Big Ag

Brazilian Hosts Seek COP30’s Blessing For Biofuels

November 21, 2025 Clare Carlile and Maximiliano Manzoni, DeSmog. Educate! Big Ag, climate crisis, COP30, Food and Agriculture

With the clock running down at the COP30 climate talks, the Brazilian hosts are working hand-in-hand with industry groups to secure backing for biofuels in the final text – despite fears that scaling production will drive deforestation and violate Indigenous rights. National delegations are at loggerheads over a proposal to include language backing the use of “transitional fuels” – which could be read as an open door for biofuels – in a draft Just Transition Work Plan to guide a fair and equitable transition away from fossil fuels.

More Than 300 Lobbyists For Industrial Agriculture Attend COP30

November 18, 2025 Rachel Sherrington and Nina Lakhani, DeSmog. Educate! Big Ag, Brazil, Carbon emissions, climate crisis, COP30, pollution

More than 300 lobbyists for food and farming organisations have participated at this year’s UN climate talks, known as COP30, taking place in the Brazilian Amazon, where agribusiness is the leading cause of deforestation, a new investigation has found. The number of lobbyists representing the interests of industrial cattle farming, commodity grains and pesticides is up 14 percent over last year’s summit in Baku — and is larger than the delegation of the world’s 10th largest economy, Canada, which brought 220 delegates to COP30 in Belém, according to the joint investigation between DeSmog and the Guardian.

Big Food’s Routes To Influence At COP30

November 11, 2025 Rachel Sherrington and Gil Alessi, DeSmog. Educate! Big Ag, climate crisis, COP30, Food and Agriculture

In the city of Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon rainforest, Brazil has kicked off the COP30 climate conference, a summit framed as a pivotal moment to reduce emissions and keep the Paris Agreement alive. More than 50,000 people are expected to attend, from heads of state to civil society groups. But as attention turns to Brazil, some of the highest emitters from the food sector are also moving to shape the agenda — positioning industrial farming not as part of the problem, but as a climate solution. Agriculture’s powerful influence operation comes at a fragile moment.

How To Feed The World And Save The Planet

October 29, 2025 Helena Norberg-Hodge and Henry Coleman, Resilience. Create! Big Ag, Food and Agriculture, United Nations, World Food Day

Awareness about the destructiveness of the global food economy has become so widespread that large institutions are now forced to address it in the open. At the FAO Summit, the UN hyped a “transformation” of the global food system, and gave the floor to voices critical of globalised supply chains and corporate-led farming. Even big businesses have become remarkably proficient at speaking the language of “regenerative,” “diverse,” “local solutions” and “farmer-led.” But, in today’s world, rhetoric has been divorced from reality. Sure enough, if you follow the money instead of the language, you see a very different kind of transformation underway.

Challenging Land Use and Abuse In Allamakee County

November 14, 2024 Dave Rollo, Resilience. Strategize! Big Ag, Factory Farming, Iowa, Land defenders, Land Rights, Mining

Allamakee County lies in the northeast corner of Iowa, bordering Minnesota and Wisconsin. It is part of a three-state region that, unlike most of the upper United States and Canada, escaped glaciation during past ice ages. This geological oddity is immediately obvious to visitors by the dramatic terrain of bluffs, hills, and valleys. Expansive plains characterize most of the rest of Iowa, where miles-thick glaciers moved over the land like a bulldozer, lowering elevated areas, filling in depressions, and depositing rich, deep till. In contrast, the unglaciated northeast of Iowa, referred to as the Paleozoic Plateau for the geologic era of ancient sea bed limestones visible at the surface, contains thin soils and exposed bedrock.

Mapped: How Big Industries Hope To Sway The UN Biodiversity Talks

October 30, 2024 Hazel Healy and Rachel Sherrington, DeSmog. Educate! Activism, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Biodiversity, Colombia, COP16, Environment, Finance and the Economy, Food and Agriculture, Pesticides, Social Justice, United Nations (UN)

Under thundery tropical skies, and amid ever more dire warnings on the precarious state of the world’s ecosystems, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference is unfolding in Colombia. This year’s summit, known as COP16, follows on from the last biodiversity conference held in Montréal in 2022, when negotiators struck an historic deal – the equivalent of the Paris Agreement on climate change – to “halt and reverse” nature loss. Now, government representatives from nearly 200 countries, along with scientists, Indigenous groups, and environmental activists, are gathered in the southern city of Cali to negotiate how to put this plan into action: protect earth’s habitats and the people who depend on them.

Industrial Fishing Undermines World’s Greatest Carbon Sink

October 24, 2024 Sophie Kevany, DeSmog. Educate! Aquaculture, Big Ag, Carbon sequestration, Environment, Fishing, Food

Fish is often sold as the perfect climate-friendly dinner: highly nutritious and lower carbon than other forms of protein. But new research is increasingly bringing some of these eco marketing claims into question. In part, because industrial fishing – scientists and campaigners say – is weakening the ocean’s ability to act as a carbon sink. Over the last 60 years, the ocean, forests and other natural carbon sinks have absorbed over half of all man-made emissions, slowing down global warming. Yet, as temperatures rise, scientists warn such processes could be on the brink of collapse.

Big Ag Uses ‘Regenerative Agriculture’ To Mask Business-As-Usual

October 23, 2024 Rachel Sherrington, DeSmog. Educate! Big Ag, False Solutions, Food and Agriculture, Report

During September’s Climate Week in New York City, the world’s major food companies lined up to share their pro-nature credentials, claiming that they are embracing “regenerative agriculture” practices that will reduce their massive carbon footprint. However, a new report finds that multinational food and ag companies – such as Cargill, Bayer and Unilever – which are using the term, have barely changed how they do business. A total of 30 major agriculture companies were analysed in the report, which was released in September by the New Climate Institute. It found that while around 80 percent of the firms were heavily referencing the phrase “regenerative agriculture” in their climate and sustainability strategies, only a third had targets, and many lacked specifics on how plans would be implemented, or applied them to just small subsets of their total operations.

Big Ag’s Road To Brazil

September 24, 2024 Rachel Sherrington and Hazel Healy, DeSmog. Educate! Big Ag, Brazil, climate crisis, COP30, emissions, Energy, Food and Agriculture, G20, New York (NY)

This week, as business and government leaders, investors and campaigners gather for New York Climate Week, DeSmog is relaunching its big agriculture series, which will scrutinise the power of food and farming companies. Agriculture used to play second fiddle to energy when it came to global warming, considered as a nice-to-have. But as global heating continues apace, emissions associated with food are rising fast. Nitrous oxide – a planet-heating gas nearly 300 times as potent as CO2 when measured over 100 years – is accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere at unprecedented levels. Levels of methane – another powerful greenhouse gas critical to reducing emissions – have soared since the start of the decade and are showing “no hint of decline”.

Big Food, Big Profits, Big Lies

June 11, 2024 Veronica Riccobene, Portside. Educate! Big Ag, Corporatism, Food and Agriculture, Inflation

As food costs have skyrocketed for Americans, some of the country’s biggest chains and grocery brands, including General Mills, PepsiCo, and Tyson, have blamed the price hikes on supply chain issues and economywide inflation. But behind the scenes, these companies have expanded profits and quietly authorized billions of dollars in lucrative stock buyback programs and dividend payouts to shareholders.

Over 600 Attacks Against 20,000 Human Rights Defenders In 2023

May 9, 2024 The Canary. Educate! Big Ag, Human Rights Defenders, Mining, Violence

Mining, big agribusiness, and the fossil fuel sectors have unleashed an astronomical spate of attacks on human rights defenders (HRDs) throughout 2023. Crucially, perpetrators linked to companies and projects in these sectors account for the majority of over 600 attacks across the course of the year. This is according to a new damning report by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC). Staggering scale of attacks against human rights defenders On Tuesday 7 May, the BHRRC published its annual briefing on attacks against HRDs. Alarmingly, the data recorded 630 attacks which directly impacted an estimated 20,000 people. In particular, these were those involved in speaking out against business-related harms during 2023.

What Are ‘Food Barons’ And Why Should You Care?

April 30, 2024 Charlie Hope D’Anieri, Portside. Educate! Big Ag, Food and Agriculture, History, Monopolies

I’ve known Austin Frerick since 2019, when he was a researcher at the Open Markets Institute. After he became a fellow at Yale’s Thurmond Arnold Project, another anti-monopoly thinktank, we collaborated to report a feature for Vox on “The Hog Barons.” He’s gone on to expand this idea to a full book, titled Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, that provides a portrait of our food system through stories of its oligarchs. Austin enlisted me for some editorial consultation while the book was under contract, and today I asked him a few questions about the book and how it helps us understand American food system.

Farm Organizations Announce National ‘Enough Is Enough Tour’

April 22, 2024 Farm Action. Organize! Big Ag, Congress, Farm Bill, Farmers, Food and Agriculture

Sixteen farm organizations announced the launch of the national Enough Is Enough Tour in protest of government policies that drive consolidation of the food system into the hands of the largest multinational corporations to the detriment of farmers and ranchers. With Congress preparing to debate the farm bill during prime planting and calving season, restricting farmers’ and ranchers’ ability to bring their voices to Washington D.C., farm groups will gather at events in at least five states to call on members of Congress to deliver a bill that levels the playing field.

US Banks ‘Sabotaging’ Climate Targets By Financing Meat And Dairy

April 6, 2024 Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch. Educate! Banks, Big Ag, Carbon emissions, climate crisis, net zero, Report

A new study has found that 58 banks in the United States are “sabotaging” their own net-zero commitments by providing financing to meat, dairy and animal feed corporations. Research for the report, Bull in the Climate Shop: Industrial livestock financing sabotages major U.S. banks’ climate commitments, was conducted by U.S. environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth and Profundo, a research group based in the Netherlands. From 2016 to 2023, $134 billion in loans and underwriting was provided to meat, dairy, food processing, animal feed and agri-commodity corporations by 58 U.S. banks, according to the report.

The Livestock Industry Has Side-Stepped Scrutiny Again

March 14, 2024 Michaela Herrmann, DeSmog. Educate! Big Ag, Congress, Food and Agriculture, Livestock, Regulations, SEC

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) made headlines around the world this week by voting to move forward with rules that will require public companies to disclose climate-related business risks to investors. Some lawmakers have welcomed the mandate from the U.S.’s most powerful financial regulator, which will now force firms to share at least some emissions data. But climate and environment campaigners are concerned about loopholes in the new rules, which have failed to include “Scope 3,” i.e. indirect, greenhouse gas emissions.

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