The global food system feeds eight billion people. It is also, in its ownership and control, one of the most concentrated industries on earth. A relatively small number of companies exercise decisive influence over what is grown, how it is processed, how it is traded, and what it costs. At the top of that structure, 23 corporations account for approximately 40% of the world’s food supply by value.

This concentration exists at every level of the food chain. In seeds and agrochemicals, three companies — Bayer (which acquired Monsanto), ChemChina (which acquired Syngenta), and Corteva (formed from the merger of Dow and DuPont’s agricultural divisions) — now control more than 60% of the global commercial seed market. This matters because seeds are the foundation of agriculture. The company that owns the seed sets the terms for everything grown from it.

In commodity trading, four companies — known in the industry by the acronym ABCD: Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus — have historically controlled the majority of global grain trading. Their market share has declined somewhat as new entrants, particularly from Asia, have grown, but they remain dominant in the movement of the crops that supply the bulk of global calories.

In food processing and retail, the concentration is visible to anyone who reads a supermarket label. The brands are numerous; the owners are few. A small number of conglomerates — Nestlé, Unilever, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and others — own the majority of packaged food brands sold in most markets. At the retail level, supermarket chains in most countries have consolidated to the point where three or four chains control the majority of grocery sales.

The consequences of this concentration are multiple. For farmers, selling into a market dominated by a small number of buyers reduces bargaining power and compresses margins. For consumers, reduced competition limits price pressure and reduces the incentive for investment in product quality or innovation. For food security, the concentration of production and distribution through a small number of nodes creates systemic fragility — as was visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, when disruptions to a handful of processing facilities caused shortages across entire categories of food.

The concentration is also geographically uneven in its effects. The decisions made by a small number of commodity traders about where to direct supply can determine whether food reaches a drought-affected region or is diverted to a more profitable market. The pricing decisions of seed companies affect what crops smallholder farmers in developing countries can afford to plant. The buying standards of large supermarket chains determine what quality requirements farmers worldwide must meet to access major markets.

None of this is invisible to regulators. Merger reviews in agriculture have become more contentious in recent years, and several proposed consolidations have been blocked or forced into significant remedies. But the base level of concentration that already exists is not meaningfully threatened by blocking the next merger. The structure has been built over decades and is not easily unwound.

What the 23-companies figure represents is not a conspiracy but a logic — the logic of scale, efficiency, and capital that drives consolidation in every industry. The question for food, as distinct from other industries, is whether the public interest in a resilient, accessible, and diverse food system is compatible with the ownership structure that economic logic has produced.