights are threatened by the agribusiness.