Today roughly 25 percent of the global population works the land. Their grueling labor feeds the remaining 75 percent.

The true magnitude of farmers’ importance reveals itself in moments of crisis. They are a keystone in a fragile global food system. If their work is jeopardized, the consequences will not be abstract.

The world’s food system is not only buckling under the climate crisis, wars, and logistical breakdowns; it is also suffering the long-accumulated structural fractures of the neoliberal agricultural regime. From seed to fertilizer, from data flows to logistics, the entire chain has been consolidated into the hands of an unprecedentedly small corporate core.

Just four corporations — Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, and BASF — now control roughly 60 percent of the world’s commercial seed and pesticide markets, an unprecedented level of consolidation across the food chain. The seed — humanity’s foundational agricultural innovation — now sits under the guardianship of multinational corporations.

The seed is as vital as oil and water. Whoever controls it, controls the terms of agricultural production.