The architecture of control: corporate power, financialisation, and democratic food futures in SA by African Centre for Biodiversity

THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONTROL

CORPORATE POWER, FINANCIALISATION AND DEMOCRATIC FOOD FUTURES IN SOUTH AFRICA How concentrated power is reshaping what South Africans grow, sell, eat, and imagine as possible

SEPTEMBER 2026

The African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) is committed to dismantling inequalities and resisting corporate industrial expansion in Africa’s food and agriculture systems. © The African Centre for Biodiversity www.acbio.org.za 13 The Braids Road, Emmarentia, 2195, Johannesburg, South Africa Tel: +27 (0)11 486 1156

Research and initial drafting: Daniel Adeoluwa Adeniyi Conceptual framing, editorial direction, and substantive revision: Mariam Mayet, African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) director Design and layout: Vickylee Vermeulen, Align Creative Acknowledgments This report builds on research and an initial manuscript prepared by Daniel Adeoluwa Adeniyi. ACB director Mariam Mayet provided conceptual framing, substantive rewriting, political analysis, and editorial direction for the final version. The ACB gratefully acknowledges the financial support of several donors, though the views expressed may not necessarily reflect the views of our donors.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONTROL

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

CONTENTS Acronyms

Beyond the checkout counter

Executive summary

Beyond the supermarket: the enduring importance of informal food systems

Key findings

Naledi deaths, Terbufos and the politics of food safety

Concentration has become systemic, not sectoral

Food safety without xenophobia

Historical dispossession converted into contemporary market power

Governance failure and food system risk

Concentration flourishes where public institutions retreat

The new frontier of supermarket expansion

The food system as a financial asset class

Mechanisms of concentration: mergers, financialisation, and digitalisation

Digitalisation opening new frontier of food-system control

The limits of competition policy

Agroecology must be food-systems-facing, not confined to farm-level alternatives

Financialisation and the assetisation of SA’s food system

The transition question

Digitalisation and data power in the food system

Introduction

Systemic consequences of corporate concentration

Mapping power in SA’s food system

Unequal participation in concentrated food systems

Understanding strategic bottlenecks in the food system

Ecological and public health consequences

Agricultural inputs: controlling the foundations of production

Corporate power and the democratic deficit

Who controls the means of production?

Just food system transition: power, politics, and possibilities

Seeds and the control of genetics

Transition as a political project—not a technical adjustment

Chemical dependency and fertiliser power

The right to food as a political and constitutional anchor

Machinery, technology and lock-in

Where transformation must begin

Feeding livestock, concentrating power

Govern corporate power directly

Rebuild public food-system capacity

Agricultural production—the meeting point of concentrated power Fewer farms, greater power

Logistics, storage and market access: governing the movement of food Moving food, controlling markets

Protect plural food economies Agroecology, democratic seed systems and urban food futures

72 73

Centre labour, women, and social reproduction

Food processing and manufacturing: transforming commodities into corporate power

Confront financial and digital capture

Capturing value beyond the farm gate

From private governance to democratic accountability

When staple foods become corporate assets

A sober but urgent politics of transition

Ultra-processed foods and the corporate shaping of diets

Beyond concentration: reclaiming democratic control

Retail power: governing access to food, markets and everyday survival

References

Gatekeepers of the food system

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

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ACRONYMS ACB

African Centre for Biodiversity

Artificial intelligence

ARC

Agricultural Research Council

CCSA

Competition Commission South Africa

CSOs

Civil society organisations

ETC Group

Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration

FAO

UN Food and Agriculture Organization

FMSS

Farmer-managed seed systems

GEPF

Government Employees Pension Fund

Genetically modified

HHPs

Highly hazardous pesticides

IPES-Food

International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems

IQF

Individually quick frozen

M&A

Mergers and acquisitions

NAMC

National Agricultural Marketing Council

NCDs

Non-communicable diseases

NSPCA

National Council of Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

OECD

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

PIC

Public Investment Corporation

South Africa

SAFEX

South African Futures Exchange

SAHRC

South African Human Rights Commission

SANSOR

South African National Seed Organisation

SAPTOA

South Africa Peoples’ Tribunal on AgroToxins

United Nations

UPFs

Ultra-processed food

USDA

United States Development Agency

THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONTROL

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY South Africa (SA)’s food system presents a stark and unresolved contradiction. The country has substantial agricultural capacity, sophisticated agro-processing industries, extensive logistics networks, powerful supermarket chains and a deeply integrated commercial food economy. Yet hunger, malnutrition, diet-related disease, food price volatility, precarious food-system labour, and ecological degradation remain entrenched.

This report argues that this contradiction is not primarily a problem of food scarcity, technical inefficiency, or inadequate production. It is a crisis of power.

The report therefore moves beyond a conventional concentration study. It argues that SA’s food system is best understood as

The central contribution is to show that corporate concentration in SA’s food system is not simply a matter of market share or the dominance of a few large firms in isolated sectors. It has become an:

They are rooted in a longer history of racialised land dispossession, apartheid agrarian restructuring, state support for white commercial agriculture, deregulation, and the privatisation of publicly supported infrastructure. Post-apartheid liberalisation did not democratise these structures. In many cases, it converted state-backed assets, market institutions, and logistical systems into private corporate advantage, while Black small-scale producers, workers, informal traders, and low-income consumers continued to face exclusion from land, finance, infrastructure, markets, and decision-making.

Architecture of control A system of interlocking power across agricultural inputs, land, production, storage, logistics, processing, retail, finance, digital platforms, and governance. At each node, dominant actors shape the conditions under which others participate. Seed and agrochemical corporations influence what farmers plant and how they produce. Silo owners, logistics companies, and wholesalers determine market access. Processors transform commodities into branded diets and capture value beyond the farm gate. Supermarkets and digital platforms govern shelf space, procurement terms, consumer visibility, data flows, and routes to everyday food access. Finance increasingly governs food-system assets as investment portfolios, while digitalisation is turning data, algorithms, and platforms into new instruments of control.

a set of strategic bottlenecks through which value, information, risk, and decision-making power flow. These bottlenecks are not accidental.

those investments are governed. At the same time, digital agriculture, artificial intelligence (AI), platform retail, appbased delivery, loyalty systems, and data analytics are extending corporate power into information infrastructures. Power is no longer exercised only through ownership of firms or physical assets. It increasingly operates through finance, data, algorithms, standards, logistics, procurement systems, and private governance.

A second contribution of the report is to show how historical concentration is now being renewed through financial and digital forms of power. Food-system assets such as grain silos, logistics networks, processors, retailers, and agribusiness firms are increasingly governed as financial assets expected to generate returns for institutional investors, pension funds, asset managers, infrastructure funds, and private capital. This creates a profound democratic

paradox: workers’ deferred wages and public-sector pension funds may be invested in corporations that shape food prices, labour conditions, and strategic food infrastructure, while workers and communities have little say over how

THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONTROL

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

A third contribution is to connect these structural dynamics to the everyday realities of food, hunger, and survival. Corporate concentration is not an abstract market condition. It shapes who can farm, who can trade, who reaches consumers, which foods are promoted, who captures value, and who bears risk. It affects the squeeze on producers, barriers facing emerging and small-scale farmers, pressures on informal food economies, precarious labour, unhealthy food environments, pesticide harms, ecological simplification, and the erosion of democratic accountability. The rise of ultra-processed foods (UPFs), the expansion of supermarket and platform retail, the weakening of public markets, the persistence of highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs), the financialisation of storage infrastructure, and the marginalisation of informal traders are not separate problems. They are connected expressions of a food system increasingly organised around corporate coordination, extraction, and control. The report also brings into view forms of food-system power that are often treated separately from concentration. The expansion of UPFs shows how processing power shapes diets, biodiversity, and public health. UPFs are not simply unhealthy products or matters of individual choice. They are products of a corporate-industrial model built on cheap commodity ingredients, branding, long shelf life, aggressive marketing, the time pressures of urban life, wage labour, long commuting times, and the erosion of local food economies. Similarly, the politics of the informal food economy reveals how food safety crises can be misdirected toward xenophobic scapegoating rather than deeper accountability for pesticide regulation, public health systems, municipal failures, and hazardous chemical governance. The Naledi/Terbufos tragedy shows why food safety must be addressed without criminalising poverty or migrant traders, and

why informal food economies must be protected, dignified, and supported rather than displaced in the name of modernisation. A further insight is that concentration flourishes where public institutions retreat. The weakening of public market infrastructure, municipal food governance, environmental health services, agricultural extension, local storage, public procurement, and coordinated food-system planning has created space for private actors to govern food systems through procurement standards, exclusive leases, distribution centres, digital platforms, voluntary codes, private labels, and corporate data systems.

The issue is therefore not only that corporations are powerful; it is that public capacity to govern food in the public interest has been weakened. SA’s food crisis is consequently also a democratic crisis: decisions that affect food access, labour, nutrition, health, biodiversity, land use, and livelihoods are increasingly mediated through private systems that are not directly accountable to the public. The report argues that competition policy remains important but insufficient. SA’s competition authorities have exposed cartels, scrutinised mergers, and investigated food pricing, grocery retail, and fresh produce markets. Yet conventional competition tools struggle to address the cumulative effects of mergers, buyer power, vertical integration, financialisation, platform retail, private standards, and data control. Public-interest merger conditions and supplier-development commitments can provide limited relief, but they rarely transform underlying market structures. A deeper approach is needed: one that treats corporate concentration as a question of public

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interest, constitutional rights, democratic accountability, ecological sustainability, labour justice, and food sovereignty—not merely as a matter of price effects or consumer welfare. The report therefore concludes that SA’s food crisis cannot be solved through production increases, market efficiency, technological innovation, or consumer-protection measures alone.

A credible just food-system transition must confront concentrated corporate power directly. It must regulate buyer and retail power, scrutinise mergers and financial ownership, prevent digital capture, rebuild public food-system capacity, protect informal and territorial food economies, centre labour and women, strengthen municipal and national food governance, and restore democratic accountability over food-system infrastructure. Crucially, it must also deepen agroecology as a food-systems-facing strategy: one that links production transformation to public-interest breeding, farmer-managed seed systems (FMSS), ecological extension, public procurement, territorial markets, urban food justice, and the reduction of dependency on genetically modified (GM) feed-grain systems, agrochemicals, monocultures, and concentrated buyers. This transition cannot be reduced to a technical adjustment. It is a political project. It asks whether food will remain primarily a site of extraction, accumulation, and shareholder return, or whether it can be reorganised around public purpose, ecological resilience, social justice, and democratic control. It asks whether hunger, malnutrition, pesticide exposure, food price volatility, worker precarity, informal trader

vulnerability, and ecological degradation will continue to be treated as separate policy problems, or recognised as connected symptoms of a concentrated and politically captured food system. The future is not predetermined. The architecture of control documented in this report was built through political choices, institutional arrangements, legal frameworks, public investments, deregulation, privatisation, and corporate strategy. It can therefore be challenged through politics, regulation, public investment, movement-building, and democratic participation. The task is not to imagine a perfect food system outside history. It is to begin shifting power now through concrete, cumulative, and politically grounded interventions.

SA’s food future must be plural, rights-based, feminist, ecological, anti-xenophobic, pro-worker, pro-smallholder, and democratically governed. It must recognise the power of corporate actors without surrendering the future to them. Above all, it must insist that food is too central to life, health, dignity, land, labour, culture, ecology, and democracy to be governed primarily as a private corporate domain.

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

KEY FINDINGS Concentration has become systemic, not sectoral Corporate concentration is reproduced across seeds, fertilisers, agrochemicals, machinery, animal feed, primary production, grain storage, logistics, processing, formal retail, finance, digital platforms, research, and policy spaces. Concentration operates less like a series of isolated monopolies and more like an interconnected system of control. Dominant actors increasingly do more than sell products. They set the terms of participation.

Concentration flourishes where public institutions retreat

Seed and agrochemical companies shape what farmers plant and how they produce. Logistics firms determine access to markets. Processors and retailers control routes to consumers, while digital platforms increasingly govern data flows and visibility. The food system is therefore not simply concentrated. It is increasingly orchestrated through corporate-controlled nodes that coordinate production, movement, pricing, standards, consumption, and data.

The expansion of corporate power reflects not only market consolidation and corporate strategy but also the weakening of public capacity to coordinate, regulate, and invest in food systems. As public institutions have retreated, private actors have assumed growing control over storage, logistics, processing, standards, procurement, and market access. Concentration is therefore as much a governance challenge as it is a market outcome, raising fundamental questions about democratic accountability and public control over the systems that sustain life.

The food system as a financial asset class Financialisation is changing the purpose of food-system infrastructure. Grain silos, logistics networks, processors, retailers, and agribusiness firms are increasingly governed not only as productive assets but as financial assets expected to generate returns for institutional investors, pension funds, asset managers, and private equity firms.

Historical dispossession converted into contemporary market power The present food system cannot be understood apart from SA’s history of racialised land dispossession and state-backed white commercial agriculture. Colonial and apartheid policies created an agrarian infrastructure of subsidised finance, marketing boards, cooperatives, silos, logistics systems, and protected markets that primarily benefited white commercial agriculture. Post-apartheid deregulation did not democratise this infrastructure. Much of it was privatised and incorporated into concentrated corporate systems. Publicly supported assets became sources of private competitive advantage, while many Black small-scale producers remained structurally excluded from land, finance, infrastructure, and market access. Concentration is therefore not a neutral outcome of efficiency, but a continuation of historical agrarian power through new corporate and financial forms.

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

The report highlights the role of the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) and Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) in major food-system actors, the assetisation of AFGRI’s silo network through SiloCo, and the growing influence of commodity markets such as the South African Futures Exchange (SAFEX). Together, these developments demonstrate how food systems are increasingly shaped by financial logics that prioritise returns and asset values alongside, and sometimes ahead of, wider social and developmental objectives.

Digitalisation opening new frontier of food-system control Digitalisation is not simply a matter of innovation or efficiency. Under conditions of concentration, it is becoming a new frontier of dependency and extraction. Digital agriculture, proprietary farm platforms, data analytics, artificial AI, app-based delivery systems, and algorithmic logistics are extending corporate influence into the information infrastructures of food systems. Farmers are increasingly both customers and generators of valuable data—raising important questions about data ownership, digital sovereignty, and control over agricultural knowledge systems.

Agroecology must be food-systems-facing, not confined to farm-level alternatives Agroecology is politically indispensable to a just food-system transition in SA, but it must be deepened beyond farm-level practices, pilot projects, or smallholder support programmes. The challenge is to make agroecology food-systems-facing: able to confront input dependency, GM feed-grain systems, monocultures, public breeding failures, supermarket buyer power, weak municipal food governance, urban food insecurity, and the erosion of informal and territorial food economies. This requires linking agroecology to public-interest breeding, FMSS, ecological extension, land and water access, public procurement, local processing, territorial markets, urban food planning, and democratic food governance. Agroecology is therefore not a marginal alternative to the “real” food system; it is a framework for shifting power across production, seed, markets, institutions, and food environments.

The transition question The report concludes that SA’s food crisis is not fundamentally a crisis of scarcity, but a crisis of power. If concentration was produced through political choices, legal frameworks, ownership structures, and regulatory decisions, it can also be challenged through politics. A credible transition must move beyond narrow concerns limited to production or market efficiency. It must confront corporate concentration, rebuild public food-system capacity, protect informal and territorial food economies, support agroecology, centre labour and women, regulate financial and digital capture, and restore democratic accountability over food-system governance. Food is too central to life, health, labour, ecology, and democracy to be governed primarily as a private corporate domain. Corporate concentration in SA’s food system increasingly resembles an hourglass structure. Many producers, workers, traders, and consumers depend on a relatively small number of firms that control agricultural inputs, storage, logistics, processing, and retail. These actors occupy strategic bottlenecks through which value, information, and decision-making power flow. The significance of these nodes lies not simply in ownership but in their ability to coordinate markets, set standards, determine access, and shape food-system outcomes. SUPPLY SIDE: PRODUCERS (MANY ACTORS)

MARKETS & PROCESSING: THE CORPORATE OLIGOPOLY

40,000+

COMMERCIAL FARMERS

CORPORATE CONCENTRATION AND MARKET POWER

2 MILLION+

SMALLHOLDER FARMERS

THE CORPORATE OLIGOPOLY (FEW ACTORS BOTTLENECK)

Ag-Inputs

Bayer/Monsanto, Pioneer/Pannar (Corteva), Limagrain Zaad, Starke Ayres, Sakata Seed, Rijk Zwaan, Kynoch, Foskor, Omnia, AFGRI, Senwes, Meadow Feeds, Epol

UPSTREAM Farm-Gate Pricing Control

Processing

Tiger Brands, Pioneer Foods, Premier Foods, RCL Foods, Nestlé, Unilever, Coca-Cola Beverages SA, PepsiCo, Clover, Parmalat (Lactalis), Woodlands Dairy

Retail

Shoprite Checkers, Pick n Pay, SPAR Group, Woolworths, Massmart

DOWNSTREAM Retail Pricing Control

DEMAND SIDE: CONSUMERS (MILLIONS OF ACTORS)

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Figure 1: South African Food System Hourglass

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

INTRODUCTION SA’s food system presents a profound contradiction. The country possesses substantial agricultural capacity, sophisticated agro-processing industries, extensive logistics networks, and one of the most developed supermarket sectors on the African continent. Yet hunger, malnutrition, food price volatility, precarious food-system labour, and ecological degradation remain deeply entrenched. SA continues to produce sufficient food at a national level, but access to nutritious and affordable food remains deeply unequal. SA is a net food exporter, yet nearly two-thirds of households experience food insecurity, almost one-third of children under five are stunted, and diet-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) account for more than half of annual deaths. This report argues that these outcomes are not accidental. They are rooted in the way power is organised within the food system. Corporate concentration is not merely a question of market share or competition law. It shapes who controls productive resources, who sets the terms of participation, who captures value, who bears risk, and whose interests ultimately govern food-system development. Understanding food insecurity therefore requires understanding how power is organised and exercised throughout the food system. This report describes that wider configuration as an architecture of control: a set of interlocking corporate, financial, infrastructural, and digital arrangements that shape who participates in the food system, on what terms, and with what consequences. Yet the story of SA’s food system cannot be reduced to concentration alone. This report argues that the country’s food

system is entering a new phase in which corporate concentration is converging with financialisation and digitalisation. Institutional investors, pension funds, private equity firms, and asset managers increasingly shape decision-making across the food economy. At the same time, digital platforms, proprietary farm technologies, e-commerce systems, and data infrastructures are creating new forms of dependency and control. Food-system power is therefore no longer exercised only through ownership. It is increasingly exercised through finance, infrastructure, standards, algorithms, data, and private governance. These developments have deep historical roots. SA’s food system remains shaped by colonial dispossession, apartheid agrarian restructuring, racialised ownership patterns, and decades of state support for white commercial agriculture. Post-apartheid deregulation did not democratise this inherited infrastructure. In many cases, it converted state-supported institutions, assets, and logistical systems into private corporate advantage, allowing historical inequalities to be reproduced through new market, financial, and technological arrangements. Meanwhile, ecological costs are increasingly externalised onto soils, water systems, biodiversity, and future generations.

The report proceeds in five broad stages. It first maps concentration across the food value chain, from agricultural inputs to retail. It then examines the mechanisms through which power is consolidated, focusing on M&A, financialisation, and digitalisation. It subsequently explores the implications of these dynamics for producers, workers, consumers, health, inequality, and ecological sustainability, before outlining pathways

towards democratic accountability, food sovereignty, ecological resilience, and public control over the infrastructures that sustain life.

The central argument is that SA’s food crisis cannot be understood primarily as a production crisis. It is a crisis of power: a question of who governs the food system, in whose interests, and with what consequences for food justice, ecological sustainability, and democratic transformation.

This report therefore moves beyond a descriptive account of market concentration. Its central concern is the political economy of power in SA’s food system. It examines how concentration operates; how it is reinforced through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), financialisation, and digitalisation; how it shapes livelihoods, labour, health, ecology, and democracy; and what this means for efforts to build a more just, resilient, and democratic food system.

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

MAPPING POWER IN SA’S FOOD SYSTEM

AGRICULTURAL INPUTS Domestic Seed Market

Maize Seed Market

10%

Soybean Seed Market

Broad Horticultural Seeds

10%

The purpose of this section is therefore not merely to identify dominant firms, but to show how power is organised across SA’s food system and how control at strategic nodes enables a relatively small number of actors to shape the conditions under which food is produced, processed, distributed, and consumed. The structure of SA’s food system reflects a long history of concentrated economic power. Colonialism and apartheid systematically concentrated control over land, infrastructure, finance, markets, and state support in the hands of a narrow group of commercial interests, while dispossessing Black communities and excluding them from meaningful participation in the agricultural

economy. Although political democracy was achieved in 1994, these underlying structures of economic power were largely preserved and, in some respects, deepened through deregulation, privatisation, and integration into global circuits of capital (Adeniyi et al., 2021; Greenberg, 2017). As illustrated in Figure 2, concentration is not confined to a single segment of the food economy but extends across the entire food system, from seeds, agrochemicals, and animal feed to agricultural production, processing, logistics, and retail. This concentration has enabled a relatively small number of corporations to exercise influence over critical bottlenecks that shape how food is produced, distributed, and consumed. The persistence of hunger, malnutrition, and ecological degradation in a country capable of producing sufficient food is therefore not simply a failure of production or markets. It reflects deeper questions about who controls the resources, institutions, and infrastructures that govern SA’s food system; whose interests they serve; and how power is exercised across the food economy. The growing influence of large agribusiness and logistics firms has coincided with the decline of public systems that once played a greater role in supporting market access, storage, transport, and agricultural coordination, thereby increasing dependence on private infrastructure.

23%

25% 45%

Mapping concentration is often treated as a technical exercise concerned with market shares and firm size. This report adopts a broader approach. It treats concentration as a question of power: who controls productive resources, infrastructures, technologies, data, routes to market, and systems of governance.

Carrot Seed Market

90%

97% Bayer/Monsanto; Pioneer/ Pannar; Limagrain Zaad

Bayer/Monsanto; Pioneer/ Pannar; Limagrain Zaad

Others

Tomato Seed Market

Cabbage Seed Market

Onion Seed Market

37%

Starke Ayres

Sakata Seed

Nuvance

Sakata Seed

Starke Ayres

Others

Spinach Seed Market

Broad fertiliser market 22%

25% 10%

45%

44%

11%

13% 10% 10%

26%

17%

23% 38%

45%

30%

90%

Pioneer/Pannar Monsanto

42%

21%

62%

17%

31%

13%

Starke Ayres

Hygrotech SA

Starke Ayres

Nuvance

Starke Ayres

Nuvance

Rijk Zwaan

Enza Zaden

Kynoch

Omnia

Sakata Seed

Others

Sakata Seed

Others

Enza Zaden

Others

Starke Ayres

Others

Foskor

Others

PRIMARY AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION BY FARM SIZE

FOOD RETAIL Formal grocery retail

Farming units (FU) 5%

2% Large farms (6.5% of FU)

18%

7% 34%

15%

Medium farms (4.6% of FU)

Pick n Pay Woolworths

Small farms (26.7% of FU)

10%

Shoprite Checkers

SPAR

Micro farms (62.1% of FU)

Massmart

19%

67%

Others

23%

FOOD PROCESSING & MANUFACTURING Maize milling

Wheat milling 3%

Sugar milling

Carbonated soft drink

20%

25%

Dairy processors and buyers

30% 40%

75%

60% 97%

80%

Pioneer Foods; Premier Foods; Pride Milling; Tiger Brands

Pioneer Foods; Pride Milling; Premier Foods; Ruto Mills (Foodcorp)

Tongaat Hulett; Illovo; RCL/TSB

Others

Coca-Cola; PepsiCo Others

70%

Clover; Nestlé; Parmalat (Lactalis); Woodlands Dairy Others

Figure 2: Concentration of corporate power across SA’s food system

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Understanding strategic bottlenecks in the food system

Agricultural inputs: controlling the foundations of production

Figure 2 demonstrates that corporate concentration is not confined to a single segment of SA’s food system. Rather, power is concentrated across a series of interconnected strategic bottlenecks that shape access to essential resources, technologies, infrastructure, markets, and consumers. Control over these bottlenecks gives dominant firms influence far beyond their immediate market share. It allows them to determine who participates in the food system, under what conditions, how value is distributed, and, increasingly, how the food system itself is governed. As a result, concentration at any one point in the value chain cannot be understood

Who controls the means of production?

in isolation. Power exercised upstream through the control of seeds, fertilisers, or agricultural finance is often reinforced downstream through processing, logistics, retail, and data systems. The cumulative effect is a food system in which decision-making authority, economic returns, and governance capacity are increasingly concentrated in relatively few hands. Understanding how these strategic bottlenecks operate is therefore essential for understanding the wider dynamics of power, exclusion, and dependency that characterise SA’s food system (Adeniyi et al., 2021; Clapp, 2021; Clapp et al., 2025; Greenberg, 2017).

Agricultural inputs constitute one of the most strategic sites of power in SA’s food system because they shape the conditions under which food is produced. Control over seeds, agrochemicals, fertilisers, machinery, and animal feed extends far beyond the sale of agricultural commodities. These sectors influence which crops are planted, which technologies are adopted, how production risks are managed, and who can participate competitively in agricultural production. As Figure 2 illustrates, concentration at this upstream stage of the food system forms a critical foundation for corporate power across the wider food economy. A relatively small number of multinational corporations and large domestic intermediaries increasingly influence the technologies, infrastructures, and inputs upon which agricultural production depends (Adeniyi et al., 2021; CCSA, 2025a; Greenberg, 2017).

Seeds and the control of genetics The seed industry provides one of the clearest examples of this concentration. Concentration in the seed sector extends beyond market share into control over breeding capacity, technology ownership, and agricultural knowledge. Although more than 80 firms are registered in SA’s seed industry, relatively few possess significant breeding and research capacity. As a result, the development of new cultivars and proprietary genetics is increasingly concentrated in a small number of multinational corporations, with implications for seed sovereignty, farmer autonomy, and climate adaptation. SA is the leading adopter of GM crops on the African continent, with GM maize and soybeans dominating commercial production systems. Control over this market is highly concentrated. Bayer/Monsanto, Pioneer/Pannar (Corteva), and Limagrain Zaad account for approximately 96.7% of the commercial maize seed market, while Bayer and Pioneer/Pannar control the overwhelming majority of registered GM maize traits and varieties available to farmers (CCSA, 2025a). Seed concentration therefore extends beyond market share to encompass control over the genetic foundations of agricultural production itself.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONTROL

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Chemical dependency and fertiliser power The significance of this concentration lies in the integration of proprietary genetics, intellectual property rights, and agrochemical technologies. GM seed systems are increasingly embedded within broader technological packages that combine patented seed traits with specific herbicide and crop-protection products. This creates recurring cycles of dependence on externally supplied technologies and associated inputs, while enabling multinational corporations to capture value through seed sales, licensing arrangements, and proprietary trait technologies. In SA’s maize and soybean sectors, this model has contributed to the growing dominance of industrial production systems and increased corporate influence over the direction of agricultural innovation (Bosiu et al., 2017; Clapp, 2021; Mayet and Greenberg, 2017). While concentration is most evident in commercial maize and soybean seed markets, similar dynamics are evident across wider seed systems. SA’s seed industry is increasingly integrated into global seed markets dominated by multinational firms such as Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, Limagrain, Rijk Zwaan, and Sakata— all of which are active in the South African market across field crops, vegetables, and other horticultural seed sectors (SANSOR, 2024). This reflects a broader trend in which breeding capacity, genetic resources, and seed innovation are becoming concentrated in a relatively small number of globally connected firms, with implications for farmer autonomy, agricultural biodiversity, and seed sovereignty. The agrochemical sector reinforces these dynamics. Following the global restructuring of the seed and agrochemical industries through the Bayer-Monsanto, Dow-DuPont (Corteva) and ChemChina-Syngenta mergers, a small

number of corporations now dominate both seed genetics and crop-protection markets (Clapp, 2021; ETC Group and GRAIN, 2025). SA is deeply integrated into these global value chains. The same firms that dominate seed technologies are also major suppliers of herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides used across the country’s maize, soybean, fruit, and horticultural sectors. This concentration has enabled the expansion of production systems heavily reliant on purchased chemical inputs while reinforcing corporate influence over the technologies and practices that underpin agricultural production (CCSA, 2025a; Greenberg, 2017).

Omnia, and Kynoch engaged in collusive conduct involving pricing, market allocation, and information exchange within the fertiliser sector, illustrating how concentrated market structures can undermine competition and increase costs for farmers (CCSA, 2009). Sasol retains a monopoly position in ammonia production, Foskor dominates phosphate production, and a small number

of companies including Omnia, Kynoch, and Foskor control significant segments of fertiliser manufacturing and distribution. The Competition Commission’s investigation into long-standing cartel behaviour involving Sasol, Omnia, and Kynoch demonstrated how concentration at this stage of the value chain can directly affect production costs across the wider agricultural economy (Bosiu et al., 2017; Mondliwa et al., 2021).

The consequences extend beyond competition and farm economics. SA remains heavily dependent on pesticide-intensive production systems, and civil society organisations (CSOs) and human rights bodies have increasingly raised concerns about the continued use of HHPs, risks to biodiversity, and the environmental costs associated with chemical-intensive agriculture (FAO, 2024; Orellana, 2024). At the same time, concentration in seed and agrochemical markets can narrow the diversity of production systems, undermine FMSS, and limit alternative pathways for agricultural development, including agroecology and more diversified farming systems (Mayet and Greenberg, 2017; UN, 2025). Concentration is equally evident in the fertiliser sector. SA imports approximately 80% of its fertiliser requirements and relies heavily on a narrow group of dominant firms operating across production, importation, blending, and distribution (CCSA, 2025a; NAMC, 2023). The risks associated with concentrated markets have been demonstrated in practice. The Competition Commission found that Sasol,

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Machinery, technology, and lock-in Agricultural machinery is often treated as a neutral tool for improving productivity, but in concentrated food systems it can become an important mechanism of technological and financial lock-in. International manufacturers such as John Deere, AGCO, Kubota, and CNH dominate global machinery markets, while local distribution in SA is concentrated among major agribusinesses such as AFGRI and Senwes, which increasingly combine machinery sales with financing, servicing, parts supply, insurance, and broader agribusiness support services (Bowman and Robb, 2025; Hall and Cousins, 2018). This means that machinery is not simply purchased as equipment. It is often acquired through broader commercial relationships that tie farmers into specific dealer networks, credit arrangements, maintenance systems, and technology pathways. These dynamics reinforce capital-intensive farming models. Modern tractors, planters, harvesters, irrigation systems, and precision-agriculture tools require substantial upfront investment and ongoing expenditure on repairs, software, fuel, spare parts, and authorised servicing. Larger commercial farms are generally better positioned to absorb these costs, while smaller producers face high barriers to entry and limited access to appropriate-scale technologies. Machinery concentration therefore contributes to the wider price-cost squeeze in agriculture: farmers must invest in expensive technologies to remain competitive, while their ability to recover these costs is constrained by concentrated buyers, volatile prices, and rising input costs. In this way, machinery becomes part of the structural pressure towards fewer, larger, and more capital-intensive farms.

Feeding livestock, concentrating power The increasing digitisation of agricultural machinery deepens these dependencies. Equipment embedded with sensors, GPS systems, telematics, yield-mapping tools, and proprietary software generates valuable farm-level data while limiting farmers’ control over repairs, diagnostics, and technological adaptation. These developments raise important questions about the right to repair, data ownership, interoperability, and farmer autonomy. Machinery is therefore no longer only a question of mechanical power. It is becoming part of a broader digital infrastructure through which corporate actors can influence production decisions, collect data, and shape the technological trajectory of agriculture. For a democratic and agroecological food-system transition, the issue is not simply whether farmers have access to machinery, but: y what kinds of technologies are supported,

Animal feed is one of the least visible but most strategic sites of power in SA’s food system. It connects upstream control over maize, soya, seed genetics, agrochemicals, and grain trading to downstream concentration in poultry, pork, dairy, beef, processing, and retail. Much of SA’s commercially produced maize and soya, including GM maize and soybeans, is not consumed directly as food by people but is channelled into animal feed.

Feed, therefore, operates as a hidden infrastructure of industrial animal agriculture: it converts control over grain, oilseeds, GM seed systems, and agrochemical-intensive monocultures into control over meat, eggs, dairy, and processed foods.

The formal animal feed sector is highly concentrated and dominated by a small number of large firms with strong links to vertically integrated livestock and poultry value chains. The existing literature identifies three firms as accounting for around 75% of commercial feed production in SA, while large South African firms have played a leading role in coordinating animal feed and poultry value chains across the wider southern African region (Ncube, Roberts, and Zengeni, 2016). Key companies include Meadow Feeds, owned by Astral Foods, which links feed manufacturing to Astral’s wider integrated poultry operations; Epol, historically one of SA’s major feed brands, which is linked to Rainbow/RCL Foods; and AFGRI Animal Feeds, alongside other firms such as Nutri Feeds, Molatek, Feedmaster, and regional feed manufacturers (Astral Foods, 2025; CCSA, 2025a; Ncube, Roberts, and Zengeni, 2016).

y who controls them, y whether they are repairable and adaptable, and y whether they strengthen or undermine farmer autonomy.

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

This matters because feed is usually the largest cost component in industrial poultry production. Companies that can procure maize and soya at scale, operate feed mills, formulate rations, coordinate logistics, and integrate feed into poultry production are better placed to control costs and shape competition. In poultry, feed cannot be separated from breeding stock, hatcheries, contract growing, slaughter, processing, cold-chain logistics, and branded retail supply. Astral Foods, for example, describes itself as an integrated poultry producer with activities spanning animal feed manufacturing, broiler genetics, day-old chicks and hatching eggs, breeder and broiler production, abattoirs, further processing, sales, and distribution. Its Meadow Feeds division is therefore not a stand-alone feed business but part of a wider vertically integrated poultry architecture (Astral Foods, 2025). Poultry is especially important because chicken has become one of the most significant and relatively affordable sources of animal protein for South African households, particularly poor and working-class consumers. The economics of poultry are therefore deeply tied to food affordability and nutrition. When maize and soya prices rise, or when feed costs increase, the pressure is felt throughout the poultry chain. Feed costs can squeeze producers, shape retail prices and influence the affordability of one of the country’s most important protein sources (CCSA, 2025b; Ncube, Roberts, and Zengeni, 2016). These dynamics also shape the position of contract growers. In vertically integrated poultry systems, growers may provide land, housing, labour, day-to-day management, and biosecurity compliance, while integrator companies control chicks, feed formulations, veterinary protocols, slaughter facilities, processing capacity, branding, and market

access. This can leave growers formally independent but economically dependent, carrying production risks while having limited control over the terms of participation. Feed is therefore not simply an input. It is a mechanism through which integrator firms govern production standards, costs, timing, biological performance, and market access.

The feed-poultry nexus also links SA’s livestock economy to GM crop systems and ecological simplification. Industrial poultry depends on large volumes of standardised feed ingredients, especially yellow maize and soya. This reinforces demand for monoculture grain and oilseed production, much of it based on GM seed, synthetic fertilisers, and agrochemical-intensive production systems. The result is a chain of dependence: proprietary seed and chemical packages support GM maize and soya production; grain and oilseeds move through concentrated storage and feed systems; feed underpins vertically integrated poultry production; and processed chicken products then move through concentrated retail and fast-food channels. Feed is therefore one of the key mechanisms through which upstream concentration is translated into everyday foods.

The paper highlights how industrial animal agriculture drives further commodification and concentration, with poor nutritional, environmental, and socio-economic outcomes, and argues that animal welfare must be integrated into agroecological food-system transitions rather than treated as separate from food justice (ACB, 2025a). This is particularly relevant to poultry. Animal welfare organisations have raised concerns about high stocking densities, intensive production systems, rapid-growth breeds, barren environments, poor ventilation, handling, transport stress, and the inability of chickens to express natural behaviours. The National Council of Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (NSPCA) identifies welfare concerns in broiler production, including ammonia burns, lameness, high stocking densities, poor ventilation, inadequate lighting, inhumane handling, and transport-related stress, while FOUR PAWS SA has highlighted the welfare crisis in chicken meat and egg production and called for higher welfare standards (FOUR PAWS SA, 2025; NSPCA, n.d.).

From a political economy perspective, this means that feed and poultry should not be viewed narrowly as a successful agro-industrial value chain. They show how the food system converts grain monocultures, GM seed systems, feed manufacturing, animal genetics, contract production, processing, logistics, and retail into an integrated corporate system for producing cheap protein.

This system may deliver large volumes of chicken, but it also concentrates power, externalises ecological and welfare costs, creates dependencies for growers, and narrows the possibilities for more diversified, agroecological, and humane livestock systems. Understanding animal feed is therefore essential to understanding how corporate power travels through the food system—from seed and soil to chickens, supermarkets and the everyday diets of South African households.

Industrial animal agriculture is not only a question of feed efficiency, protein supply, or corporate structure. It also raises ethical, ecological, and welfare concerns. Linzi Lewis’s discussion document for Humane World for Animals SA, republished by ACB, argues that South African agricultural policy gives insufficient attention to animal welfare and tends to treat animals primarily as commodities for production, trade, and consumption.

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Agricultural production—the meeting point of concentrated power If control over agricultural inputs shapes the conditions of production, agricultural production itself is the point at which multiple forms of corporate power converge. South African farmers increasingly operate within a food system characterised by concentrated control over seeds, agrochemicals, fertilisers, machinery, finance, storage, processing, and retail. Consequently, many producers exercise limited influence over the economic conditions under which they operate. Rather than functioning as independent actors within competitive markets, farmers are positioned between highly concentrated input suppliers, on the one hand, and powerful traders, processors, and retailers on the other. Production, therefore, becomes the site where concentrated power elsewhere in the food system is experienced, negotiated, and reproduced (Adeniyi et al., 2021; Bowman and Robb, 2025; Greenberg, 2017).

Fewer farms, greater power

resource constraints (FAO et al., 2022; Hall and Cousins, 2018; Swanby et al., 2025).

SA’s agrarian economy remains profoundly shaped by the legacies of colonial dispossession and apartheid. While agriculture is often discussed as a single sector, it is more accurately understood as a deeply unequal agrarian structure characterised by stark disparities in access to land, water, finance, infrastructure, and markets.

Concentration is also evident at farm level. Large commercial farming enterprises

A relatively small number of large-scale commercial farming enterprises continue to generate most marketed agricultural output, while smaller-scale producers remain concentrated in former homeland areas and other marginalised regions where access to irrigation, finance, extension services, and formal markets remains constrained. Recent estimates suggest that approximately 15,000 large-scale commercial farms produce most of SA’s food, while millions of rural households retain some connection to agricultural production, often under severe

account for a disproportionate share of agricultural income and output, while the number of commercial maize producers has declined dramatically over the past two decades. These trends point to ongoing consolidation within primary production and the persistence of a highly unequal agrarian structure. Importantly, concentration at farm level is not simply the result of technological progress or greater efficiency. It is closely connected to the wider restructuring of the food system. Rising costs for inputs such as seed, fertiliser, agrochemicals, machinery, and energy have increased the capital requirements of farming, while concentration among processors, retailers, and traders has strengthened buyer power downstream. Farmers consequently face what has frequently been described as a “price-cost squeeze”, paying escalating prices for essential inputs while possessing limited influence over the prices they receive

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The maize sector, SA’s most important staple-producing industry, illustrates these dynamics clearly. Over the past two decades, the number of commercial

absorbing rising input costs and meeting the requirements of increasingly concentrated value chains. Similar patterns are visible in dairy production, where the number of milk producers declined from approximately 14,000 in 2005 to fewer than 1,200 by 2020 (FAO et al., 2022), while milk production became increasingly concentrated among larger suppliers integrated into processor-led supply chains dominated by firms such as Clover, Lactalis, and Nestlé (CCSA, 2019).

volumes remained relatively stable (Bowman and Robb, 2025). This shift reflects a transition towards fewer, larger, and more capital-intensive operations capable of

The livestock sector reveals additional forms of concentration. In poultry, one of SA’s most important protein sectors, vertically integrated corporations such as Astral Foods, Rainbow, and Country Bird Holdings increasingly coordinate breeding

for their products. Farm consolidation is therefore not occurring solely within agriculture; it also reflects the growing influence of actors operating elsewhere in the food system (Bowman and Robb, 2025; CCSA, 2025b; Greenberg, 2017).

maize producers has declined from approximately 14,000 in 2000 to 3,406 by 2024, even while overall production

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

stock, feed production, contract growing, processing, and distribution within integrated corporate systems. Feed production, genetics, and market access are frequently controlled by the same firms, leaving many growers dependent on contractual arrangements with limited bargaining power. Similar dynamics are evident in beef production, where large feedlots have become critical control points between primary production and formal markets, concentrating value capture beyond the farm gate (Greenberg, 2017; Ncube et al., 2016; Rainbow Chicken, 2024). Recent evidence from SA’s fresh produce sector demonstrates that concentration is increasingly reproduced through downstream market structures. The Competition

Commission’s Fresh Produce Market Inquiry found that access to major retail

and export markets is increasingly shaped by logistics capabilities, cold-chain infrastructure, traceability systems, private standards, and buyer power. While these requirements are often justified in terms of efficiency and food safety, they frequently favour larger commercial producers with access to capital and established infrastructure. Smaller and emerging producers often struggle to meet supermarket procurement requirements regarding volume, consistency, packaging, certification, and delivery schedules. Consequently, concentration at the farm level is reinforced through concentration in downstream value chains (CCSA, 2025a). This pattern is particularly evident in

export-oriented industries such as citrus, one of SA’s most successful agricultural sectors. Access to export markets increasingly depends on sophisticated packing facilities, logistics systems, phytosanitary compliance processes, and international marketing channels. Larger producers are generally 29

better positioned to meet these requirements, while smaller growers frequently remain dependent on intermediaries or packing-house operators to access global markets. As a result, value capture, market access, and negotiating power increasingly accrue to actors controlling critical infrastructure and coordination functions rather than to producers themselves (CCSA, 2025a; Chisoro and Roberts, 2024).

Viewed in this way, the central issue is not simply whether there are fewer farmers than in previous decades. The more important question is whether SA’s agricultural future is becoming increasingly dependent on larger, more capital-intensive, and more vertically integrated production systems, and what this implies for equity, resilience, ecological sustainability, and democratic control over the food system. Ownership of land remains important, but contemporary power increasingly operates through control over technologies, finance, infrastructure, logistics, and value chains. Farmers may formally own land while exercising progressively less influence over the systems that determine what they produce, how they produce it, and whether they remain economically viable. Agricultural production has therefore become one of the key sites through which concentrated corporate power is translated into everyday economic realities across SA’s food system (Bowman and Robb, 2025; Clapp et al., 2025; Greenberg, 2017). THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONTROL

Logistics, storage, and market access: governing the movement of food If agricultural production is the point at which concentrated power is experienced, logistics and storage are the mechanisms through which that power is organised and exercised. Food must move through a series of critical infrastructures before it reaches consumers, including grain silos, transport corridors, cold chains, wholesale markets, distribution centres, and export facilities. Control over these infrastructures shapes who can access markets, on what terms, and how value is distributed across the food system. The movement of food is therefore not simply a technical function but a central site of economic and governance power within SA’s food system (Bowman and Robb, 2025; Greenberg, 2017). The contemporary structure of SA’s logistics system has its roots in the political economy of apartheid agriculture. For much of the twentieth century, the state financed and supported extensive networks of grain silos, rail infrastructure, and cooperative marketing systems that primarily served white commercial agriculture. Following deregulation in the 1990s, many of these publicly supported assets were transferred to newly privatised agribusinesses, including AFGRI, Senwes, and NWK. Rather than democratising market access, deregulation concentrated ownership of strategic infrastructure in the hands of relatively few corporate entities, enabling a small number of firms to retain significant influence over grain handling, storage, and market coordination (Adeniyi et al., 2021; Bosiu et al., 2017; Ducastel and Anseeuw, 2018). Grain storage remains one of the clearest examples of infrastructural concentration. Silos are not simply warehouses but strategic nodes through which grain is graded, stored, traded, and mobilised through commodity markets. Because silo networks are highly capital intensive and difficult to replicate, ownership remains concentrated among a small number of agribusinesses. Recent research shows that silo infrastructure has increasingly been transformed into a financial asset class, generating stable returns for institutional investors and infrastructure funds. The shift from viewing silos as developmental agricultural infrastructure to treating them as revenue-generating investment assets reflects broader trends of financialisation across SA’s food system (Bowman and Robb, 2025; Ducastel and Anseeuw, 2018).

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Moving food, controlling markets Control over logistics is becoming increasingly intertwined with digital technologies. In 2024, Senwes invested in AI-enabled silo management systems to improve storage efficiency and inventory management. While these technologies may improve operational performance, they also reinforce the competitive advantages of large infrastructure owners able to invest in advanced digital systems, further widening the gap between large agribusinesses and smaller market participants (Senwes, 2024). The restructuring of SA’s transport system has reinforced these patterns of concentration. As rail freight declined, food distribution became increasingly dependent on private road transport. Major logistics firms such as Bidvest, Unitrans, Imperial Logistics, and Super Group occupy powerful positions within food distribution networks, while vertically integrated operators increasingly combine transport, warehousing, and supply-chain management services. At the same time, deteriorating road infrastructure, congestion, and inefficiencies at key ports, including Durban and Cape Town, have increased the strategic importance of firms able to internalise logistics and absorb disruptions. As logistics costs become a more significant determinant of competitiveness, control over transport infrastructure becomes an increasingly important source of market power (CCSA, 2025a; Vilakazi, 2018). The growing concentration of power within supermarket distribution systems illustrates how logistics increasingly functions as a mechanism of market governance. SA’s major retailers have progressively moved away from store-level procurement towards highly centralised distribution centres that coordinate purchasing, warehousing, and

delivery at national scale. While this model improves efficiency, it also raises significant barriers for smaller producers. Participation in formal retail supply chains increasingly depends on access to packaging facilities, traceability systems, cold-chain infrastructure, and strict delivery schedules. Access to markets is therefore increasingly mediated through logistics, rather than determined solely by productive capacity (CCSA, 2019; CCSA, 2025a). Barriers to entry remain particularly high in cold-chain logistics. The capital costs associated with refrigerated transport and storage limit the participation of smaller operators and reinforce the dominance of established logistics firms in high-value, perishable food supply chains. Recent findings from the Fresh Produce Market Inquiry demonstrate that logistical infrastructure has become one of the most important determinants of inclusion and exclusion in agricultural markets. Smaller and emerging farmers frequently lack access to cold storage, grading facilities, transport services, and distribution networks necessary to supply supermarkets and export markets. Similar dynamics are evident in the citrus industry, where participation increasingly depends on access to packhouses, cold-chain infrastructure, phytosanitary compliance systems, and export logistics. Larger producers are generally better positioned to meet these requirements, while smaller growers often remain dependent on intermediaries to access high-value markets (CCSA, 2025a; Chisoro and Roberts, 2024). The weakening of public market infrastructure further reinforces these inequalities. The Fresh Produce Market Inquiry highlighted

serious infrastructure and governance

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challenges affecting several national fresh produce markets, including aging facilities, cold-chain failures, and operational constraints. As larger commercial producers increasingly bypass these public markets in favour of direct supply arrangements with supermarket distribution centres, public markets lose throughput, price discovery functions weaken, and smaller farmers

become increasingly dependent on declining institutions. This shift effectively

transfers greater control over food distribution from public infrastructure towards privately governed supply chains (CCSA, 2025a). The state is not merely a passive observer of these developments. Urban planning decisions, retail development trajectories, and the declining investment in public food infrastructure have, often inadvertently, reinforced supermarket-led food provisioning and concentrated supply chains.

Since market liberalisation and the withdrawal of more coordinated forms of state oversight, investment has increasingly favoured shoppingcentre-based retail expansion rather than the strengthening of public wholesale and fresh produce market infrastructure.

From a political economy perspective, logistics and storage are therefore not neutral support services. They are strategic infrastructures through which economic power is exercised and reproduced. Control over transport systems, storage facilities, distribution centres, and export channels shapes who gains access to markets, who captures value, and whose interests food systems ultimately serve. Infrastructure, in this sense, becomes a mechanism of governance. The power to move food increasingly becomes the power to govern food markets (Clapp et al., 2025; Greenberg, 2017). The growing concentration of logistics and food-system infrastructure cannot be understood solely through corporate strategy or market dynamics. It has also been shaped by decades of deregulation, privatisation, and declining public investment in critical agricultural and food-system infrastructure. The weakening of public institutions and infrastructure has increased dependence on private logistics networks, storage facilities, and supply chain operators, enabling dominant firms to consolidate their control over strategic nodes in the food system. Concentration is therefore not only a consequence of market power, but also reflects broader questions of governance, public capacity, and the state’s role in shaping food-system development.

The result has been a gradual shift of economic and logistical power away from publicly governed spaces and towards privately controlled food distribution networks. Concentration in food logistics and retail should therefore be understood not only as an outcome of corporate strategy but also as the product of policy, planning, and governance choices that have enabled and entrenched existing power asymmetries within the food system (Adeniyi et al., 2021; CCSA, 2025a; Das Nair, 2019).

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

FOOD PROCESSING AND MANUFACTURING: TRANSFORMING COMMODITIES INTO CORPORATE POWER Capturing value beyond the farm gate Food processing occupies a strategic position within SA’s food system because it sits at the intersection between agricultural production and food consumption. While agricultural inputs shape the conditions under which food is produced, agricultural production reveals the squeeze on producer autonomy, logistics governs the movement of food, and processing is the stage at which agricultural commodities are transformed into branded products, consumer goods, dietary norms, and corporate value. It is here that raw materials such as maize, wheat, sugar, soybeans, milk, and vegetable oils are converted into products that dominate supermarket shelves and household diets. Processing is therefore not simply a technical activity of value addition. It is a key site of value capture, market consolidation, and corporate influence through which economic power acquired at one point in the food chain is translated into influence over consumers, food environments, and public policy (Bowman, 2025; Dube et al., 2018; Greenberg, 2017). SA’s food processing sector is characterised by high levels of concentration across several staple and nutrition-sensitive markets. Major corporations such as Tiger Brands, Premier

Foods, Pioneer Foods (now owned by PepsiCo), Nestlé, Lactalis, Clover, Coca-Cola Beverages SA, and RCL

Foods occupy powerful positions across milling, baking, dairy, beverages, packaged foods, edible oils, convenience foods, and ultra-processed products. Their influence extends beyond production volumes alone. Through ownership of processing capacity, brands, distribution systems, and marketing networks, these firms shape the structure and functioning of food value chains and exercise significant influence over what foods are available, how they are priced, and how they are consumed (CCSA, 2019; Dube et al., 2018; Greenberg, 2017). Concentration may also influence pricing dynamics.

Competition authorities have repeatedly noted evidence of asymmetric price transmission in staple foods, whereby prices rise rapidly when input costs increase but decline more slowly when those costs fall, limiting the benefits of lower costs reaching consumers.

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

When staple foods become corporate assets The milling and baking sectors illustrate these dynamics particularly clearly. Our analysis shows that four major firms—Premier Foods, Tiger Brands, Foodcorp, and Pioneer Foods—account for approximately 75% of national maize meal production, while four dominant companies control roughly 97% of wheat milling. Bread production is similarly concentrated, with a small number of firms, including Premier Foods, Tiger Brands, Foodcorp, and Albany, accounting for most of the pan-baked bread production, and supermarket groups also becoming significant producers through in-store and private-label baking. These are not niche product categories. Maize meal and bread remain among the most important staple foods consumed by South African households, particularly low-income households. Control over processing capacity in these markets, therefore, carries implications that extend well beyond competition law, affecting food affordability, food security, and the distribution of economic value throughout the food system (CCSA, 2019; Dube et al., 2018).

Concentration in processing has historically translated into market power and anti-competitive conduct. SA’s food sector has a documented history of cartelisation, price-fixing, and market allocation in staple

food categories, including bread, wheat milling, maize milling, and dairy products. These cases matter because they have involved foods consumed daily by poor and working-class households. They demonstrate that concentration is not merely a descriptive feature of market structure. Under certain conditions, it can create opportunities for dominant firms to coordinate conduct, protect market share, and preserve profits in ways that directly affect consumers, especially households that spend a disproportionate share of income on food (CCSA, 2019; Buthelezi et al., 2019; OECD, 2024).

The bread cartel remains one of the clearest examples in SA of how concentrated processing power can undermine both competition and the right to food. Investigations revealed coordinated conduct among Premier (Blue Ribbon), Tiger Brands (Albany), Foodcorp (Sunbake), and Pioneer Foods (Sasko), which together controlled between 50% and 60% of SA’s bread market. Competition authorities found that firms had coordinated bread prices, market allocation, and other trading practices, resulting in substantial penalties and consent agreements between 2007 and 2010. The political significance of the case lies in the fact that it centred on a basic staple food consumed daily by millions of South Africans, particularly poor and working-class households. Unlike anti-competitive conduct in luxury or discretionary markets, collusion in bread markets directly affects the cost of a food item that accounts for a significant share of expenditure for low-income consumers.

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The case demonstrated how concentration in essential food sectors can enable corporate actors to extract value from those least able to absorb rising costs, exposing the profound social consequences of market power in staple food systems (CCSA, 2019; Competition Tribunal, 2010; OECD, 2024). Recent food price monitoring reinforces the need to scrutinise processing and retail margins. The Competition Commission’s March 2025 Essential Food Price Monitoring Report continued to track key processed foods, including sunflower oil, brown bread, canned pilchards, eggs, individually quick frozen (IQF) chicken, and maize meal. The Commission noted that some food prices had begun falling modestly but emphasised that monitoring remained necessary to ensure that declining upstream costs are passed through quickly and proportionately to retailers and consumers. It also observed that the producer-to-retail spread for sunflower oil remained at its highest level since 2021, even where price transmission had improved (CCSA, 2025b). Recent civil society interventions have also brought the politics of food prices into sharper public focus. The Union Against Hunger’s 2026 submission to the South African Human

Rights Commission (SAHRC)’s National Inquiry into the Food Systems of SA argues

that the constitutional right to sufficient food is being violated because of policy failures and abuses of power, including corporate power in the food system. The submission identifies concentration of power in the food value chain and its impact on access, affordability, and nutritional quality as one of the issues requiring investigation (Union Against Hunger, 2026). This is evidence of growing rights-based mobilisation around food prices and the deeper problem: the concentration of decision-making power over processing, branding, logistics,

retail, and governance. The issue is not only that food is expensive, but also that the structures that determine food prices, diets, and access are concentrated and largely undemocratic (Adeniyi et al., 2021; Clapp et al., 2025; Moyo and Thow, 2020). The 2017-2018 listeriosis outbreak provides another important case study of processing power and public accountability. The outbreak, linked to processed meat products

manufactured by Tiger Brands’ Enterprise Foods facility, exposed weaknesses in food

governance, corporate accountability, and state oversight. It also illustrated how risks generated within a highly concentrated processing system can have national public-health consequences. The significance of this case is not limited to food safety. It shows that concentrated processing systems can socialise risk while corporate accountability remains contested and fragmented (Adeniyi et al., 2021; HunterAdams et al., 2018).

Recent merger activity demonstrates that corporate concentration in food processing continues to deepen. PepsiCo’s acquisition of Pioneer Foods transferred ownership of major South African staple and beverage brands, including Sasko, White Star, Spekko and Liqui-Fruit, into the portfolio of one of the world’s largest food and beverage corporations. PepsiCo’s subsequent acquisition of the remaining stake in FutureLife further extended its presence in higher-value cereal and nutrition-related categories (PepsiCo, 2023). These developments show how South African staple and processed food markets are increasingly embedded in transnational corporate strategies, with decision-making shaped not only by local food needs but by global portfolios, margins, and shareholder expectations.

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

economy terms, processing concentration is becoming portfolio power: the ability to shape multiple parts of the diet through ownership of brands, facilities, logistics relationships, and retail channels (Bowman, 2025; CCSA, 2019; Dube et al., 2018). The Premier-RFG transaction is another significant recent case. The proposed acquisition brings together Premier’s staple food and bakery portfolio, including brands such as Blue Ribbon, Snowflake, and Iwisa, with RFG’s long-life and convenience food brands, including Rhodes, Bull Brand, Today, Magpie and Hinds. Public reporting in March 2026 stated that the transaction had received final clearance and that the combined group was expected to generate approximately R28 billion in annual revenue, subject to conditions, including a restriction on job cuts and enterprise and supplier development commitments (Food Business Middle East and Africa, 2026).

Dairy processing provides another South

African example of how processing power operates as buyer power. Four major processors and buyers, Clover, Nestlé, Parmalat/Lactalis and Woodlands Dairy, collectively purchase about 70% of SA’s raw milk output. This gives processors significant influence over dairy farmers, particularly as the number of milk producers has declined sharply while total milk production has not fallen correspondingly. The implication is not simply that the dairy sector has become more efficient. It is that fewer, larger producers are increasingly integrated into concentrated processor-led supply chains that determine procurement terms, quality standards, product development, and market access (CCSA, 2019; FAO et al., 2022).

The significance of the Premier-RFG case is that it shows a shift from concentration within individual product categories to concentration across food portfolios.

The same dynamics are visible in edible oils, poultry, and convenience foods. The top

five sunflower seed crushers account for 81% of the market, while the Competition

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Large processors increasingly compete through brand ecosystems that span staples, convenience foods, canned foods, snacks, baked goods, and ready-to-eat products. This strengthens their bargaining power with retailers, allows them to spread marketing and distribution costs across multiple categories, and makes it harder for smaller processors to compete for shelf space, procurement contracts, or consumer recognition. In political

Commission’s 2025 food price monitoring work continues to track sunflower oil and IQF chicken because of their importance to household consumption and price transmission. In poultry, processing is closely linked to breeding stock, feed production, contract growing, slaughter, cold-chain logistics, and retail distribution, creating vertically integrated systems in which value capture is coordinated across the chain (CCSA, 2025b; Ncube et al., 2016; OECD, 2024).

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Ultra-processed foods and the corporate shaping of diets Perhaps nowhere are the broader implications of processing power more visible than in the rise of UPFs. SA’s food system is undergoing a profound nutrition transition, marked by growing consumption of packaged snacks, sugar-sweetened beverages, processed cereals, confectionery, convenience foods, and ready-to-eat meals. Recent South African studies link rising UPF consumption to poor diet quality, obesity, and diet-related NCDs, particularly among low-income households whose food choices are shaped by affordability, convenience, marketing, and unequal access to healthier foods (Frank et al., 2024; Godbharle et al., 2024). This shift is also linked to wider social changes, including urbanisation, wage labour, long commuting times, and reduced time and space for food preparation. UPFs are therefore not simply a public-health problem or a matter of individual choice. They are an expression of a food-processing model organised around scale, standardisation, branding, long shelf life, and profit maximisation.

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ACB’s work on UPFs in Africa shows that these products are becoming central to “globalised diets”, displacing healthier whole foods while expanding markets for corporate-industrial agri-food systems (ACB, 2024h). UPFs are attractive to large processors because they are made from relatively cheap, mass-produced ingredients; can be reformulated across multiple product categories; have long shelf lives; generate high margins; and can be aggressively marketed to diverse consumer groups. Their growth is therefore closely tied to corporate concentration in processing, branding, packaging, logistics, and retail. It is also shaped by the social conditions of everyday life: precarious work, low incomes, urban food

deserts, inadequate public infrastructure, time poverty, and the erosion of accessible local food economies. The consequences extend beyond nutrition. UPF production depends heavily on a narrow basket of globally traded commodity crops, especially maize, wheat, soy, and oilseeds, which are transformed into industrial ingredients for branded products. This reinforces agricultural homogenisation, weakens demand for diverse local foods, and contributes to the erosion of agricultural biodiversity, FMSS, and food cultures (ACB, 2024e). UPF systems also generate ecological harms through industrial production, packaging, transport, consumption, and disposal, thereby linking dietary change to biodiversity loss, climate pressures, and pollution (ACB, 2024d). UPFs therefore illustrate how concentrated processing power extends far beyond the factory gate. Large food manufacturers shape not only what people eat but also agricultural production systems, food environments, public health debates, and regulatory agendas. Through advertising, product placement, sponsorships, branding, lobbying, and voluntary self-regulation, corporations influence both consumer behaviour and the policy terrain. While taxation, front-of-package labelling, marketing restrictions, and ingredient limits are important, they do not by themselves address the deeper structures of concentration and power that drive UPF expansion (Abdool Karim et al., 2025; ACB, 2024g; Milsom et al., 2023; Moodie et al., 2021). The rise of UPFs therefore confirms the central argument of this section: processing is not only about value addition but also about the corporate shaping of diets, biodiversity, health, everyday urban life, and food-system governance.

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

RETAIL POWER: GOVERNING ACCESS TO FOOD, MARKETS, AND EVERYDAY SURVIVAL Gatekeepers of the food system Retail is the point at which the food system becomes visible to most people. It is where food is encountered as price, choice, convenience, scarcity, aspiration, and everyday survival. Yet retail should not be understood simply as the final stage of the value chain. In SA, supermarket concentration has become one of the most powerful mechanisms through which corporate actors govern access to food, discipline suppliers, shape consumption patterns, reorganise urban food economies, and, increasingly, capture consumer data. If inputs control the conditions of production, production reveals the squeeze on farm autonomy; logistics controls the movement of food; and processing transforms commodities into brands and dietary power, with retail being the point at which these concentrations converge into direct authority over consumers, suppliers, informal traders, urban space, and food environments. SA’s retail sector is economically significant and highly concentrated. Retail trade accounts for more than 30% of gross domestic product. Retail sales for 2025 were expected to reach R1.53 trillion (Tiger Brands, 2025), and the food segment accounts for around half of total retail sales. Formal retail food sales reached approximately R865 billion in 2024 (USDA, 2025b), while total food trade revenues may exceed R1.4 trillion when informal food trade is included (Business Wire, 2023). In formal grocery retail, market power is concentrated

in a small group of large supermarket chains, including Shoprite, Pick n Pay, SPAR, Woolworths, and Massmart. This “Big Five” control between 60% and 80% of formal retail sales, and Shoprite alone has an estimated 34% market share in the formal grocery segment (CCSA, 2019; CCSA, 2025a). The political-economy significance of this concentration lies not only in the size of these firms but also in the functions they perform. Supermarkets increasingly act as gatekeepers between producers and consumers. They determine which suppliers enter formal markets, what standards they must meet, what volumes they must deliver, what payment terms they must accept, what products receive shelf space, and how food is presented to consumers. Retailers therefore exercise a form of private governance over the food system. Their procurement systems, distribution centres, private standards, trading terms, loyalty programmes, and digital platforms increasingly shape the rules of participation in food markets. This means that supermarket power is not limited to consumer-facing sales. It reaches backward into farming, processing, packaging, logistics, and informal trade.

The Competition Commission’s Grocery Retail Market Inquiry remains one of the most important South African investigations into retail power.

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The Inquiry examined the impact of the expansion, diversification, and consolidation of national supermarket chains on small and independent retailers in townships, peri-urban, and rural areas, and the informal economy. It also investigated the impact of long-term exclusive lease agreements between property developers and national supermarket chains, the role of financiers in these agreements, competition between local and foreign-operated small retailers, and the effect of regulations—including municipal town planning and by-laws—on small and independent retailers, and informal traders (CCSA, 2019). This framing is important because it recognises that retail concentration operates not only through market shares but through property relations, spatial planning, finance, tenancy arrangements, and municipal regulation.

One of the clearest examples of retail power has been the use of exclusive lease agreements in shopping centres. Large supermarket chains historically used their position as anchor tenants to secure lease clauses that prevented shopping centre owners from leasing space to competing grocery retailers, specialist food stores, or smaller independent operators. These arrangements helped entrench supermarket dominance in formal retail spaces, particularly in malls and shopping centres, while limiting opportunities for smaller competitors and independent food businesses. The Grocery Retail Market Inquiry identified these exclusive leases as a competition concern and recommended that major supermarket chains cease enforcing them, while also calling for measures to support competitiveness for spaza shops and small independent retailers (CCSA, 2019).1

Retail power also operates through buyer power over suppliers. Large supermarket chains procure at scale and increasingly through centralised distribution systems. This enables them to demand volume, consistency, traceability, packaging, certification, delivery schedules, and price concessions from suppliers. These requirements may improve efficiency for supermarkets, but they often raise barriers to entry for smaller producers, small processors, and historically disadvantaged suppliers. The result is a system in which participation in formal retail is increasingly conditional on having the capital, logistics, certification, and administrative capacity to meet privately determined standards. Smaller suppliers may be formally “included” into corporate supply chains but on terms that shift high costs and risks onto them. This dynamic is especially evident in fresh produce. The Competition Commission’s 2025 Fresh Produce Market Inquiry found barriers to competition across the fresh produce value chain, including challenges at national fresh produce markets, the role of market agents, high input costs, regulatory hurdles, and systemic barriers facing small-scale, emerging, and historically disadvantaged farmers. The Inquiry also highlighted limited access for small and emerging farmers to formal retail channels and national fresh produce markets and noted a slow transformation in the sector. It found that the fresh produce market is valued at more than R53 billion annually, excluding informal sales channels and exports, but that the share of historically disadvantaged farmers and market agents remains negligible (CCSA, 2025a). These findings are directly relevant to retail because supermarkets are among the most powerful routes to consumers and because their procurement systems shape which producers can access those markets.

1 https://businesstech.co.za/news/business/739535/massive-changes-for-shopping-malls-in-south-africa-deadline-set-for-spar-pickn-pay-and-shoprite-to-end-exclusivity-agreements/

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Beyond the checkout counter The Fresh Produce Market Inquiry also drew attention to pricing transparency and supermarket practices. It recommended that major retailers, including Shoprite Checkers, Pick n Pay, Woolworths, SPAR, Food Lover’s Market, and Massmart, display prices for selected fresh produce on a per 100-gram basis in addition to any other pricing display used, in order to facilitate easier price comparisons for consumers (CCSA, 2025a). This recommendation may appear technical, but it reflects a broader concern with how food markets are organised and experienced. Consumers do not make choices based on price alone; purchasing decisions are shaped by how information is presented, including pack sizes, unit pricing, promotions, product placement, and other aspects of the retail environment. Greater pricing transparency can therefore play an important role in improving consumers’ ability to compare products and make informed purchasing decisions, particularly in contexts where food affordability is a major concern. In this sense, retail power extends beyond the setting of prices to include influence over the informational and commercial environments through which food choices are made.

accrued to processors, influence product formulation, discipline branded suppliers, and control shelf competition. This increasingly blurs the boundary between processing and retail. Retailers do not merely mediate between processors and consumers; they increasingly compete with processors while governing their access to consumers. Private labels such as Shoprite’s Ritebrand and Pick n Pay’s No Name increase retailers’ bargaining power and may require suppliers to produce supermarket-owned brands, often at lower margins than their own branded goods (Das Nair and Dube, 2017; Dube et al., 2018). Retail power is also spatial power. The post-apartheid expansion of supermarket chains into townships, peri-urban areas, and rural areas has profoundly transformed food access. On one hand, supermarkets may provide consumers with convenience, predictable product availability, and competitive prices on selected goods. On the other hand, their expansion can displace or weaken independent retailers, small grocers, market traders, butcheries, bakeries, and spaza shops that have long served low-income communities. The Grocery Retail Market Inquiry explicitly investigated the impact of national supermarket expansion on small and independent retailers in townships, peri-urban, and rural areas, and the informal economy (CCSA, 2019). This makes

Supermarkets also shape the food environment through private labels and category management. Private labels allow retailers to move beyond selling food produced by others to becoming quasi-manufacturers and brand owners. By expanding house brands, retailers can capture margins that previously 43

retail a central terrain of contestation over local livelihoods, urban economies, and community control of food access. This process of “peripheral supermarketisation” is reshaping local food economies and intensifying pressures on informal traders who have historically played a critical role in food access and livelihoods.

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Beyond the supermarket: the enduring importance of informal food systems The informal food economy is not marginal to SA’s food system. It is one of its most important and least recognised components. Estimates cited by Trade Intelligence suggest that the informal grocery sector, including spaza shops and mobile traders, is worth approximately R184 billion annually and serves around 11.1 million consumers, while as much as 40% of the food purchased by South Africans each year may pass through informal trading channels (Daily Investor, 2024).

expanded, the informal economy has not disappeared. Instead, SA’s food system is increasingly characterised by coexistence, competition, and interdependence between large retail chains, wholesalers, migrant-owned businesses, spaza shops, street traders, and other forms of informal food retail. Rather than viewing informal trade as a residual sector awaiting replacement by modern retail, it is better understood as a critical component of food security and everyday survival for millions of people.

More recent estimates cited by NielsenIQ in SA’s State of the Retail Nation suggest that traditional trade generated R43.1 billion in sales during the first quarter of 2026,2 while the broader informal retail economy may be worth approximately R190 billion annually, forming part of a wider township economy estimated at around R900 billion.3 Although such figures should be treated with caution unless independently verified, they point to a

critical reality: informal food traders are not peripheral actors. They are essential

providers of food access, livelihoods, and last-mile distribution, particularly in low-income communities where formal supermarkets may be distant, expensive to reach, or poorly aligned with the purchasing patterns of households that shop daily and in small quantities. The significance of informal food systems is not only economic. Informal traders provide flexibility, proximity, credit, social embeddedness, and employment in contexts marked by high unemployment, low incomes, and unequal access to transport and retail infrastructure. As formal supermarkets have

2 https://www.retailbriefafrica.co.za/uncategorized/niq-state-of-the-retail-nation-q1-2026-south-african-retail-benefits-from-benigninflation/ 3 https://businesstech.co.za/news/business/862616/south-africas-hidden-r900-billion-retail-giant-is-beating-shoprite-and-pick-npay/ Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Naledi deaths, Terbufos, and the politics of food safety The politics of the informal food economy came sharply into public focus following the deaths of children in Naledi, Soweto, and other communities after exposure to the HHP Terbufos in 2024. The deaths shocked the country and exposed profound weaknesses in food-safety governance, pesticide regulation, and environmental health systems. CSOs, including the South African People’s Tribunal on AgroToxins (SAPToA), UnPoison SA, farmworker organisations, and ACB partners, worked alongside public-health researchers such as former Professor Leslie London and Professor Hanna-Andrea Rother at the University of Cape Town, whose evidence on Terbufos poisonings helped expose the scale of the crisis and strengthen the case for regulatory action (ACB, 2024i; Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention, 2025; London et al., 2026; SAPToA, 2025).

However, the public response to these deaths also exposed a deeply troubling political dynamic. Rather than focusing on pesticide regulation, hazardous chemicals, public health systems, and regulatory failures, public debate was quickly redirected towards foreign nationals operating spaza shops and informal businesses. Anti-migrant organisations and political actors sought to present the crisis as a consequence of migration rather than a consequence of failures in pesticide regulation, enforcement, and public oversight. This framing contributed to harassment, violence, shop closures, and broader xenophobic mobilisation directed at migrant traders in townships and urban areas. Such responses must be rejected.

Food safety without xenophobia The deaths of children from pesticide poisoning represent a profound food-system and public-health failure, but they cannot be explained through the nationality, ethnicity, or immigration status of traders. Framing food safety through a xenophobic lens diverts attention away from the structural conditions that create risk in the first place: weak regulation of hazardous pesticides, inadequate environmental health systems, poor municipal oversight, fragmented enforcement, poverty, unsafe storage conditions, under-resourced local government, and the absence of dignified and properly supported local food economies. Xenophobic narratives obscure state responsibility while legitimising violence against some of the most economically vulnerable participants in the food system. This critique is particularly important because migrant traders have become integral to SA’s informal food economy. Research by Marc Wegerif and others demonstrates that migrant-owned food businesses play an important role in food distribution, employment generation, and consumer access, particularly in underserved areas. Through extended trading hours, dense supply networks, competitive pricing, and embedded relationships within communities, migrant traders have become central actors within township food systems rather than outsiders operating at their margins. Attempts to criminalise or exclude these traders in the name of food safety not only reproduce exclusionary and violent politics, but risk undermining food access and livelihoods for the very communities such interventions claim to protect (Wegerif, 2020; Wegerif, 2026).

This does not mean dismissing legitimate food-safety concerns. Serious governance failures exist and require urgent attention.

The Public Protector’s 2026 investigation drew attention to weaknesses in food-safety governance, including failures of

coordination, inadequate inspection capacity, institutional fragmentation, and shortcomings in enforcement systems. While some of the findings bring together a range of distinct issues that require careful differentiation, the broader conclusion regarding governance failure is difficult to dispute. Food-safety crises are more likely to emerge where regulatory systems are weak, environmental health services are under-resourced, and municipal institutions lack the capacity required for effective oversight. The appropriate response is therefore not xenophobic exclusion, but stronger public institutions, better enforcement of hazardous pesticide controls, improved environmental health systems, safer storage and trading infrastructure, and greater accountability across the food system.

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

The new frontier of supermarket expansion

At the same time, as middle- and upper-income markets become saturated, retailers have expanded into township and rural markets through discount formats, smaller stores, and private-label strategies. Shoprite’s Usave and Usave eKasi formats, Pick n Pay’s Boxer stores, and SPAR’s Savemor model are all examples of efforts to capture lower-income and price-sensitive consumers (Bowman, 2025; Daily Investor, 2024). This process represents a new frontier of corporate expansion into spaces where informal food economies have historically provided affordable, flexible, and socially embedded access to food. The challenge is therefore not simply one of food safety or competition between different retail formats. It is a struggle over who will shape the future of food access in SA’s townships and rural communities and whether informal food economies will be supported as a legitimate and valuable component of a democratic food system or displaced through a combination of corporate expansion, regulatory neglect, and xenophobic politics.

Governance failure and food system risk The failures also point to a broader crisis of public capacity within local food systems. Weak environmental health services, inadequate inspection capacity, fragmented governance, and poor municipal infrastructure have increased food safety risks and undermined public oversight. Yet the persistence and significance of informal food economies should not be understood simply as a response to state failure. Informal traders, spaza shops, and street vendors perform important economic

and social functions that formal retail and public systems have often been unable or unwilling to provide, including access to affordable food, proximity, credit, and livelihood opportunities. The challenge is therefore not to replace informal food systems, but to strengthen public institutions in ways that support safer, more equitable, and better governed food environments while recognising the indispensable role that informal food economies already play.

Retail concentration is also entering a new digital phase.

platform for same-day grocery, general merchandise, and speciality pet delivery (Shoprite Holdings, 2025b). Shoprite’s 2025 integrated report presents the Group’s strategy, business model, and growth drivers, including “A Smarter Shoprite”, highlighting the strategic importance of digital capabilities and data-driven retail systems to the company’s growth model (Shoprite Holdings, 2025a). More recent reporting states that Sixty60 generated R11.9 billion in sales in the six months to 28 December 2025, growing by 34.6% year on year.4,5

The rise of platform retail matters because it extends supermarket power beyond physical stores. Digital grocery platforms combine ordering, payments, delivery, customer profiling, loyalty data, promotions, and algorithmic visibility. They allow retailers to gather granular information on consumer behaviour, target promotions, integrate adjacent product categories, and expand into forms of convenience that informal traders cannot easily replicate. This creates a new layer of concentration: not only control over shelf space but also control over search results, app interfaces, delivery infrastructure, consumer data, and digital payment systems. Retailers increasingly govern food access both through place and through platform.

Shoprite’s 2025 results presentation records group sales of R252.7 billion, 8.9% sales growth, R8 billion in market share gains for core Supermarkets RSA, two new distribution centres, and the rollout of a new Sixty60 4 https://techcentral.co.za/shoprite-keeps-sixty60-momentum-as-group-sales-rise-7-2/277048/ 5 https://techcabal.com/2026/08/12/shoprites-sixty60-is-now-a-1-6-billion-digital-commerce-business/,

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

This has implications for the informal food economy. Informal traders have historically competed through proximity, flexible credit, small pack sizes, long operating hours, and local knowledge. Digital supermarket platforms challenge this by offering convenience, delivery, and personalised promotion—first to middleand upper-income consumers, but increasingly to broader markets as platform models expand. At the same time, business-to-business digital platforms are emerging to supply spaza shops and informal retailers, in some cases creating new dependencies on corporate wholesalers, logistics systems, and data infrastructures. The future struggle in South African food retail may therefore not only be between supermarkets and spaza shops, but between different models of platform-mediated food access.

Retail also shapes diets. Supermarkets influence consumption through promotions, shelf placement, store layout, private labels, loyalty schemes, and pricing strategies. This links retail concentration directly to the earlier discussion of UPFs. Large retailers provide the physical and digital infrastructure through which UPFs, sugary beverages, processed cereals, snacks, convenience foods, and private-label products are normalised and promoted. They also determine the visibility and relative affordability of fresh produce, minimally processed foods, and healthier alternatives. The retail environment therefore cannot be treated as neutral. It actively shapes demand and contributes to the nutritional transition unfolding in SA.

and data systems, retailers shape the food system in ways that are not subject to the same democratic accountability as public regulation. Their power is infrastructural, spatial, economic, and, increasingly, digital.

A democratic food-systems agenda must therefore treat retail as a central site of transformation. This does not mean romanticising all informal trade or dismissing genuine concerns regarding food safety, affordability, and consumer protection. It means refusing a future in which those concerns are used to legitimise xenophobia, criminalise poverty, displace migrant traders, or clear the path for corporate retail expansion. A just approach would protect

public health while supporting informal traders with infrastructure, safe storage, transparent licensing, fair wholesale access, pesticide controls, municipal services, and protection from violence and displacement. It would regulate buyer power, trading terms, private labels, digital data practices, and unhealthy food environments in the public interest. The central question is not merely how to make supermarkets more efficient, but how to ensure that food access, supplier participation, trader livelihoods, and community food economies are not subordinated to concentrated corporate retail power. Retail is therefore not the end of the food chain. It is the point at which corporate concentration becomes everyday life:

y where they shop, y what foods they encounter, y which producers survive, y which traders are displaced, and y whose food systems are made visible or invisible. In this sense, retail power is not simply a competition issue. It is a democratic issue, a livelihoods issue, a public health issue, a Pan-African solidarity issue, a nutrition issue, and a spatial justice issue. Any serious transition towards democratic food systems in SA must confront supermarket and platform power while actively rebuilding, protecting, and dignifying the diverse formal and informal food economies that continue to feed most people.

y what people can afford,

From a political economy perspective,

retail concentration represents one of the clearest examples of private governance in the food system. Supermarket chains

increasingly determine the terms of market access for producers, processors, traders, and consumers. Through procurement standards, exclusive leases, distribution centres, private labels, digital platforms, pricing practices,

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

MECHANISMS OF CONCENTRATION: MERGERS, FINANCIALISATION, AND DIGITALISATION The persistence of concentration despite repeated competition interventions raises an important question: how is corporate power reproduced and deepened over time? Beyond anti-competitive conduct, concentration is increasingly driven by structural processes that enable corporations to expand ownership, extend control over strategic assets, and strengthen their influence across food value chains. Among the most important of these processes are M&A, which have played a significant role in reshaping ownership patterns across SA’s food system.

Corporate concentration in SA’s food system is not merely the result of organic business growth. It has also been driven by successive waves of M&A that have consolidated ownership across agricultural inputs, processing, manufacturing, and food retail. Through mergers, dominant firms can eliminate competitors, expand market share, acquire strategic assets, and strengthen their influence across multiple segments of the value chain. As a result, M&A has become one of the most important mechanisms through which concentration is reproduced and deepened within contemporary food systems (Buthelezi et al., 2023; Clapp, 2021).

SA has experienced a significant wave of food-system mergers in recent years.

Major transactions include: y PepsiCo’s acquisition of Pioneer Foods, which brought a range of household brands under the control of a global food conglomerate; y Heineken’s acquisition of Distell and Namibia Breweries; y Lactalis’ acquisition of Nestlé SA’s Cremora business; and the y Premier-Rhodes transaction. These transactions further concentrated market power within food processing and branded food markets and form part of a broader international trend of consolidation, through which large corporations seek economies of scale, enhanced bargaining power, and greater control over supply chains and consumer markets. Similar dynamics have been observed globally through

medium-sized enterprises, independent processors, and farmer-owned businesses. The cumulative effect is an increasingly concentrated food economy in which a relatively small number of firms exercise substantial influence over prices, supply chains, procurement systems, and consumer food environments (Angumuthoo et al., 2020; Buthelezi et al., 2019). SA’s Competition Act contains important public-interest provisions intended to ensure that merger assessments consider employment, equity, ownership transformation and the participation of small businesses. However, critics have argued that merger regulation has often been insufficient to address the structural consequences of consolidation. Public-interest remedies, including supplier development funds and local procurement commitments, may mitigate some immediate impacts but frequently leave underlying market structures intact. Concerns have also been raised about limited monitoring of merger conditions, the persistence of market concentration despite

regulatory intervention, and the tendency to assess mergers primarily through short-term efficiency and consumer-price considerations rather than their broader implications for economic democracy, food sovereignty, and the public interest (Angumuthoo et al., 2020; Klaaren et al., 2025). Ultimately, the persistence of large-scale consolidation despite an active competition regime raises broader questions about the state’s capacity and willingness to confront corporate concentration. While competition authorities have sought to balance market efficiency with public-interest considerations, the continued consolidation of ownership across food systems suggests that existing approaches have struggled to reverse or meaningfully constrain the accumulation of corporate power. This raises important questions about whether more transformative approaches to regulation and economic governance are required if food systems are to serve broader social, developmental, and ecological objectives.

mega-mergers in the seed and agrochemical sectors, including Bayer-Monsanto, Dow-DuPont and ChemChina-Syngenta (Buthelezi et al.,

2023; Clapp, 2021). The implications of these mergers extend beyond changes in ownership. Consolidation can reduce the number of independent actors within food systems, strengthen barriers to entry for smaller firms and reinforce existing inequalities in market access. In sectors already characterised by high levels of concentration, mergers frequently increase the market power of dominant corporations while narrowing opportunities for small and

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

The limits of competition policy SA’s competition authorities have played an important role in challenging anti-competitive conduct within food value chains. Through cartel prosecutions, merger regulation, market inquiries, and food-price monitoring, the Competition Commission has exposed collusion in sectors such as bread, wheat milling, poultry, and fertilisers, while also scrutinising major transactions and market dynamics in food processing and retail. Yet despite these interventions, concentration across many segments of the food system remains high and, in some cases, has deepened. This reflects a broader challenge facing competition policy: while competition law can address explicit collusion and abusive conduct, it is often less effective in confronting the cumulative effects of mergers, acquisitions, vertical integration, financialisation, and platform-based forms of market power. Transactions such as PepsiCo’s acquisition of Pioneer Foods demonstrate how concentration can continue to evolve within formally competitive markets. The challenge is therefore no longer only about preventing cartels but about addressing the growing structural power of firms that increasingly shape supply chains, food environments, consumer choices, and

food-system governance more broadly. Moreover, competition policy has historically focused on price effects and consumer welfare, often giving less attention to the broader social, developmental, and ecological consequences of concentration. While SA’s Competition Act contains important public-interest provisions designed to protect employment, support small businesses, and promote more inclusive ownership patterns, these measures have often struggled to address the structural dynamics that drive concentration across food systems. Remedies attached to major mergers, including supplier development programmes and local procurement commitments, may alleviate some immediate harms but do not necessarily alter underlying market structures or redistribute economic power. Conventional competition tools are being stretched beyond their original design as food-system concentration becomes increasingly intertwined with financial ownership, control over infrastructure, proprietary technologies, and digital platforms. Addressing these challenges will require a a broader approach to economic governance that considers questions of ownership, democratic accountability, food sovereignty, and public interest, alongside market competition (Angumuthoo et al., 2020; Buthelezi et al., 2019; Klaaren et al., 2025). Furthermore, concentration in the food system is not driven solely by anti-competitive conduct or failures of merger regulation. Increasingly, corporate power is reproduced through deeper processes of financialisation that reshape who owns, governs, and benefits from food systems. Understanding these processes is essential to explaining why concentration persists despite regulatory intervention.

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Acquiring firm

Target firm

Walmart Stores Inc. (USA) Massmart Holdings Retail/Wholesale

Pioneer Hi-Bred (DuPont) Pannar Seed Agricultural Inputs (Seeds)

RCL Foods (Remgro) Foodcorp & TSB Sugar Food Processing

Clover SA DairyBelle (Yogurt/UHT) & Nkunzi Milkyway Food Processing

AB InBev SABMiller Beverages

Bayer AG Monsanto Agricultural Inputs

PepsiCo Pioneer Foods Food Processing

2011

2012

2013–14

2014

2016

2017

2020

A watershed moment for foreign retail entry. Approved with significant public interest conditions, requiring Walmart to establish a R240 million Supplier Development Fund to support local smallholder farmers and agro-processors.

Reduced the highly concentrated hybrid maize seed market from three main players to two. Initially prohibited by the Competition Commission for stifling innovation, but later approved with conditions on appeal by the Competition Appeal Court.

Transformed Rainbow Chicken (a poultry producer) into a diversified branded consumer food giant (RCL Foods) by acquiring milling, baking, and sugar operations.

Driven by a strategy to expand into new, higher-margin niche markets (like yogurt and Ayrshire milk) rather than building new organic capacity.

A global mega-merger that consolidated the beer market. Approved in SA with extensive conditions, including a R1 billion investment fund for South African agriculture and enterprise development. AB InBev later sold SABMiller’s 54.5% stake in Coca-Cola Beverages Africa to Coca-Cola.

A global mega-merger combining dominance in seeds and agrochemicals. Conditionally approved in SA; Bayer had to divest its Liberty Link herbicide tech and certain seed operations to ensure continued local competition.

A massive US$1.7 billion acquisition. Approved with heavy public interest conditions, including issuing R1.6 billion in shares to a worker trust and investments to develop local agricultural supply chains.

Premier Group Pioneer Foods Food Processing

Minkama/BGFIBank Group Chococam, Cameroon (from Tiger Brands) Food Processing

Ashton Fruit Producers Co-op/Norfund Langeberg and Ashton Foods (from Tiger Brands) Canned Fruits / Food Processing

Lactalis SA Cremora (from Nestlé) Dairy / Creamers

Rand Agri Randfontein Milling (from Tiger Brands) Milling

Heineken Distell Group Beverages

Molare & Silver Blade (Country Bird) Value Added Meat Products (from Tiger Brands) Meat Processing

2025–26

2025-26

2025

2023

2020

A R4.3 billion share-swap deal resulting in a combined mega-processor with annual revenues approaching R28 billion. The merger combines Premier’s baking and milling dominance with RFG’s canned and convenience foods, bringing it within striking distance of market leader Tiger Brands.

Tiger Brands sold its 74.69% majority stake in Cameroonian confectionery maker Chococam (Chocolaterie Confiserie Camerounaise S.A.) to Minkama Capital Ltd for roughly US$76 million, with financial backing from BGFIBank Group.

Tiger Brands sold its canned fruit operation for a symbolic R1 to a new company set up by a consortium of the Ashton Fruit Producer Co-operative and Norwegian Investment Fund for Developing Countries (Norfund).

Lactalis SA (which previously acquired Parmalat) expanded its portfolio by acquiring the iconic Cremora coffee creamer brand from Nestlé, further consolidating the dairy and dairy-alternative space.

Tiger Brands disposed of its commercial maize and wheat milling business (including the iconic Ace brand) to commodity trader Rand Agri to streamline its portfolio. Approved by the Tribunal with strict conditions to protect existing jobs.

A R40.1 billion transaction, which creates Heineken Beverages. Approved after 18 months with extensive conditions, including a R400 million supplier development fund, R10 billion local investment commitments, and the forced sale of the Strongbow cider brand.

Following the devastating 2017–2018 Listeriosis outbreak traced to its Enterprise polony facility, Tiger Brands sold its abattoirs to Molare and its meat processing plants to Silver Blade for approximately R428 million.

Figure 3: Timeline of significant M&A within SA’s agri-food sector. Illustrates how ownership and influence extend across agricultural inputs, primary production, logistics, food processing, and retail, creating interconnected pathways through which value, information, and decision-making authority are concentrated within a relatively small number of firms.

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Financialisation and the assetisation of SA’s food system Corporate power in food systems increasingly extends beyond market concentration and ownership structures to encompass the growing influence of financial actors, institutional investors, and financial markets. Financialisation refers to the expanding role of financial motives, institutions, and investment practices in shaping the organisation and governance of food systems. Under these conditions, food-system assets are increasingly evaluated for their capacity to generate investor returns, often shifting attention away from broader objectives such as food security, equitable livelihoods, and ecological sustainability (ACB, 2023a; Clapp and Isakson, 2018). A key dimension of this transformation is the

growing role of institutional investors in SA’s food economy. Ownership of major food corporations increasingly involves pension funds, asset managers, and investment vehicles holding significant stakes across processing, retail, agribusiness, and logistics. The PIC, acting on behalf of the GEPF, has become one of the country’s most influential investors in the food sector through its shareholdings in major food-system corporations. This creates an important paradox. Workers’ deferred wages and retirement savings are invested in corporations that shape food prices, labour conditions, and food-system outcomes, yet workers themselves exercise limited influence over how these investments are governed. Financial ownership, therefore, introduces additional layers of distance between food production, decision-making, and democratic accountability (Adeniyi et al., 2021; Bosiu et al., 2017; Greenberg, 2017).

Financialisation is also reshaping SA’s food system through changing ownership structures and investment priorities. Strategic agricultural assets, logistics networks, storage facilities, and agribusinesses are increasingly treated as financial assets expected to generate stable returns for institutional investors and private capital. The transformation of AFGRI and

the creation of the SiloCo investment platform illustrate how food-system

infrastructure is increasingly valued not only for its productive role within agriculture but also for its capacity to generate financial returns. These developments reflect a broader shift in which investment logics increasingly influence decisions concerning ownership, governance, and the management of strategic food-system assets (Bowman and Robb, 2025; Ducastel and Anseeuw, 2018).

The growing influence of financial actors is also evident in agricultural commodity markets. The incorporation of SAFEX into the Johannesburg Stock Exchange has strengthened the role of financial institutions within agricultural commodity trading. While futures markets can provide mechanisms for managing price risk, they also create opportunities for speculative activity by actors with no direct involvement in food production, processing, or consumption. Agricultural commodities increasingly circulate not only as food and agricultural products but also as financial assets whose value is shaped by

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investment decisions, market expectations, and financial strategies. These developments can contribute to the distancing of food prices from the realities of production, livelihoods, and food access (ACB, 2023a; Clapp and Isakson, 2018).

From a food sovereignty perspective, the significance of financialisation lies in its effects on governance and accountability. As ownership becomes increasingly concentrated among institutional investors, pension funds, and private equity interests,

decision-making power is progressively removed from producers, workers, and communities most directly affected by foodsystem outcomes. Financialisation therefore deepens existing forms of concentration while reinforcing a system in which foodsystem governance is increasingly shaped by investor priorities rather than broader social, developmental, and ecological objectives. Understanding these dynamics is essential for explaining why concentration persists despite regulatory interventions and why control over food systems increasingly extends beyond production and markets into the financial institutions that govern investment and ownership (ACB, 2023a; Clapp and Isakson, 2018; UN, 2025).

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Digitalisation and data power in the food system Just as financialisation has extended corporate power beyond ownership and production, digitalisation is creating new mechanisms through which control over food systems is exercised and reproduced. Digital technologies are often presented as tools for improving efficiency, productivity, traceability, and market access. However, under conditions of concentrated corporate power, digitalisation is also reshaping who controls information, data, standards, and decision-making within food systems. Increasingly, power is exercised not only through ownership of land, inputs, logistics infrastructure, and retail networks, but also through control over digital platforms, software systems, algorithms, and data infrastructures that mediate participation in food markets (ACB, 2023d; ETC Group, 2022; Prause et al., 2021).

In agriculture, digital technologies are becoming integrated into proprietary corporate ecosystems that combine seeds, agrochemicals, farm management software, satellite monitoring, predictive analytics, and AI. Major agribusiness corporations such as Bayer,

Syngenta, and Corteva increasingly offer digital platforms that combine agronomic advice with data collection and input sales. These systems promise improved productivity and risk management, but they also enable corporations to accumulate extensive information on farming practices, production conditions, and farmer behaviour. As ACB has argued, the rise of the digital

economy in agriculture risks deepening forms of dependency by embedding farmers within closed technological systems in which data, analytics, and decision-support tools remain under corporate control (ACB, 2023d). In this context, data becomes a strategic resource and control over agricultural knowledge increasingly accompanies control over seeds, genetics, and other productive inputs. SA’s experience demonstrates that digitalisation is not confined to farm-level technologies. Increasingly, strategic food-system infrastructures are also being digitised. Senwes, one of the country’s largest agribusinesses, has invested in AI-enabled silo management systems designed to improve storage efficiency and inventory management. While such technologies may improve operational performance, they also reinforce the advantages of firms already controlling strategic infrastructure. The benefits of digitalisation are therefore unevenly distributed, often strengthening the capacity of dominant actors to coordinate markets and manage information flows while increasing barriers for smaller participants with limited access to capital and technological resources (Senwes, 2024). Digitalisation is also transforming retail and food distribution. SA’s major supermarket groups increasingly compete not only through physical stores but through digital platforms, data analytics, loyalty programmes, and app-based food delivery services. Shoprite’s continued expansion of Sixty60 illustrates how digital retail is extending corporate power into new domains of consumer behaviour and market coordination. These platforms enable retailers to collect detailed information on purchasing habits, personalise promotions, shape consumer visibility, and integrate food sales with logistics, payments, and

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delivery systems. Control over consumer data increasingly complements control over shelf space, procurement systems, and physical retail networks. Digital platforms therefore introduce new forms of market power that operate through information, visibility, and consumer surveillance rather than conventional ownership alone (Shoprite Holdings, 2025).

The implications extend beyond questions of efficiency and competition. Digitalisation increasingly influences: y who can participate in food systems, y under what conditions, and y with what degree of autonomy. Farmers, traders, suppliers, and consumers generate valuable data yet often have limited influence over how that information is collected, used, or monetised. Decisions affecting production, logistics, procurement, and consumption are increasingly mediated through algorithms, software systems, and platform governance arrangements that operate outside traditional forms of public accountability. As the Competition Commission and international researchers have noted, digital markets create

new opportunities for concentration and forms of power that are often difficult to address through conventional regulatory tools (CCSA 2020; Prause, 2025). From a food sovereignty perspective, the central issue is not whether digital technologies should be adopted, but whose interests they serve and who controls the infrastructures through which they operate. Digital technologies can potentially support farmer learning, ecological planning, local market development, and public-interest food-system governance. Yet without adequate safeguards, they may also deepen existing forms of concentration, extend corporate influence over knowledge systems, and reinforce the distancing of decision-making from producers, workers, and communities. As food systems become increasingly shaped by both financial and digital forms of power, questions of data sovereignty, algorithmic accountability, and democratic control over digital infrastructures become central to the future governance of food and agriculture in SA (ACB, 2023a; ACB, 2023d; Clapp et al., 2025).

Systemic consequences of corporate concentration The preceding chapters have shown that concentration is not confined to individual segments of SA’s food economy. Rather, it is reproduced across agricultural inputs, production, logistics, processing, and retail. The significance of this pattern lies not simply in the growing size of corporate actors but in the cumulative effects that concentration has on livelihoods, labour, ecological systems, public health, and democratic governance. Viewed as a whole, concentration reshapes who participates in food systems, who

benefits from them, who bears their risks and whose interests ultimately shape their development.

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

UNEQUAL PARTICIPATION IN CONCENTRATED FOOD SYSTEMS The concentration mapped across the preceding chapters has profound implications for participation within SA’s food system. Access to land, inputs, finance, market infrastructure, processing facilities, logistics networks, and retail channels is increasingly mediated through concentrated corporate structures. While these systems may improve coordination and efficiency for dominant actors, they often create barriers for small-scale producers, emerging farmers, informal traders, and smaller enterprises seeking to participate on equitable terms. Competition Commission investigations into grocery retail and fresh produce markets have highlighted persistent challenges facing smaller and historically disadvantaged participants seeking access to formal markets and value chains (Adeniyi et al., 2021; CCSA, 2019; CCSA, 2025a).

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These inequalities take different forms across the food system. Small-scale producers frequently face concentrated input markets, on one side, and concentrated buyers on the other, limiting their bargaining power and ability to capture value. Workers continue to experience labour insecurity, casualisation, and uneven protections across agriculture, processing, and retail, while women face additional barriers in accessing productive resources, markets, and decision-making spaces. Informal traders remain essential providers of food access and livelihoods but often operate under conditions of insecure tenure, inadequate infrastructure, and growing pressure from supermarket expansion. Although the specific dynamics vary, the common pattern is that participation

increasingly occurs on terms shaped by actors with significantly greater economic, infrastructural, and political power (CCSA, 2019; CCSA, 2025a; Commission for Gender Equality, 2024; FAO et al., 2022; Greenberg, 2017).

Viewed collectively, these patterns reveal that concentration is not simply a matter of market structure. It shapes who can participate in food systems, under what conditions, and with what capacity to influence outcomes. The cumulative effect is a food system in which opportunities, risks, and decision-making power remain unevenly distributed, reinforcing existing inequalities while limiting the ability of historically marginalised actors to shape the future of food-system development. The central issue is therefore not only economic inequality, but unequal participation in the systems and institutions that govern food production, distribution, and access (Clapp et al., 2025; Moyo and Thow, 2020; Swanby et al., 2025).

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Ecological and public health consequences Corporate concentration also has important ecological and public health consequences. Across agricultural inputs, production, processing, and retail, concentration tends to favour scale, standardisation, and uniformity. While these characteristics can generate efficiencies, they also contribute to ecological simplification. The concentration of seed ownership, the expansion of monocultures, dependence on agrochemical packages, and the increasing dominance of a narrow range of globally traded commodity crops have significant implications for biodiversity, resilience, and sustainability.

systems generate environmental pressures throughout the product lifecycle, including pesticide and fertiliser use, greenhouse gas emissions, packaging waste, transport infrastructure, and resourceintensive processing systems. Concentration often obscures these wider impacts because ecological costs are frequently externalised onto ecosystems, communities, and future generations while economic benefits remain concentrated within corporate value chains. Public health outcomes are similarly affected. SA’s food system simultaneously confronts

hunger, micronutrient deficiencies, obesity, and rising rates of diet-related NCDs. The growth of UPF consumption, combined with highly unequal access to healthy diets, illustrates how food-system outcomes are shaped not only by individual choices but by broader structures of availability, affordability, and marketing. Retail environments, food processing systems, and corporate marketing strategies increasingly influence dietary patterns in ways that have profound implications for public health (Moodie et al., 2021).

Recent pesticide poisoning incidents, including the deaths of children in Naledi and elsewhere, further highlight the interconnected nature of food-system risks. These tragedies exposed wider failures in hazardous pesticide governance, environmental health oversight, food safety systems, and public accountability. They also demonstrate why such incidents cannot be reduced to questions of individual responsibility or to migrant traders alone but must instead be understood within broader systems of regulation, accountability, and risk management.

The cumulative effect is a progressive narrowing of biological, agricultural, and dietary diversity: y Agricultural landscapes become increasingly dominated by a smaller number of crops, y food manufacturing depends on a limited basket of commodity ingredients, and y consumer diets become increasingly shaped by standardised and highly processed products. ACB’s research on UPFs demonstrates that these processes are deeply interconnected. The expansion of UPFs is not simply a nutrition issue but part of a broader restructuring of food systems around industrial production, corporate concentration, and standardised commodity supply chains. The same dynamics that contribute to biodiversity loss and ecological degradation increasingly shape what people eat and how food environments are organised. The environmental implications extend beyond production itself. Industrial food

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

CORPORATE POWER AND THE DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT Underlying the social, economic, and ecological consequences is a broader question of governance. Corporate concentration increasingly shapes not only markets but also the institutions, standards, and decision-making processes through which food systems are governed. Across agricultural inputs, logistics, processing, retail, and digital platforms, private actors exercise growing influence over procurement systems, technology choices, food environments, research agendas, and market access (Clapp et al., 2025; Greenberg, 2017; Milsom et al., 2023). The significance of this shift is that decisions affecting food production, distribution, labour conditions, consumption, and ecological outcomes are increasingly mediated through private systems of authority that are not directly accountable to the public. Governance therefore occurs not only through law and public policy but also through private standards, contractual arrangements, proprietary technologies, corporate platforms, and financial actors. This creates what can be understood as a democratic deficit: the growing gap between the societal importance of food systems and the extent of democratic influence over the institutions that shape them (Clapp et al., 2025; Pereira and Drimie, 2016). Viewed collectively, the evidence presented in this report suggests that concentration should not be understood only as a competition issue. It is also a question of power, participation, and accountability. The challenge is not simply how to regulate markets more effectively, but how to ensure that the governance of food systems serves broader public interests, including social justice, ecological sustainability, and the constitutional right to food (Clapp et al., 2025; Moyo and Thow, 2020).

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JUST FOOD SYSTEM TRANSITION: POWER, POLITICS, AND POSSIBILITIES The concentration of corporate power within SA’s food system raises a fundamental question: what would it take to build a food system that is socially just, environmentally sustainable, and democratically governed? The evidence presented in this report demonstrates that hunger, malnutrition, ecological degradation, and widening inequalities are not simply the result of technical failures in food production or distribution. Rather, they are rooted in deeper structural patterns of concentration, financialisation, corporate control, and unequal decision-making power. Addressing these challenges therefore requires more than incremental policy reform or improvements in market efficiency. It requires transforming the political and economic arrangements that govern the food system itself. (Clapp et al., 2025; Swanby et al., 2025). Recent submissions to the SAHRC’s National Inquiry into the Food Systems of SA have reinforced the argument that SA’s food crisis is not fundamentally a problem of food scarcity but one of power, inequality, and governance. CSOs participating in the Inquiry argued that persistent hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity coexist with adequate national food production because food systems are increasingly shaped by concentrated corporate power, unequal access to resources, and fragmented governance arrangements that fail to realise the constitutional right to food. These interventions underscore the need to understand food system transformation

not simply as a technical transition towards sustainability but as a democratic and rights-based project requiring greater public accountability, more participatory forms of governance, and the redistribution of power within food systems (Just Transition in the Food System Group, 2026).

A just food system transition should therefore be understood as a political project as much as an economic or environmental one. At its core lies the question of who controls land, seeds, infrastructure, data, markets and food-system governance, and whose interests these systems ultimately serve. A just transition seeks to address the structural drivers of inequality while advancing the constitutional right to food, food sovereignty, ecological resilience, and democratic participation. This requires confronting the various forms of corporate power, including market concentration, M&A, financialisation, digitalisation, and the growth of private governance arrangements that increasingly shape food-system outcomes (Clapp et al., 2025; Kaljonen et al., 2023). International debates on just food system transitions emphasise that sustainability cannot be achieved without simultaneously addressing entrenched inequalities and power imbalances. Transitions are not politically neutral processes; they create winners and losers and often involve competing visions

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

of development, governance, and food production. In SA, where the food system remains deeply shaped by the legacies of colonialism, apartheid, market liberalisation, and ongoing corporate concentration,

a just transition must address both historical and contemporary forms of exclusion. Such a transition therefore entails redistributing power and resources, expanding meaningful participation in decision-making, and creating institutional arrangements capable of prioritising public interests over the imperatives of corporate accumulation (Clapp et al., 2025; Kaljonen et al., 2023; Swanby et al., 2025). This perspective aligns closely with food sovereignty approaches, which emphasise the right of people to participate in determining how food is produced, distributed, and governed. From this standpoint, a just transition is concerned not only with environmental sustainability or improved food security outcomes but also with democratising

food systems and creating greater accountability for the institutions and actors that shape them. It requires strengthening the agency of small-scale producers, workers, informal traders, consumers, and communities in decisions that affect their livelihoods, health, and environments while challenging the concentration of economic and political power within a relatively small number of dominant corporations (Clapp et al., 2025; Moyo and Thow, 2020; Swanby et al., 2025). The following sections examine the implications of corporate concentration for a just transition, explore alternative approaches to food governance, and consider the role of agroecology as a pathway towards more democratic, resilient, and equitable food systems. Together, they highlight both the constraints imposed by concentrated corporate power and the possibilities for transforming SA’s food system in ways that advance food justice, ecological sustainability, and democratic accountability.

Transition as a political project—not a technical adjustment The central challenge facing SA is not simply how to improve food production or make existing value chains more efficient. As the preceding chapters have shown, corporate concentration shapes market participation, labour conditions, food environments, ecological outcomes, and systems of governance. Addressing these challenges therefore requires more than technical reforms or sustainability initiatives operating at the margins. It requires confronting the concentration of economic and political power that continues to shape the food system (Adeniyi et al., 2021; Clapp et al., 2025). At the same time, a democratic food-system transition requires rebuilding public capacity alongside the regulation of private power. Over several decades, many of the institutions, infrastructures, and governance systems that once played important roles in agricultural coordination, food distribution, environmental health, and public accountability have been weakened, privatised, or neglected. Reclaiming democratic control over food systems, therefore, depends on both constraining concentrated corporate power and rebuilding the public institutions capable of governing food systems in the public interest (Adeniyi et al., 2021; Clapp et al., 2025; Pereira and Drimie, 2016).

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The right to food as a political and constitutional anchor The constitutional right to food provides an important normative foundation for a just food-system transition. In SA, this right cannot be reduced to access to calories or short-term food relief. It requires attention to the social,

economic, ecological, and institutional conditions necessary for people to access adequate, nutritious, safe, and culturally appropriate food with dignity. Viewed in this

way, the right to food is not only an outcome of food systems but also a lens through which the distribution of power, resources, and opportunities within those systems can be evaluated (Moyo and Thow, 2020; Union Against Hunger, 2026).

financialised, and increasingly digitalised food system requires a plural approach to transformation. A credible transition must therefore draw on food sovereignty, constitutional rights, feminist political economy, labour justice, ecological sustainability, public health, and democratic governance, recognising that each contributes important insights into how power can be redistributed within food systems (Clapp et al., 2025; Kaljonen et al., 2023; Swanby et al., 2025).

A rights-based approach therefore raises broader questions about participation, accountability, and justice. It asks whether: y workers can secure dignified livelihoods, y small-scale producers can participate on fair terms, y women’s productive and reproductive labour is recognised and supported, y informal traders are protected rather than criminalised, and y communities have meaningful influence over decisions that shape food systems. In this sense, the right to food provides a framework through which diverse concerns relating to labour, health, gender, ecology, food sovereignty, and democratic governance can be connected within a common transformative agenda (Clapp et al., 2025; Moyo and Thow, 2020; Swanby et al., 2025). While food sovereignty remains an important political framework within these debates, SA’s highly urbanised, supermarketised, informalised,

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Where transformation must begin Concentration is systemic, making the question of where to start difficult to answer. The answer is not to wait for a fully designed alternative food system. It is to identify pressure points where power can begin to shift, public capacity can be rebuilt, and alternative food economies can be protected before they are further squeezed out.

Govern corporate power directly SA cannot transition while allowing concentrated firms to continue setting the rules of the food system. Competition policy must move beyond narrow consumer-price effects and address market structure, buyer power, ownership concentration, public-interest outcomes, labour impacts, ecological harms, and the survival of smaller actors. Merger control must ask not only whether a transaction raises prices, but whether it deepens dependency, reduces ownership diversity, undermines small producers, weakens informal food economies, entrenches unhealthy food environments, or strengthens corporate control over strategic infrastructure. This requires stronger scrutiny of M&A, enforceable public-interest conditions, regulation of unfair trading terms, oversight of private standards, and serious limits on abusive buyer power. A mandatory grocery supply code should be considered to address delayed payments, listing fees, rebates, unilateral contract changes, arbitrary delisting, and the transfer of risk onto suppliers. Public-interest conditions in mergers must be transparent, enforceable, and monitored over time. Supplier development funds and local procurement undertakings should not function as corporate social responsibility gestures. They must become instruments of deconcentration, redistribution, and structural transformation.

Competition law alone, however, cannot carry the transition. It must be linked to food policy, labour policy, environmental regulation, public procurement, municipal planning, seed law, digital regulation, and the constitutional right to food. Otherwise, competition reform risks addressing symptoms without shifting the deeper architecture of power.

REBUILD PUBLIC FOOD-SYSTEM CAPACITY SA’s food system cannot be governed primarily through corporate standards, voluntary self-regulation, private procurement systems, and market-led coordination. A central problem is the fragmentation and weakness of public food governance, which allows private governance to fill the vacuum. Corporate actors set standards, structure markets, influence research, shape food environments, and determine participation in supply chains, while public institutions often lack the capacity, coordination, or political will to govern the system in the public interest. Transition requires rebuilding public capacity at multiple levels. Nationally, food governance must be coordinated across agriculture, health, trade, environment, social development, competition, labour, and finance. Provincially and municipally, public institutions must be able to support informal traders, regulate food safety without resorting to xenophobia, protect productive land, maintain fresh-produce markets, invest in local storage and processing, and build territorial food economies. Municipalities are particularly important because they shape trading spaces, land-use planning, public transport, informal retail, fresh produce markets, school food environments, and local economic development.

Food security cannot remain a residual social-welfare concern. It must become a mandate for planning, infrastructure, health, economic, and ecological and democratic governance. This requires restoring and strengthening public infrastructures that have been neglected, privatised, or subordinated to corporate supply chains, including municipal fresh produce markets, local storage, public cold-chain access, informal trading infrastructure, public procurement systems, extension services, seed systems, and community-level food infrastructure.

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Protect plural food economies A transition cannot be built only through formal corporate supply chains. Informal traders, spaza shops, hawkers, street vendors, municipal markets, small processors, local wholesalers, community food networks, territorial markets, and FMSS are foundational to food access, livelihoods, and resilience. They are not marginal residues of a pre-modern food economy but part of the living infrastructure through which millions of people access food. The political danger is that crises such as food poisoning, pesticide exposure, or public health failures are used to justify the displacement of informal traders and the expansion of corporate retail. ACB’s Pan-African position must reject xenophobic scapegoating unequivocally. Food safety matters. But food safety without justice can become a weapon against poor and migrant traders. A just transition must insist on safe food environments, hazardous pesticide control, better municipal infrastructure, fair licensing, transparent regulation, and public-health accountability, while protecting informal food economies from criminalisation, violence, and displacement. This is also an anti-corporate position. If informal food economies are weakened in the name of safety, while corporate retailers expand into township and rural markets, the result will not be food justice. It will be a further transfer of market power from precarious community-based traders to large supermarket chains and digital platforms. The transformation agenda must therefore defend informal food economies while improving the conditions under which they operate.

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

AGROECOLOGY, DEMOCRATIC SEED SYSTEMS, AND URBAN FOOD FUTURES Agroecology is politically indispensable to a just food-system transition in SA because it challenges the dominant production model’s direction—not because it offers a simple technical substitute for every existing form of commercial production.

increases chemical dependency, exposes workers and communities to hazardous pesticides, concentrates risk in a few crops and firms, and leaves production systems vulnerable to climate, energy, water, and market shocks.

The problem is not only that South African agriculture is concentrated; it is that concentration is tied to a production pathway increasingly dependent on proprietary seed, synthetic fertilisers, agrochemicals, mechanisation, debt, monocultures, standardised commodities, concentrated buyers, and long-distance supply chains.

A politically grounded agroecological transition must therefore work across scales. It includes support for smallholder and emerging farmers, but it also requires transforming commercial production itself by reducing agrochemical dependency, diversifying rotations, rebuilding soil fertility, integrating livestock and cropping systems more ecologically, protecting pollinators and water systems, expanding FMSS, and shifting public support away from input-intensive monocultures towards more resilient and diverse production landscapes. Agroecology is not a retreat from the big-picture food system. It is a way of contesting the big picture: who controls production, what kinds of farming are publicly supported, which risks are normalised, whose knowledge counts, and what forms of food production are treated as viable.

Agroecology matters because it offers a different organising logic: one rooted in biodiversity, soil health, farmer knowledge, seed sovereignty, ecological resilience, local and territorial markets, reduced input dependency, and democratic control over productive systems. In the South African context, agroecology should not be framed as a marginal programme for small-scale or subsistence farmers alone. That framing concedes too much to the idea that large-scale monoculture is the only serious way to feed the country. The real question is not whether agroecology can immediately replace the entire commercial food system, but whether SA can afford to deepen a model that locks farmers into expensive external inputs, narrows biodiversity,

alignment, biodiversity, climate resilience, sustainable natural-resource management, and food security, while ARC-linked work has reviewed legislation and case studies to inform an agroecology management framework. The danger is that such a strategy becomes confined to farm-level practices, pilot sites, or technical recommendations while leaving the wider food system intact. A credible national agroecology strategy must be food-systems-facing: connecting agroecological production to land and water access, public breeding, FMSS, ecological extension, local processing, public procurement, territorial markets, urban food governance, nutrition, labour, municipal infrastructure, and regulation of corporate input, processing, and retail power. Otherwise, agroecology risks being accommodated at the margins of the existing system rather than becoming a public strategy for reducing input dependency, rebuilding ecological resilience, and shifting power.

This is especially important in a country where staple production, animal feed, poultry systems, processing, and retail are deeply connected. Large volumes of GM maize and soya flow into animal feed and industrial livestock systems, linking monoculture grain production to poultry, processed foods, and supermarket supply chains. A transition that leaves this feed-grain-poultry complex untouched will not meaningfully challenge the corporate architecture of control.

Agroecology therefore requires a wider food-system lens: y diversifying production, y reducing dependency on GM feed crops, y supporting alternative protein systems, y strengthening local mixed farming, y rebuilding territorial markets, and y ensuring that public procurement creates demand for diverse, nutritious, and ecologically produced foods.

SA’s National Agroecology Framework process, commissioned by the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development and developed through the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), offers an important policy opening, but only if it is treated as more than a technical farming framework.6 The draft Framework recognises agroecology’s relevance to policy

6 https://www.nda.gov.za/images/Branches/AgricProducHealthFoodSafety/NaturalResources/land--soil-management/preservationand-development-of-agricultural-land/nafsa_27-november-2025-final.pdf

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

A credible South African agroecology agenda also requires a more sophisticated seed strategy. FMSS are politically indispensable because they protect farmer knowledge, seed autonomy, agricultural biodiversity, local adaptation, and community control. They are essential to resisting the enclosure of seed by intellectual property, GM technologies, and corporate breeding pipelines. But FMSS cannot be expected to carry the entire burden of varietal development in a highly unequal, climate-stressed, and commercially structured agricultural economy. Nor should the absence of strong FMSS in some crops or regions be used to justify deeper dependence on corporate seed. The way forward is not a false choice between FMSS and formal breeding. It is to rebuild public breeding in the public interest while protecting and strengthening FMSS. SA needs publicly funded, democratically governed breeding programmes oriented towards nutrition, climate resilience, farmer needs, biodiversity, low-input production, agroecological adaptation, and territorial food systems—not only yield, uniformity, input responsiveness, and corporate marketability. Public breeding should support open-pollinated varieties, participatory plant breeding, locally adapted crops, neglected and underutilised species, indigenous and traditional crops, and varieties suited to diversified production systems rather than only industrial monocultures. This requires a new compact between public researchers, farmers, seed custodians, smallholders, agroecology practitioners, and communities. Public breeding should not replicate top-down research models or serve as a feeder system for private seed companies. It must be linked to participatory breeding, community seed banks, farmer field schools, decentralised seed multiplication, public extension, and local seed enterprises. In this

model, FMSS and public breeding reinforce each other: farmer systems keep diversity alive in fields and communities, while public breeding provides scientific capacity, long-term investment, and public-good research that corporate seed markets will not deliver. This is particularly important in SA, where commercial maize and soya seed markets are highly concentrated and tied to GM traits, agrochemical packages, and industrial feed systems. A just transition cannot rely only on conserving seed diversity at the margins while the strategic breeding agenda for staple, feed, vegetable, and climate-resilient crops remains dominated by private corporations. Seed sovereignty must therefore be understood as both a community struggle and a public-capacity agenda. It requires defending farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange, and sell seed, while also rebuilding the state’s capacity to breed, multiply, and distribute seed in ways that serve public health, ecological resilience, food sovereignty, and democratic control.

agriculture. It means locating it politically and materially within a wider urban food-systems agenda. Urban agriculture can support livelihoods, community organisation, localised production, ecological learning, social solidarity, dietary diversity, and claims to land and public space. But it will not address food insecurity at scale if it is treated as a substitute for income, social protection, affordable food, public transport, municipal markets, safe trading spaces, public procurement, informal trade support, and food-sensitive urban planning. Kroll et al. (2021) make precisely this

point: urban agriculture should not be treated as a quick fix for food insecurity but can become a site of struggle for deeper, just food-system change if supported through land, water, seed, infrastructure, markets, peer learning, and political organisation. A new South African narrative on agroecology must therefore connect the transformation of rural production with urban food justice. Most South Africans are urbanised, and food insecurity is increasingly experienced in cities, townships, informal settlements, and peri-urban spaces.

Urban and peri-urban food systems must also be treated realistically. Urban agriculture should not be presented as a quick fix for SA’s food insecurity crisis. Urban food-system scholars have consistently warned that food insecurity in South African cities is shaped less by the absence of household food production than by poverty, income insecurity, spatial inequality, retail power, transport costs, food environments, municipal governance, and the wider organisation of food systems. Food policy must therefore look beyond narrow claims that urban agriculture can solve urban hunger and instead address the interactions among households, urban systems, food environments, infrastructure, and governance (Battersby and Haysom, 2018; Haysom and Battersby, 2016). © Shutterstock

This does not mean dismissing urban

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Centre labour, women, and social reproduction

The food system is urban not because food is mainly produced in cities, but because urban planning, retail expansion, transport infrastructure, municipal governance, informal trade, school feeding, public procurement, waste systems, and food environments shape how people access food. SA’s food-system challenges require governance arrangements capable of addressing complexity, fragmented mandates, and unequal power relations, alongside participatory, place-based learning, and collective problem-solving rather than top-down technical planning (Drimie and May, 2025; Pereira and Drimie, 2016). For agroecology to become transformative, it must therefore be backed by institutions, infrastructure, and public investment. Farmers cannot be expected to carry the costs and risks of transition alone while confronting concentrated input suppliers, supermarket buyer power, weak local markets, and inadequate public support. Agroecology requires land and water access, ecological extension services, farmer-to-farmer learning, public seed systems, community seed banks, local storage, decentralised processing, municipal markets, school feeding programmes, public procurement, and transition finance. In urban and peri-urban areas, this also means protecting land for food production, where appropriate, supporting community and market gardens, investing in

local food hubs, linking producers to public procurement, strengthening informal trade, and embedding food into municipal planning rather than treating it as a residual welfare concern. This means rejecting both romanticism and defeatism. Agroecology should not be romanticised as a complete solution on its own but neither should it be dismissed as irrelevant to SA’s commercial and urban food systems. Its political importance lies precisely in its ability to expose the limits of the dominant model and to open a different horizon for production and food governance: more diverse, less dependent, more democratic, more ecologically grounded, and more accountable to people and territory. A just food-system transition in SA will not be built by greening monocultures, adding voluntary sustainability language to concentrated value chains, or reducing urban food policy to small gardens. It requires shifting power over land, seed, knowledge, inputs, markets, public breeding, public procurement, urban planning, and food-system governance. Agroecology is central to that struggle because it is one of the few frameworks that links ecological repair to food sovereignty, democratic control, and the redistribution of power.

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A food transition that improves ecological outcomes while leaving workers poor, casualised, and insecure cannot be called just. Food-system workers, including farm workers, seasonal workers, processing workers, logistics workers, and retail workers, sustain the system under conditions of low pay, weak enforcement, labour brokerage, insecure contracts, and, increasingly, digital surveillance. These conditions are not incidental. They are part of how value is extracted. The transition must therefore include enforceable labour protections, living wages, improved inspection capacity, stronger worker representation, safe transport, decent housing, protection from pesticide exposure, and specific safeguards for women workers. Food-system workers are not simply labour

inputs. They are rights-holders, food providers, and members of communities affected by the same food system they sustain. Women must be centred, not added as an afterthought. Women are producers, workers, traders, seed custodians, caregivers, and organisers of household food security. Yet they often carry the combined burdens of hunger, unpaid care work, low-paid employment, land exclusion, food provisioning, and community survival. A transition agenda must therefore include gender-responsive land reform, social protection, support for women farmers and traders, recognition of unpaid care work, protection for women farm workers, and meaningful participation of women’s movements in food governance.

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

Confront financial and digital capture The next frontier of food-system power is not only land, seed, processing, and retail. It is finance and data. Financialisation shifts food-system assets into the hands of institutional investors, asset managers, and private equity. Digitalisation creates new forms of dependence through proprietary platforms, data extraction, digital surveillance, and algorithmic control. These processes distance decision-making from farmers, workers, and communities, while deepening corporate control over knowledge, infrastructure, and market access. The transition must therefore include rules on data sovereignty, interoperability, farmer consent, the right to repair, algorithmic transparency, and public-interest digital infrastructure. Agricultural and food data should not be treated as a private resource for extraction by corporations. Digital tools should support farmers’ knowledge, public extension, ecological planning, local markets, and democratic governance, rather than deepening dependence on proprietary systems. Financial regulation must also scrutinise private equity ownership, crossholdings, assetisation of food infrastructure, and speculative practices that affect food access, farmer livelihoods, and public accountability. Confronting financial and digital capture also means treating food-system infrastructure as strategic public-interest infrastructure, not simply as an asset class or technology market. Public money, pension funds, and development finance should not be allowed to deepen corporate concentration without binding public-interest obligations, democratic oversight, and accountability to workers, producers, and communities.

Strategic assets such as silos, logistics systems, wholesale markets, agricultural data platforms, digital retail systems, and payment infrastructures should be governed according to food security, labour, ecological, and right-to-food objectives, not only investor returns or platform growth. This requires transparency over ownership and crossholdings, stronger scrutiny of private equity and infrastructure funds, conditions on public and pension-fund investment, limits on data extraction, and support for public, cooperative, and open digital systems that strengthen farmer autonomy, informal trade, municipal food governance, and agroecological transition.

From private governance to democratic accountability The central transition challenge is governance. SA’s food system suffers from fragmented public governance and the expansion of private governance. Corporations set standards, determine procurement terms, shape research agendas, influence policy debates, control data systems, promote voluntary codes, and govern food environments. This creates a democratic deficit in a system that is central to life, health, labour, land, ecology, culture, and constitutional rights. Transition requires rebuilding public and democratic food governance. This should include a legally mandated national food and nutrition security council with authority and accountability; stronger parliamentary oversight of the right to food; municipal food mandates; provincial and municipal food policy councils; transparent conflict-of-interest rules; and meaningful participation by small-scale farmers, workers, informal traders, women’s organisations, public-health actors, environmental justice organisations, and civil society.

The question is not whether finance or digital tools have a role in food systems but whether they will be subordinated to democratic food futures or allowed to become the next layer of private rule.

This is not a technocratic governance reform. It is a struggle over who gets to decide the future of food systems. Democratic governance must be capable of mediating between different food economies, regulating corporate power, protecting vulnerable actors, redistributing resources, and creating conditions for diverse, resilient, and locally rooted food systems to flourish.

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

A sober but urgent politics of transition There is no single lever, law, movement, or production model that can unravel the depth of corporate power documented in this report. But complexity cannot become an excuse for paralysis. The fact that the system is difficult to transform makes political action more urgent, not less. SA must begin where power is most concentrated and where public intervention can create space for alternatives to survive and grow. This means regulating corporate concentration, rebuilding public food infrastructures, protecting informal and territorial food economies, supporting agroecology, transforming labour conditions, confronting financial and digital capture, and embedding food governance in democratic accountability.

The transition will be contested because it challenges entrenched interests. It asks whether food will remain primarily a site of extraction, accumulation, and shareholder return, or whether it can be reorganised around public purpose, ecological resilience, social justice, and democratic control. It asks whether SA will continue to treat hunger, malnutrition, pesticide exposure, food price volatility, smallholder exclusion, worker precarity, and ecological degradation as separate policy problems, or whether it will recognise them as connected symptoms of a concentrated and politically captured food system. This is where the urgency lies. The current trajectory is not neutral. Every year of delay deepens corporate lock-in, weakens public capacity, narrows the space for alternative food economies, normalises unhealthy food environments, exposes communities to ecological and public-health risks, and makes future transformation harder.

The task is not to imagine a perfect food system outside history. It is to begin shifting power now through concrete, cumulative, and politically grounded interventions. SA’s transition must be plural, rights-based, feminist, ecological, anti-xenophobic, pro-worker, pro-smallholder, and democratically governed. It must recognise the depth of corporate power without surrendering to it. Above all, it must insist that the future of food cannot be left to corporations, asset managers, digital platforms, and voluntary codes. Food is too central to life, health, land, labour, culture, ecology, and democracy to be governed as a private corporate domain.

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

BEYOND CONCENTRATION: RECLAIMING DEMOCRATIC CONTROL Corporate concentration is not simply a feature of SA’s food system. It is part of a wider architecture of control through which economic and political power is organised across agricultural inputs, production, logistics, processing, retail, finance, and digital infrastructures. As this report shows, concentration is reinforced through M&A, financialisation, platformisation, and forms of private governance that shape who participates in food systems, on what terms, and whose interests are prioritised. The significance of these developments extends beyond competition, efficiency, or consumer choice. Concentrated control over food systems affects livelihoods, labour conditions, public health, ecological sustainability, and democratic accountability. It influences who can farm, who can trade, who reaches consumers, who captures value, who bears risk, and who has a voice in decisions affecting food production, distribution, and consumption. The persistence of hunger, malnutrition, and exclusion in a country capable of producing sufficient food cannot be understood apart from these wider questions of power and governance.

The architecture of control described in this report is not natural, inevitable, or permanent. It was built through political choices, institutional arrangements, legal frameworks, public investments, deregulation, privatisation, and corporate strategy. It can therefore be challenged and transformed through political action, democratic participation, public policy, and movement-building. The central question

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is not whether change is possible, but which interests and values will shape that change. A just food-system transition will require more than regulating individual firms or addressing isolated market failures. It requires rebuilding public capacity, strengthening democratic governance, supporting diverse food economies, protecting workers and informal traders, advancing agroecology as a food-systems-facing and power-shifting strategy across production, seed, public breeding, public procurement, and urban food systems, and confronting financial and digital capture. Above all, it requires recognising food not merely as a commodity, but as a public good central to health, dignity, livelihoods, ecological resilience, and social justice.

power across the systems that sustain life. Ultimately, the question is not simply how food is produced, processed, or sold. It is a question of whether SA will allow the architecture of control to deepen or whether it has the political courage to build democratic food futures rooted in public purpose, ecological repair, food sovereignty, and the right to food.

Reclaiming the food system, therefore, means more than loosening the corporate grip at the margins. It means changing the terms on which food systems are governed. It means asking whether strategic food-system infrastructure—seeds, silos, logistics networks, public markets, digital platforms, food data, procurement systems, and urban food spaces— will be governed for investor returns and corporate growth, or for food justice, ecological resilience, democratic accountability, and the constitutional right to food. The challenge ahead is one of democratic transformation. SA does not need to choose between corporate efficiency and romantic alternatives. It needs a plural, rights-based, feminist, ecological, anti-xenophobic, and pro-worker food future capable of redistributing

Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa

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Corporate power, financialisation and democratic food futures in South Africa