OP-ED: SA’s food system on trial — Who controls what we eat?

This op-ed is based on a research paper published by the African Centre for Biodiversity and co-authored by Daniel Adeniyi and Mariam Mayet.

South Africa’s food crisis is usually explained through poverty, unemployment, drought, global prices or poor consumer choices. However, these do not explain the country’s central contradiction: South Africa has sufficient national food production, a sophisticated agricultural economy, powerful food manufacturers, advanced logistics systems and one of the continent’s most developed supermarket sectors, yet hunger, malnutrition, skipped meals and food anxiety remain part of everyday life for millions.

The underlying problem is that food does not move through a neutral chain from farm to fork. Rather, it moves through a highly concentrated system of gateways in which access, prices and choices are shaped by those with disproportionate market power.

A crisis of power, not scarcity

The uncomfortable truth is that South Africa’s food crisis is not primarily a crisis of scarcity. It is a crisis of power organised through a concentrated architecture of influence. 

At key points in the system, a small number of actors occupy strategic bottlenecks, shaping the choices available to everyone else. Input companies influence what can be planted and at what cost. Grain storage and logistics firms affect who can move food and reach markets. Processors turn staples into branded portfolios and capture value beyond the farm gate. Supermarkets exercise significant influence over shelf space, supplier terms, prices, promotions and, increasingly, the data trails of everyday shoppers.

This is what makes the system so difficult to penetrate. Farmers may own land, but still be locked into proprietary seed, chemicals, fertilisers, machinery, debt, silo access and buyers they cannot easily escape. Small processors exist but struggle to secure raw materials, financing, certification, distribution and retail shelf space. Informal traders feed communities daily but operate without the infrastructure, protection  and public support that formal retailers take for granted.

Consumers appear to choose freely, but their choices are shaped by prices, promotions, product placement, transport costs, time-scarce urban lives, credit, digital platforms and the food environments corporations have built around them.

The architecture works because one layer of power reinforces the next, and because boundaries between sectors are becoming increasingly blurred. Influence over seed, chemicals and machinery shapes production; production is disciplined by finance, input costs and buyer requirements; storage, logistics and cold chains affect who can enter markets; processors turn commodities into branded portfolios; and retailers shape which suppliers and products reach consumers. 

In some value chains, the same company, corporate group or closely connected set of firms may operate across several of these functions – for example, by linking feed, poultry production, processing, distribution and retail supply, or by combining procurement, private labels, logistics, data systems and consumer platforms. Digital platforms and financial investors then sit across these layers, drawing value, data and strategic influence from multiple points in the chain. 

By the time food reaches a household, many of the most important decisions have already been made elsewhere – by institutions and corporations that remain only weakly subject to meaningful public accountability.

This is also why democratic reform cannot focus on one sector alone. Opening the food system to greater public accountability requires understanding how power travels across it: how genetically modified seed becomes feed, feed becomes poultry, poultry becomes processed and branded food, and processed food moves through cold chains, supermarket distribution centres, private labels and platform retail and pricing systems. 

The novelty of this moment is not simply that corporations are large. It is that corporate, financial, infrastructural and digital power are increasingly fused across sectors, allowing firms and corporate groups to extend their influence from inputs to logistics, processing, retail, data and finance while presenting this integration as efficiency, innovation and consumer choice.

The companies at the bottlenecks

Across the food system, power is concentrated at strategic bottlenecks. In seeds and agrochemicals, Bayer/Monsanto, Corteva/Pioneer/Pannar, Syngenta, Limagrain Zaad, Rijk Zwaan, and Sakata are among the companies whose products and market positions shape what many farmers plant and how they produce. In fertilisers, Sasol, Omnia, Kynoch and Foskor have occupied significant positions. In machinery and farm technologies, global firms such as John Deere, Agco, Kubota and CNH operate through local agribusiness networks such as Afgri and Senwes.

These companies do not simply sell products. Their market positions influence which kinds of farming are viable, who can afford to farm and the extent to which farmers become dependent on proprietary seed, chemical, machinery, data and credit systems.

Downstream, the pattern repeats. Grain storage and market access are shaped by firms such as Afgri, Senwes and NWK, whose silo networks grew out of earlier state-backed and cooperative infrastructure. Food logistics and cold chain systems are influenced by companies such as Bidvest, Unitrans, Imperial Logistics and Super Group. In processing and manufacturing, Tiger Brands, Premier, PepsiCo/Pioneer Foods, RCL Foods, Nestlé, Lactalis, Clover and Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa turn basic commodities into branded foods, drinks, convenience products and ultra-processed food (UPF) portfolios. In formal retail, Shoprite, Pick n Pay, Spar, Woolworths, Massmart and Food Lover’s Market exercise significant influence over shelf space, procurement terms, private labels, prices and, increasingly, shoppers’ data trails.

A proposed 2026 transaction shows how this downstream power is moving upstream through ownership. Woolworths has announced plans to acquire 100% of in2food, a major manufacturer of private-label convenience foods, fresh produce, long-life products and bakery goods, which generates more than R5-billion in annual revenue. Woolworths Foods is already in2food’s largest customer, and the companies have worked together since the early 1990s. The transaction, registered as large-merger case 2026MAR0036, is under active competition review at the time of writing.

If approved, the merger would give Woolworths direct ownership of one of its most important food suppliers. Instead of simply buying products from in2food, Woolworths would also control a major part of the manufacturing process behind many of the foods sold in its stores. This would extend Woolworths’ influence beyond supermarket shelves and deeper into food production itself.

The implications go beyond whether the deal leads to lower costs or greater efficiency. A retailer that already has significant power over what consumers buy will also gain greater control over how food is produced, which products are developed, which suppliers can access markets, and how value is distributed along the supply chain. Smaller manufacturers and independent suppliers may find it increasingly difficult to compete with a business that combines retail dominance with ownership of a major food producer.

The key concern is therefore not simply the size of the merger but the concentration of power it represents. As retailers expand their control over manufacturing, logistics and supply chains, a growing share of the food system could be governed by a small number of large corporations, potentially reducing diversity, competition, and opportunities for smaller enterprises.

This is not simply market concentration in the narrow sense. It is an architecture of influence and dependency in which horizontal concentration within sectors is reinforced by vertical integration and cross-sector coordination between inputs, finance, storage, logistics, processing, retail, and data systems.

Power operates not only through ownership but also through infrastructure, procurement rules, trading relationships, financial investment, private standards, data systems and digital platforms. Farmers, workers, traders and consumers may appear to make choices in the market, but the terms of those choices are increasingly shaped by actors with substantial economic leverage and by corporate strategies that connect multiple parts of the food system.

When food prices become political

Food is not a luxury. Bread, maize meal, cooking oil, eggs, chicken and vegetables are the basis of daily survival. When costs rise, when value is concentrated in long, opaque supply chains or when declining upstream costs are not passed on quickly and fairly, poor and working-class households absorb the shock first. Competition authorities have repeatedly shown why essential-food price monitoring is necessary: the spread between producer and retail prices can affect whether families eat adequately or go without.

Apartheid’s food infrastructure was never democratised

This system has deep historical roots. Apartheid did not leave food to the market. It built an agrarian system through land dispossession, subsidies, credit, marketing boards, cooperatives, rail, silos, research and extension that served white commercial agriculture while excluding the Black majority from land, infrastructure, finance and markets. After 1994, too much of this infrastructure was deregulated, privatised or weakened rather than transformed into a democratic food system. Political democracy did not become food democracy.

Food as an asset class

What is new today is that older forms of corporate power are being renewed through finance and data. Food system assets are increasingly treated as investment assets expected to deliver returns to pension funds, institutional investors, private equity and asset managers.

The Public Investment Corporation (PIC) and the Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) hold significant interests across major listed food and retail corporations. Afgri’s SiloCo investment platform shows how grain silos can be repositioned from agricultural infrastructure into revenue-generating financial assets. The South African Futures Exchange – now part of the JSE – shows how staple grains circulate not only as food but also as financial commodities shaped by traders, investors, and price expectations.

There is a deep contradiction here. Public-sector workers’ deferred wages, held through the GEPF and managed by the PIC, are invested in many of the same corporate food, retail, logistics and financial systems that shape food prices, working conditions and everyday access to food. Yet the workers whose pensions help capitalise these systems have limited meaningful say over how that capital is used, what kinds of food futures it supports or whether it advances public purpose rather than private returns. This is one of the tragedies of financialised food systems: workers are made indirect investors in systems that may deepen their own disempowerment as workers, consumers and citizens.

The new frontier: data, apps, and algorithms

Digitalisation is opening a new frontier in the corporate reorganisation of food systems. This is not just about apps, convenience, or better logistics. It is about extending corporate influence into the data, prediction and decision-support systems that increasingly shape how food is produced, moved, priced, marketed and consumed.

Bayer, Syngenta and Corteva increasingly link seed, agrochemicals, farm advice and data systems through proprietary digital platforms, turning farmers’ fields, soils, yields, and input choices into streams of commercially valuable information.

Senwes has invested in artificial intelligence-enabled silo management, showing how grain storage itself can become a site of data-driven decision-making.

In retail, Shoprite Checkers Xtra Savings, Pick n Pay Smart Shopper, Spar Rewards, Woolworths MyDifference (previously WRewards) – and their app-based grocery delivery systems more broadly – show how supermarket power is moving beyond the shelf into payments, delivery routes, personalised promotions, consumer profiling, pricing strategies, supplier visibility, and algorithmic ranking.

Digital payment systems, buy-now-pay-later products, credit scoring, e-wallets and platform-based delivery services can also shape who gets access to food, on what terms and at what cost. 

Under conditions of concentration, digital “innovation” does not automatically democratise food systems. It can deepen dependency; privatise knowledge; gather commercially valuable data from farmers, traders, and consumers; and enable corporations to anticipate, influence, and monetise behaviour across the food chain. The concern is that food systems are increasingly shaped not only by land, seed, silos, trucks and shelves, but also by databases, algorithms, payment systems and platforms that remain largely outside democratic scrutiny.

Corporate food environments and unhealthy diets

The rise of UPFs shows how corporate food systems can simultaneously shape diets, health, and biodiversity. 

Tiger Brands, PepsiCo/Pioneer Foods, Premier, RCL Foods, Nestlé, Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa, Lactalis and Clover are among the companies with large portfolios of processed and packaged foods in South Africa. Through brands, advertising, sponsorships, distribution systems, private-label arrangements and relationships with retailers, such companies help shape the food environment itself. 

UPFs are not merely the result of individual choice. They are made possible by cheap commodity ingredients, industrial processing, aggressive marketing, long shelf life, supermarket distribution and the time pressures of urban life.

Food safety without xenophobia

The public health risks are not limited to diet. The deaths of children in Naledi, Soweto, after reported exposure to Terbufos, exposed serious failures in pesticide regulation, environmental health oversight, and municipal governance. Yet public debate too quickly turned towards spaza shops, migrants, and informal traders. This is dangerous and misleading. Food safety cannot be built on xenophobia.

A deeper concern is that public systems have failed to meet their basic obligations to poor and working-class communities: to regulate hazardous pesticides, enforce food safety standards, provide safe waste management systems, support informal traders, protect children and ensure that townships and rural areas are not left to navigate toxic, under-resourced and unsafe food environments on their own.

The crisis lies in hazardous pesticides, weak enforcement, unsafe storage conditions, poverty, waste management failures, and under-resourced public systems—not in the nationality of those struggling to survive in the informal food economy.

Read more: Slow violence against children: The invisible toll of chronic pesticide exposure

Informal traders, spaza shops, hawkers and township food networks are not marginal to South Africa’s food system. They are essential to food access, livelihoods, affordability and last-mile distribution. If food safety crises are used to criminalise poverty, displace migrant traders or justify the further expansion of supermarket and platform-based retail, the result may not be safer food. It may instead concentrate even more influence over the places where poor and working-class people buy food.

What do democratic food futures look like?

South Africa needs a new public conversation about food. We cannot solve hunger by producing more of the same, greening corporate supply chains at the edges nor asking consumers to make better choices in deeply unequal food environments. Nor can competition policy alone carry the burden, important as it is. 

A just food system transition must confront concentrated power across the chain, including the roles of Bayer, Corteva and Syngenta in inputs; Sasol, Omnia, Kynoch and Foskor in fertilisers; Afgri, Senwes and NWK in storage and grain coordination; Tiger Brands, Premier, PepsiCo/Pioneer Foods, RCL Foods, Nestlé, Lactalis, Clover and Coca-Cola in processing; and Shoprite, Pick n Pay, Spar, Woolworths, Massmart and Food Lover’s Market in retail.

It must also confront the fact that these sectors increasingly overlap, as firms use mergers, portfolio expansion, private labels, logistics networks, digital platforms and financial ownership to extend their influence across multiple points in the food system.

This transition must also confront the state’s own responsibility. The South African Human Rights Commission’s hearings into the right to food are an important starting point because they treat hunger, unsafe food and exclusion as questions of rights, accountability and governance. But hearings cannot substitute for structural change. 

A democratic food future requires enforceable duties on the state; public investment in municipal markets; food safety systems; highly hazardous pesticide phase-out and robust regulation and enforcement; agroecological production; local storage; public procurement; informal trading infrastructure; and meaningful power for communities, workers, small-scale producers, informal traders and consumers to shape food policy. 

Food democracy cannot mean being invited to speak after the system has already been designed elsewhere. It must mean shifting the rules, institutions, infrastructures and investments that determine what food is grown, where it moves, what it costs, who benefits and who is left hungry.

Agroecology as a politics of power

Agroecology is central to this shift, but it cannot carry the burden alone and must not be reduced to a substitute for state responsibility. It is not a romantic return to small gardens nor a technical add-on for marginal farmers. 

Agroecology is an ecological and political approach to food system transformation that seeks to rebuild food systems around biodiversity; farmer and community autonomy; territorial markets; seed sovereignty; public accountability; and the right to food rather than corporate dependency and extraction. 

In cities and towns, this means much more than household gardens. It includes municipal land for food production; community, school and clinic gardens; rooftop and courtyard growing where appropriate; township fresh-produce markets; public and community kitchens; support for spaza shops, hawkers, street vendors and early-morning traders; local food hubs that connect nearby agroecological producers to schools, hospitals and public procurement programmes; cold rooms, water access, sanitation, stalls and safe storage for informal traders; local composting and food waste recovery systems; and urban food corridors that link peri-urban farmers with township and inner-city markets. 

But without land redistribution; public procurement; municipal food infrastructure; public interest research and breeding; extension services; seed system support; fair finance; local storage; worker protections; and regulation of corporate power, agroecology risks being celebrated rhetorically while poor farmers, workers, traders and consumers are left to carry the costs of transition on their own.

The point is not to replace the state with agroecology, but to make agroecology part of a wider democratic food politics that demands the state rebuilds public systems, confronts corporate concentration, supports territorial markets, and guarantees the right to food in practice.

Read more: How to boost profits for SA’s small-scale farmers — the biotechnology vs agroecology debate

The choice before South Africa is stark. Food can remain a site of extraction, speculation, corporate expansion and platform power. Or it can be reorganised around the right to food, ecological resilience, dignified livelihoods, public health, anti-xenophobic solidarity, feminist justice and democratic accountability.

These concentrated systems of power were built through political choices. They can also be challenged through political choices. The first step is to stop pretending hunger is simply a problem of scarcity, charity or individual behaviour.

It is time to ask who governs South Africa’s food system—and why something so central to life, health, land, labour, culture, and democracy has been left largely in private hands. DM

Mariam Mayet is the executive director of the African Centre for Biodiversity.