The report shows how control over land, labor, markets, and stories keeps food systems stuck in inequality, and offers clear, urgent policy ideas for change. It moves past critique to concrete proposals: redistributing resources, rethinking governance, and expanding who has real access to food. It highlights often ignored areas – from agroecology to seed sovereignty and informal markets – arguing that true change requires shifting power itself.
INTRODUCTION
To truly transform food systems, we must confront what holds them in place: power. Not as an abstract force, but as concrete control over land, markets, labor, taste, and narratives. This report begins with common sense assumptions that should not be controversial: food systems must feed everyone, not only those that can afford it; they must regenerate ecosystems, not deplete them; and they must provide decent livelihoods to those who nourish us, not consign them to hunger and exploitation.
But the fact that we are not meeting these goals is not due to technical failures. Power inequities are at the root of hunger and malnutrition, the destruction of ecosystems and climate change, and deep social inequalities. Yet power is also the hardest barrier to address, because it is both historically entrenched and actively reinforced by today’s economic and political systems—systems that have evolved to extract value for the benefit of a few, while externalizing costs onto the many (Sen, 1981; Patel & Moore, 2017; Clapp, et al., 2025).
Confronting power is thus urgent and essential for transforming food systems. This report presents a set of public policy recommendations to rebalance power in food systems. This rebalancing means, for example, redistributing the control, ownership, and management of land and water resources; redirecting public investment toward territorial systems and biodiversity; protecting and promoting traditional and informal food markets; and dismantling the institutional protections that uphold corporate concentration—whether through trade rules, subsidies, weak antitrust regulations and enforcement, or other mechanisms.
We present seven briefs on different domains—agroecology, fisheries and aquaculture, neglected and underutilized species, supply chains, nutrition, seeds, and governance—but all share the same premise: transformation is only possible when power shifts. The selection of topics addressed in this report is not exhaustive; it focuses on illustrative domains, while acknowledging that other areas of the food system would also benefit from a similar power-focused analysis and recommendations.