The confluence of these factors in 2026 has prompted researchers, advocacy groups and farmers around the world to more forcefully question the architecture of an increasingly stressed global food system—and the money, both public and private, that supports it.

Coinciding with harvest season in much of the world this month, critics and activists are using a handful of agriculture- and food-focused events to home in on the structural problems of a system they say disadvantages developing countries, fattens rich ones and fails to “feed the world” as it claims to. 

“It does produce food,” said Jeff Conant, a deputy director with the advocacy group Friends of the Earth. “It also undeniably produces something on the order of a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. It produces illness. It produces dispossession of land-based peoples. It produces obesity and it produces wealth for the corporate elites at the expense of the rest of us.”

This month, Friends of the Earth and more than a dozen advocacy groups published a report tracking the profits of the world’s largest food companies. “It is not, in fact, a food system,” Conant said. “It’s an agribusiness financial complex.”

On Friday—the United Nations’ “World Food Day”— hundreds of farmers from around the world protested against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, accusing the institutions of undercutting public support for agriculture and worsening hunger.

The protest, organized by La Via Campesina, a grassroots movement of small-scale farmers, came as the institutions concluded their weeklong annual gathering in Bangkok.

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