Star-narrated film, Groundswell ends on a breathtakingly beautiful note. Narrated by Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson, the film paints a picture of a world where a better food system for people and the planet is possible. But what’s blocking this vision of regenerative farming from taking off? Industrial agriculture and Big Ag’s corporate greed.

As regenerative agricultural expert Natalie Topa powerfully states in the film:

At Greenpeace, we agree: food systems are one of our greatest sources of hope. The way we produce food right now through intensive industrial farming is destroying the Earth, but a diverse, regenerative system could restore it. While the film successfully mainstreams the crucial idea of living soil, we have to look closely at the forces holding this future back.

But as inspiring as Groundswell is, it leaves out a critical question: If a better food system is entirely possible, what is blocking us from achieving it?

Big Ag’s corporate greed is blocking regenerative farming

Early in the documentary, Woody Harrelson says that technology and policies haven’t done enough to fix our heating planet. That’s because they don’t challenge the root cause: corporate greed and Big Ag’s grip on our food systems. 

From seeds and fertiliser to consumption, a handful of giant agribusiness corporations monopolise the food market. Today, global agriculture is locked down by a handful of massive corporate monopolies – which means just a few giant companies control almost everything.

From seeds and fertilisers to meat processing and supermarkets, a tiny group of multi-billion-dollar corporations control the market, squeezing farmers on both sides. They use their massive wealth to lobby governments, making sure laws protect their profits rather than the planet or regular people.

This leaves farmers trapped in a vicious cycle. They have to take out massive bank loans just to buy expensive chemical fertilisers and sprays. Then, they are forced to overproduce just to pay off their debts, destroying the land in the process.

Do you ever feel like the world is breaking, but the people in charge aren’t doing anything to fix it? We see the alarm bells ringing every day through erratic weather, floods, and droughts. Yet, the solutions are right in front of us. This corporate bottleneck is exactly why those solutions aren’t being put into action.

Beware of Big Ag’s “regenerative” greenwashing

Because of documentaries like Groundswell the public is demanding change. We know it’s making a difference because industrial giants can no longer ignore the word “regenerative.” But instead of changing their practices, these companies are trying to hijack the term Regenerative Agriculture to protect their usual destructive practices. This is called greenwashing – using eco-friendly language as a marketing shield to cover up environmental harm.

Corporate giants like Nestlé are increasingly using these catchphrases. Even governments are getting in on the action. A few years ago, I attended a regenerative agriculture conference hosted by the New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries. From the opening speeches, the goal was transparent: rebrand existing, intensive farming to cash in on the global eco-hype.

New Zealand’s massive dairy producers love to boast that their farming is pasture-based (meaning cows eat grass outside), compared to the cramped feedlots often seen in Europe and America. But don’t buy the hype. Grass-fed can still mean highly industrial:

• It is still a monoculture: Vast landscapes have been stripped of wild trees and biodiversity to create giant fields filled with just one animal and only one or two species of grass.
• It relies heavily on chemicals: You can only cram that many cows onto a field if the grass is supercharged by millions of tonnes of synthetic (artificial) fertiliser, made using fossil fuels.
• It is a massive climate polluter: Pasture-based or not, New Zealand’s intensive dairy industry remains the country’s single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Real regenerative agriculture means diverse plants and animals, living soil, fewer chemicals, shorter supply chains and communities in control. Big Ag’s “regenerative” branding usually means business-as-usual factory farms with new labels. We need to support lots of smaller-scale, local producers, processors and retailers who live in and care about our communities – and are fighting factory farms.

Industrial agriculture is busting Earth’s planetary boundaries

Groundswell ends on a high note with a beautiful montage of regenerative initiatives and hopeful graphs showing how eco-friendly farming practices are growing globally. Yes, there is a real reason for hope in the rising number of farmers pushing for this change. But the dark flipside is that conventional industrial agriculture is expanding too – and fast. It is swallowing up ecosystems, belching out massive greenhouse gas emissions, and blowing past more planetary boundaries than any other industry.

Right now, the world’s largest meat empire – JBS – is planning an absolutely enormous expansion of industrial meat farming into a brand new frontier: sub-Saharan Africa. For decades, JBS has been the market leader in Brazil’s beef industry, which is the primary engine behind the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Now, it plans to use Nigeria as a gateway to export its destructive mega-farm model to the African continent.

JBS is not acting alone. From Nigeria to New Zealand, Mexico to Spain, industrial meat and dairy giants are aggressively expanding production. Often to produce foods that aren’t even nutritious. In the case of the New Zealand dairy industry, its biggest customers make chocolate bars.

Just as the Groundswell documentary makes clear, we do not need conventional industrial agriculture to feed the world. These expansions are not about feeding people; they are about lining shareholders’ pockets – at seemingly any cost to people and planet. JBS is run by two billionaire brothers and the company is right now being sued by the Brazilian government for labour abuses.

But, at a time when logic, science, and public opinion say we must move away from chemically-dependent monocultures, the industry still holds so much power. And it is using its wealth and influence to lobby for environmental deregulation and massive corporate handouts. Unless we break the power of Big Ag, we’re on a direct path to more industrial destruction.

More plant-based meals and buying local food is good. But to break Big Ag’s grip we need people power

If giant corporations stand between us and the world envisioned by Groundswell, how do we break their grip?

Yes, we can and should support local: buy our produce at farmers’ markets instead of the big supermarket chains. Eat less meat and dairy and replace it with more plants, which use far less land and water to produce. If we have the time and space, we can even grow some of our own veggies in gardens and allotments or keep backyard chickens.

But change doesn’t come from consumer choices alone. History shows us that the biggest changes occur through people power. They happen when everyday people stand up together against industrial giants – and win. And there are reasons for hope – we are already seeing the cracks in the system:

• In Denmark: Following relentless public pressure to protect drinking water and animal rights, the Danish government has officially committed to regulating industrial pork production and supporting regenerative, ecological farming methods. This is a huge turnaround for a country whose meat industry churns out more pigs per person than anywhere else in the world.
• In Croatia: Local communities have mobilised a massive grassroots coalition to fight a toxic mega-project – an industrial factory farm aiming to slaughter 100 million chickens a year. Europe’s largest poultry producer has pulled out of the project, citing local opposition as its main reason.
• Taking on the behemoths: Greenpeace recently disrupted the shareholder meeting of JBS – the world’s largest meat empire and one of the key engines behind the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. We are taking legal action to block them from exporting this destructive model to sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.

Time to take our power back – with healthy soil and a food system that heals not harms people and planet

Groundswell shows us a beautiful destination, but we have to build the road to get there.

To heal the planet, we absolutely need to build healthy soil and recloak our Earth in greenery. But we cannot get there unless we dismantle the political stranglehold of the small number of massive corporations who profit from keeping things broken.

We have the power to fix our food system, but it requires all of us standing together. Join Greenpeace today and help us fight for a food system that heals the Earth and belongs to people, not corporations.

Stop Big Ag: End Toxic Greed

Join the global movement putting people and the planet before corporate profit. 

Take action now

Amanda Larsson is the Global Project Lead for Agriculture at Greenpeace Aotearoa 

The Stakes for the ISA and Deep Sea Mining in 2026 and Beyond

Deep sea mining isn’t just an environmental disaster—it is a unilateral power grab disguised as a resource war, and a modern iteration of colonial history in the Pacific.

This report exposes how a speculative industry is trying to colonise the ocean floor—and highlights the critical, fleeting window the international community has to stop this resource grab before it starts.

From Norway to New Zealand, efforts to exploit the seabed have crashed into a
wall of opposition: legal challenges, parliamentary blocks, and fierce resistance from local communities, scientists, the fishing industry, and environmental groups. The world is not waiting for deep sea mining; it is actively mobilising against it.

Download the report:

Power Games in the Deep: The Stakes for the ISA and Deep Sea Mining for 2026 and beyond – Full Report

Biodiversity protection is vital to life on Earth. Healthy oceans and forests provide us with the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink and much more. Indigenous Peoples, local and coastal communities have been protecting these ecosystems for generations. Their cultures, knowledge and livelihoods are centred around a deep connection to nature.

Yet, the world’s oceans have been plundered by industrial fishing, filled with plastic pollution and affected by climate change. Deforestation for commodities like soy, palm oil, meat and dairy are pushing forests to the brink, and a new rush for minerals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper for the energy transition, AI, new technology and the military means these crucial ecosystems are at greater risk.

From Chile to Indonesia, from the DRC to Sweden, mining has been poisoning lands, displacing communities and leaving a trail of destruction behind. The rush for so-called “critical minerals” even threatens the world’s pristine and understudied deep sea ecosystems. 

How to protect forests and oceans

To ensure a livable planet for future generations, we must protect vast areas including forests and the ocean from mining. Greenpeace International, together with Mighty Earth,Rainforest Foundation Norway and Fern, released an indicative global Restricted Areas Map and Framework for governments, investors and companies using raw materials extracted from Earth. Advancing and applying the Restricted Areas framework is a crucial step to ensure mining does not destroy essential biodiversity, natural ecosystems, carbon storage and freshwater systems.

As crucial leaders and stewards of nature protection, Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights must be respected. The Restricted Areas Framework requires Free Prior and Informed Consent before any mining activities happen in their territories. The map then combines multiple environmental and conservation datasets to identify landscapes and natural ecosystems that should be off-limits or ‘no-go zones’ to mining. The map also identifies hotspots where mining of raw materials overlaps with Restricted Areas, and serves as a starting point for further discussions and more detailed mapping of locations where mining poses unacceptable environmental or social risks.

What areas are critical for protection

A key global data set used for the Global Restricted Areas map is the recently updated Intact Forest Landscapes (IFL) map. Identified through satellite imagery, IFLs are the last remaining large undisturbed forest landscapes on Earth – a mosaic of forests and associated natural ecosystems of at least 50,000 hectares, showing minimal signs of human activity or habitat fragmentation. They are massive stores of carbon and biodiversity, as well being the traditional territories for many Indigenous Peoples and local communities. The data, recently updated by World Resources Institute, Global Land Analysis and Discovery lab at the University of Maryland, and Greenpeace International Global Mapping Hub, is available on WRI’s Global Forest Watch platform.

At CBD COP15, governments agreed to the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to protect biodiversity, including the target of protecting at least 30% of lands and seas by 2030, and rights-based approaches. The Restricted Areas framework and map provide a useful tool to identify additional areas for protection or Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs), as well as Indigenous and Traditional Territories (ITTs). It reinforces the need for rights-based approaches to any protection or conservation, and the need for Direct Access Financing (DAF) for Indigenous Peoples and local communities for biodiversity conservation, restoration and management. 

A transition away from fossil fuels without destroying the planet is both necessary and possible

Transitioning away from fossil fuels is vital for our future on the planet. But the current “critical minerals” rush, driven by geopolitical competition and different sectors, threatens to undermine the possibility of a just and green energy transition. Mining often causes devastating environmental damage and social harm, repeating extractivist and colonial patterns and disregarding the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. There are numerous reports of workers’ rights violations, land grabs from Indigenous Peoples, and threats to communities connected to the mining industry. Around the world, environmental legal frameworks are being revised or weakened under the justification of national “interest” or for “security” reasons. 

With responsible political leadership, it is possible to meet global climate targets while limiting mining. According to the report Beyond Extraction, commissioned by Greenpeace International and authored by the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, there are several solutions for achieving an energy transition that doesn’t put further pressure on Earth’s vital ecosystems. A key recommendation of the report is that decision-makers must prioritise mineral use for essential energy transition purposes, with public transport, improved recycling programmes, and advanced battery technologies shown as crucial solutions to limit mineral demand.

From deep in the Amazon to the pristine paradise and UNESCO Geopark of Raja Ampat, Papua, Indonesia, Indigenous Peoples, local and coastal communities are resisting mining on their territories around the world. Protecting human rights and ecological integrity must be non-negotiable foundations of a fast and just energy transition. World leaders, investors, and companies must implement a Restricted Areas framework and recognise Indigenous Peoples’ territories and rights, and protect the world’s most sensitive places. We must stand with the guardians of the forest to protect the ecosystems that maintain all life on Earth. 

Grant Rosoman is a Global Forest Solutions Advisor at Greenpeace International and Leon Auty is a Research and Communications Assistant at Greenpeace International.

Learn more at restrictedareasfrommining.org