From 8–10 September 2025, big agribusiness companies will gather in Amsterdam for the Regenerative Agriculture & Food Systems Summit Europe. At a time of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and rising hunger, this Summit promotes a corporate version of “regeneration” that hides the real causes of food injustice.

We—social movements, farmers, agroecologists, and solidarity networks—reject this Summit as a platform for corporate greenwashing. Instead, we call for farmer-led, community-based regenerative food systems that truly nourish people, restore ecosystems, and protect future generations.

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What real regenerative agriculture means

Regenerative agriculture is not new. Its roots lie in the knowledge and practices of Indigenous Peoples, peasant farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, and land workers. These communities have cared for soil, water, and biodiversity for centuries.

True regenerative agriculture is based on principles of agroecology. It means food systems that:

• Restore ecosystems and respect nature.
• Guarantee farmer and community control over seeds, land, and water.
• Ensure fair prices, decent livelihoods, and food as a basic human right.
• Strengthen local economies and cultures.

This is very different from the Summit’s agenda, which replaces community knowledge with corporate “solutions” driven by investors, high-tech platforms, and profit models.

Why we resist the Summit

This Summit undermines food sovereignty and agroecology. The private‑sector players at the heart of the Regenerative Agriculture Summit and their focus on digital soil testing, financing schemes and carbon contracts sideline the political dimensions essential to genuine regeneration: equitable land distribution, access to food as an inalienable right, fair prices, collective self‑determination, and agroecology. Without these elements, “regeneration” becomes a loophole through which corporate inertia and green growth narratives persist.

The Summit allows powerful companies to reshape the meaning of regeneration to fit their business interests. Their “solutions”—carbon credits, patented seeds, AI platforms and synthetic fertilisers—concentrate wealth and power, while ignoring the real demands of farmers: land and water rights, seed sovereignty, farmer autonomy, and justice.

We want to caution against allowing powerful agribusinesses and tech companies to redefine regenerative agriculture for profit at the expense of ecosystems and people. According to the World Benchmarking Alliance, out of the top 350 global food & agriculture companies, over 90% fail to clearly show how they assess and address human rights violations, child or forced labour, along with insufficient greenhouse gas reduction targets aligned to the Paris Agreement

Most announced speakers are white men from corporate offices. The Summit’s programming continues to enable corporate capture and greenwashing. “Regenerative agriculture” is abused to give legitimacy to entrenched industrial food system actors and corporate interests driving inequality, exploitation, and ecological destruction.

Farmers and grassroots voices are again almost entirely absent from the programme. There is no recognition, nor self-representation, of the Indigenous, Black, and peasant roots of agroecology and organic farming. Instead, the Summit presents corporations as the leaders of “regeneration,” while small-scale food producers—the ones who actually feed the world—remain sidelined. The few Regenerative Agriculture organisations that agreed to attend the Summit also denounced its profit-driven agribusiness partners, and reinforced that regenerative agriculture must be people-led:

“Truly regenerating agricultures are led by farmers, peasants and indigenous communities – people who work with the land on a day-to-day basis. Human rights abuses, continuously choosing profit over people and planet, dependency in-locking ‘innovations’, racism, imperialism – all that is not regenerative agriculture. Regenerating agricultures can have a million faces: Small, big, old, new, organic, not organic, dryland, wetland, etc. What unites and empowers the people-led movement of regenerating agricultures is ‘unity in diversity’ for the shared goal: Holistic, continuous, social, ecological, and economic improvement. To invite and empower as many farmers and people as possible on that journey of regeneration is our mission at EARA. That is what we are working for within the summit – while fully appreciating and supporting the work of our fellow farmers and activists outside of the summit opposing the corporate capture and greenwashing of our regeneration narrative. Together we grow the strongest and truest regeneration!”

– Simon Kraemer, European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture

Picture from Summit brochure 2025 showing the composition of attendees

Other distinguished speakers chose to boycott the Summit on principle:

“I’m stepping out of the Regenerative Agriculture Summit EU 2025 because I stand in solidarity with Dutch and global grassroots farmers and rural communities who are negatively impacted by the participating corporations’ industrial model of agricultural extraction. I’m also withdrawing my participation because the Summit and the corporations present have co-opted and distorted the concept of regenerative agriculture without valuing and acknowledging its traditional and indigenous roots and the actual purpose of regenerating the earth. Instead, this Summit gives a platform to large multinational corporations and industrial farmers with track records of harming the environment, excluding small-scale farmers and their communities, and contributing to climate collapse around the world.”

– Independent statement from Sara Golden, Fair Value Chains Advisor, Oxfam Novib

Corporate capture and false solutions

This year’s Summit is promoted as a space for innovation, but its sponsors and speakers show a very different picture. Key partners include EIT Food (Gold Partner), Doktar Technologies (Platinum Partner), Think Regeneration (Partner), Downforce Technologies (attending participant), and others. Their programmes centre on digital tools, financing schemes, carbon contracts, and patented inputs—while ignoring the real needs of farmers such as land rights, seed sovereignty, and fair prices.

The Summit is guided by a Global Advisory Board linked to the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform, which represents many of the world’s biggest agribusinesses. Its members include:

• Yara, profiting from the war in Ukraine while expanding global dependence on synthetic fertilisers made from fossil gas.
• Bayer and Syngenta, whose pesticides, GMOs, and patented seeds threaten biodiversity and keep farmers locked into dependency.
• Nestlé, with a long track record of broken promises on child labour, trafficking, and deforestation—its cacao supply chains have destroyed up to 85% of Ivory Coast’s forests.
• Unilever and other multinationals, which block real sustainable agriculture and food justice in order to protect their profits.

Together, these corporations push false “solutions”: tools designed for industrial agriculture. Digitalisation and AI are being used to tighten corporate control. Big data, carbon markets, and digital sequence information are promoted as “smart farming,” but in reality, they exclude or exploit smallholders, extract data, and financialise nature. These approaches leave decision-making power and value extraction in the hands of big agribusinesses, rather than shifting resources and decision-making to small farmers and communities. Technology should be farmer-controlled, transparent, open-source, accountable and aligned with agroecological practice—not corporate profit models.

ETC Group & Grain Report June 2025- Top 10 Agribusiness Giants: Corporate Concentration

Our call

We stand for food sovereignty and agroecology. Regeneration cannot be reduced to soil carbon metrics, apps, and contracts. It must mean:

• Land reform and access to land.
• Farmers’ rights and fair prices.
• Local autonomy over food systems.
• Protection of biodiversity, soil, water, and air.

The real solutions to climate, hunger, and inequality will not come from corporate-led “regenerative” models. They come from agroecology and the people who practice it every day.

Picture of 2024 protest

Join us

Activists, farmers, and communities in the Netherlands and beyond have resisted the Summit since it first came to Amsterdam. We will continue—through protest, art, and community action—to expose greenwashing and promote food systems that truly regenerate life.

Resistance is fertile! Join the movement. Sign this statement!
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/FkDsPFkIk0jJ-gWRjXh5eed2KZEoMOv1rasiXYoQYPM

ASEED (Action for Solidarity, Equality, Environment and Diversity), Agroecologie Netwerk NL, Extinction Rebellion Landbouw, Stichting Voedselpark Amsterdam, Toekomstboeren