Manufacturing Consent: Big Ag’s Playbook of Propaganda and Power

Antonio Gramsci argued that propaganda is the main fabric through which contemporary power asserts itself. For Gramsci, propaganda is central to cultural hegemony; in other words, the dominance of a particular worldview (often that of the ruling class or elite) that is so deeply internalised by society that it becomes ‘common sense’ and uncritically accepted as natural and inevitable.

There are many reasons why transnational agribusiness has been able to secure its dominance in the global food system, not least its enormous economic and political clout. However, Gramsci’s insights, alongside Bernays’s ‘engineering of consent’ and Chomsky and Herman’s media propaganda model, help us to understand the sector’s dominance on an ideological level.

Gramsci’s cultural hegemony theory describes how dominant interests gain control by force or law but more importantly by shaping the cultural beliefs, and narratives of the entire society. Schools, media and science institutions help to preserve the status quo to ensure that the interests they ultimately serve are experienced as reality itself.

Bernays developed this further, arguing that modern propaganda appeals to irrational emotions and unconscious desires, engineering consent for deeply unjust outcomes. Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model adapts these insights for the media age, revealing how consent is manufactured through selective news, expert testimony, corporate ownership of information pathways and the systematic filtering of dissent.

The agribusiness–agritech sector exemplifies these theories in action. To secure its hegemony, Big Ag employs a sprawling, coordinated propaganda complex comprising PR giants (such as Ketchum and FTI Consulting), front groups (Genetic Literacy Project, American Council on Science and Health, Cornell Alliance for Science, International Life Sciences Institute) and ideologically aligned third-party specialists who amplify and circulate its worldview as received wisdom.

These networks saturate media, dominate web searches, steer ‘educational’ content, and organise phony grassroots engagement (astroturfing), all aimed at upholding the inevitability and virtue of industrial agriculture while making alternatives rooted in the local, organic and agroecological seem marginal or dangerous. Techniques include ghost-writing articles, manipulating search result visibility and pushing talking points through seemingly independent experts and scientists across various universities, not least Florida and Saskatchewan. Careerists who think their credentials can mask or divert attention from the CropLife firms or the Gates Foundation who set their agenda.

True to Chomsky’s model, dissent is actively targeted. Industry action plans deploy PR teams in an attempt to neutralise critics such as US Right to Know, GMWatch, journalists and public-interest scientists. These methods have included coordinating attacks on critical comments and commenters in online threads (Monsanto’s ‘let nothing go’ programme), leveraging media connections to exclude critical voices from panels or publications and directly attacking reputations of opponents.

Critics are placed on a ‘hit list’ and smeared as murderers (condemning millions to starvation for opposing GM), privileged ‘First World’ ideologues or anti-science extremists, rather than principled advocates for ecological and public health. This reputational assault aims to shape the boundaries of acceptable debate.

At the same time, the industry attempts to frame itself as the saviour of humanity. Corporate narratives insist that only industrial monocultures, pesticides and biotech can feed the world and solve hunger, a message repeated by company executives like Syngenta CEO Erik Fyrwald, industry-aligned politicians like the now-disgraced Owen Paterson and so-called media science experts such as Patrick Moore, who accused the people at GMWatch of being “murdering bastards” (yes, that ‘Patrick Moore’ who once claimed on a radio show that glyphosate was harmless to drink but when asked by the host to drink some ran away playing the victim).

The narrative of industrial salvation is perhaps most starkly embodied in the Green Revolution (GR), which has been aggressively championed as the definitive humanitarian achievement of agribusiness ideology. The GR is positioned as a triumph of technology and chemicals, and agribusiness lobbyists waste no time in telling everyone that it saved millions from starvation and secured the world’s food supply. A crucial talking point.

Yet, this account is fiercely contested by those who scrutinise on-the-ground reality. The GR did no such thing in India in terms of actually preventing famine. According to Prof. Glenn Stone, it merely put more wheat in the diet (displacing traditional high-yielding and more nutrient-dense crops), and per capita food consumption might well have decreased during the GR period.

For Big Ag, the metrics of success seem to be less about saved lives and more about market penetration and self-serving historical revisionism. Moreover, organic farmer and GR critic Bhaskar Save went further by denouncing the entire enterprise as an ecological, agronomic and human disaster that traded short-term yield increases for long-term soil health, biodiversity loss, increased farmer indebtedness and deepening dependency on corporate inputs, thereby directly contradicting the promised humanitarian outcome with a legacy of devastation.

The concept of modernisation in agriculture is distorted by agribusiness corporations and industry actors to serve their own commercial and ideological interests. Today, for instance, we see agribusiness executives claiming traditional Indian agriculture is ‘backward’, inefficient and in need of industrial technology and biotech solutions. And what do they propose as the solution? Their industrialised monocultures, their chemical treadmills, their dependency-cloud-based platforms, their ‘precision’ farming, their genetically modified seeds and inputs and their dominance and vision as the only path to progress and food security.

This approach aims to legitimise corporate supremacy while marginalising indigenous knowledge, agroecological practices and smallholder farmers’ alternatives. Bayer, as a major player, strategically depicts Indian agriculture as inherently deficient to justify the expansion of its proprietary seeds, agrochemicals and technologies, attempting to create a manufactured consent in favour of industrial agriculture under the guise of modernisation.

‘Saviour’ appeals try to mask ecological harm, nutritional decline and rural dispossession behind the emotional blackmail of humanitarian necessity and scientific-technological innovation. Any policy or movement that questions their model is depicted as anti-poor, anti-science or recklessly ideological.

Multimillion-dollar lobbying budgets buy access to decision makers, scientific panels and regulatory agencies. Industry-funded science, front group advocacy and managed media events ensure that legal and policy frameworks privilege the industrial model, granting it further legitimacy while branding agroecological and organic movements as unrealistic or anti-progress. Scientific consensus, regulatory authority and media messaging are shaped so systematically that even dissenters often come to believe in the naturalness of corporate dominance.

The agribusiness propaganda assault fully realises the models of hegemony and manufacturing consent laid out by Gramsci, Bernays and Chomsky. The dominant narrative has impacted nearly every key institution so that industry influence is rendered almost invisible and criticism almost unthinkable.

But the mask has slipped. The cracks are laid bare. From mounting scientific evidence of pesticide harm to the deep unsustainability of monoculture farming, the ‘common sense’ narrative of corporate agriculture is increasingly on the defensive. High-profile scandals and the relentless investigative work of independent journalists and scientists have exposed the industry’s coordinated tactics—the ghost-writing, the astroturfing, the smear campaigns.

In recent years, revealing the propaganda complex has been an essential step towards reclaiming the narrative. At the same time, publicising the genuine success of alternative models is helping to crush the false narrative of industrial agriculture. These models are not rooted in corporate profit, dependency, chemical dependence or the type of snake-oil ‘modernisation’ pedalled by the likes of Bayer. With appropriate support, the evidence is clear that alternative models are rooted in genuine ecological resilience not fake proprietary techno-solutionism, smallholder empowerment not dispossession and genuine nutritional security not illness and disease.

Colin Todhunter specialises in food, agriculture and development and is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. His open access books on the global food system can be accessed via Figshare (no sign in or sign up required).

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