Stolen Soil and Corporate Welfare: The Global Scam of ‘Feeding the World’

Supermarket shelves have never been fuller, yet diets have become poorer. Across the world, food systems praised for their productivity now deliver an abundance of calories alongside widespread micronutrient deficiency, ecological collapse and rural precarity.

This is the outcome of an agricultural model that equates food security with yield and mass production with nourishment. Sustained by billions in subsidies, industrial agriculture increasingly resembles a welfare state for agribusiness and retail giants whose profits depend on public money.

Nutritional decline

Corporate-driven industrial agriculture claims to feed the world but too often delivers empty calories while starving populations of nutrients. Consider that high-yield rice produces empty calories while becoming nutritionally impoverished. Since the 1960s, the concentration of zinc and iron in wheat and rice in India has fallen by 30 to 45%. In contrast, millets and pulses deliver far higher levels of protein, zinc and iron per square inch.

This is not unique to India: Rothamsted Research in the UK has evaluated the mineral concentration of archived wheat grain and soil samples from the Broadbalk Wheat Experiment. The experiment began in 1843, and their findings show significant decreasing trends in the concentrations of zinc, copper, iron and magnesium in wheat grain since the 1960s.

At the same time, nutritionally dense millet acreage in India has declined by 60% over the last seven decades. The decline is a result of structural shifts in Indian agriculture following the Green Revolution.

In the UK, the logic is similar, albeit expressed differently. Ultra-processed foods dominate, monocultures deplete soil and calories are abundant while nutrition is undermined. Obesity coexists with micronutrient deficiencies; grass-fed livestock and diverse rotations have largely been replaced by input-intensive systems, while supermarkets dictate production priorities and shape farming.

Industry PR frequently attempts to justify its role by implying the world would starve without its seeds and chemicals. The industry justifies this claim through the enduring myth of the Green Revolution; a narrative Prof. Glenn Stone and others have effectively debunked. The claim that industrial seeds ‘saved’ India from mass starvation, for instance, is less history than PR.

In reality, the Green Revolution represented a pivot towards input-intensive farming that displaced existing productivity gains in favour of a model that mandated dependency on proprietary seeds, chemical fertilisers and pesticides supplied by an increasingly concentrated global industry.

Displacement and precarity

When traditional farming is destabilised through state withdrawal, corporate inputs, global supply chains and monocultures, it becomes financially unviable for many farmers. Rural communities are removed from the soil. In India, this displacement is leveraged as part of a broader neoliberal strategy, clearing land for industrial-scale corporate agriculture.

In rural Britain, young people leave for cities as rural life becomes economically untenable and villages lose schools, healthcare and transport. Meanwhile, farmers rely heavily on subsidies, rural development grants and agri-environment schemes.

These payments mainly stabilise industrial supply chains and supermarket profits. In the UK, more than half of farm income comes from subsidies rather than market sales and larger farms disproportionately capture payments. In effect, subsidies sustain monocultures and high-volume production for supermarkets.

UK subsidies like the Basic Payment Scheme and its successors provide a non-market floor for farm income. They therefore function as an indirect subsidy for retail giants. By covering the farmer’s basic survival costs, the taxpayer effectively lowers the break-even point for producers, allowing supermarkets to use their purchasing power to negotiate farm-gate prices that are frequently below the actual cost of production.

So, the taxpayer pays to keep the farm viable, only for the supermarket to extract the resulting value through suppressed prices and high retail margins.

Mugging the public

These national subsidy regimes are embedded within a transnational agricultural input economy dominated by a small number of food retail, agrochemical and seed corporations, including firms such as Bayer and Syngenta, which sell proprietary seeds and chemicals at prices the farmer could not otherwise afford.

In the UK, publicly supported farm incomes stabilise demand for proprietary seeds, pesticides and fertilisers integrated into supermarket-led supply chains, ensuring predictable markets for input suppliers even as farm-gate prices are driven down.

The farmer is squeezed by both sides (inputs and retail), and although the mechanisms might differ per country, the underlying logic is consistent: the state absorbs risk while private firms profit from farmer dependence on proprietary inputs and chemically intensive production systems. We see a globally integrated system of public risk management for agribusiness.

While India still (however precariously) attempts to buffer the producer (through mechanisms like the Minimum Support Price for crop assurance and the Public Distribution System to stabilise consumer costs), the UK system has been fully utilised to de-risk the balance sheets of private giants.

The British public is being ‘mugged’ twice: once at the tax office and again at the checkout. At the same time, the state is subsidising a third ‘mugging’: a taxpayer-funded public health collapse. By bankrolling volume over nutrition, the government pays corporations to manufacture a health crisis, then taxes the public to treat the fallout. The taxpayer funds the hollow calories, the supermarket margins and the resulting chronic diseases whose cost falls on the NHS.

Welfare scroungers

The media too often vilifies the poor (whether families in the UK or struggling farmers in India) for needing public support. However, the biggest ‘scroungers’ are not families supposedly ‘fiddling the system’ but the shareholders of retail and input corporations whose profit margins are underwritten by public money.

In the UK, the agricultural sector is ensnared in a subsidy trap that functions as a taxpayer-funded life-support system for corporate retail. While the annual farming budget has remained largely stagnant at £2.4 billion since 2007 (effectively a significant cut when adjusted for inflation) it remains the only thing standing between many British farmers and bankruptcy.

According to Defra’s 2024/25 statistics, these payments now account for 30% to 55% of farm business income. Without this public intervention, the majority of UK farms would operate at a net loss. This means that the current market price for food is a policy choice to protect the margins of retail giants such as Tesco, which recently reported an adjusted operating profit of £3.13 billion.

In India, every time a farmer scans their fingerprint to purchase a subsidised bag of fertiliser, they trigger a transfer of public funds to chemical manufacturers. According to policy analyst Devinder Sharma (in numerous articles in The Tribune newspaper), by fixing the retail price of urea while guaranteeing cost recovery, the government has created a low-risk environment for input-intensive agriculture.

The average Indian agricultural household earns just ₹10,218 ($113) per month, while chemical companies—buffered by ₹1.91 lakh crore ($23 billion) in public funds—remain highly profitable.

Whether through the stagnant grants of the UK or the biometric pipelines of India, the state has become the ultimate guarantor of a high-input, high-cost agricultural model that would otherwise be commercially unsustainable for producers.

Towards a new system

In the UK, breaking this model requires a structural dismantling of the ‘supermarket state’. A genuine transition would necessitate land reform that decouples land value from real estate speculation alongside a strengthened retail code that mandates a minimum producer share of the retail price, ensuring value is not siphoned off by shareholders before it leaves the farm gate.

The current predatory model is a conscious political choice. An alternative is required—one rooted in community resilience, ecological health and nutritional sufficiency rather than corporate extraction. This shift is already visible in fragments of resistance emerging in both India and the UK.

In India, the revival of millet cultivation in Odisha demonstrates how subsidies can be reclaimed for social justice. By linking minimum support prices (MSPs) to decentralised procurement and school meal programmes, the state has transformed millets from ‘forgotten foods’ into pillars of nutrition and soil health.

In the UK, community-supported agriculture, seed-saving networks and local co-operatives act as quiet secessions from the corporate supply chain. While inheritance tax and market consolidation threaten land access, these projects prioritise health per acre and local autonomy, ensuring that the value created by the soil remains within the community rather than being siphoned off to retail headquarters.

The path forward requires a fundamental decoupling of food from the logic of extraction. This means a transition from a state that subsidises shareholder dividends to one that invests in soil sovereignty, small-scale farming and the long-term health of its people.

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer and researcher whose work is self-directed and unpaid. Access his work on Figshare.

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