Across the world, food systems praised for their productivity now deliver an abundance of calories alongside widespread micronutrient deficiency, ecological collapse and rural precarity.

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

Nutritional decline

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

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

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

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 Obesity coexists with micronutrient deficiencies; grass-fed livestock and diverse rotations have largely been replaced by input-intensive systems, while supermarkets dictate production priorities and shape farming.