While those at Davos 2026 seemed to agree that food systems must transform, they also agree that transformation remains stubbornly stuck. And that’s leading to missed opportunity. According to Deloitte, if we reshape how we produce, process, and distribute food, it could unlock $121 trillion in global economic growth by 2070.

At the same time, we see progress in other areas: climate finance is flowing; technology solutions are proliferating; corporate commitments are mounting.

So why is food systems transformation slow to happen?

The answer that emerged from this year's World Economic Forum wasn't about technology, capital, or political will. It was about the relationship between farmers and the corporations who buy from them. When that relationship is characterized by skepticism rather than trust, even the most ambitious sustainability commitments stall at the farm gate.

The Pattern That Broke Trust

The farmer-corporate relationship sits at the heart of food systems transformation. When it works, change happens rapidly. When it doesn't, even the best intentions go nowhere.

Research by FAIRR, a UK advisory firm for food systems investors, revealed some stark numbers: among 79 major agrifood companies that they examined, 50 claimed a commitment to regenerative agriculture. But only 18 set concrete targets, and just four provide financial support to farmers making the transition.

Some executives seem to view farmer trust-building as a "nice to have" — important for reputation, maybe, but not central to business strategy.

This is backwards. Farmer trust is the bottleneck to supply chain transformation. Without it:

• Investments in traceability and transparency yield meaningless data because farmers don't have the resources to input accurate information

• Innovation stalls because farmers can't pilot new practices that might fail

• Supply chain resilience suffers because farmers diversify buyers rather than deepening relationships with ones they don't trust

• As a result, sustainability commitments remain paper exercises because adoption at scale never happens

Companies that build genuine trust with farmer partners don't just get better ESG scores. They get more resilient supply chains, quicker results from innovation, higher-quality data for decision-making, and competitive advantage when regulations tighten or consumer preferences shift.

What Makes Leading Companies Successful

While the FAIRR study showed a gap, some companies do get this right. Others should learn from their approach, which is all about building trust in the system.

Take the PepsiCo-Yara International partnership highlighted at Davos. Rather than asking farmers to simply switch to lower-carbon fertilizers and hope for the best, the collaboration provides the fertilizers alongside agronomic support, soil diagnostics, and digital farm monitoring. Both the company and farmers can verify outcomes. Risks are shared. The partnership creates mutual visibility into whether promises are being kept.

Other companies, including General Mills, Cargill, and Nestle co-invest in transition to regenerative agriculture by funding soil testing, providing access to new equipment, or offering premium payments tied to verified practice changes. These aren't charity; they're recognition that transformation requires shared investment proportional to shared benefit.

Defining a Trust-Building Architecture

The examples above point toward a different approach to farmer-corporate collaboration. These aren't just procurement agreements with sustainability language. They're partnerships that are designed to drive an infrastructure that builds trust throughout the system.

What makes them different?

• Verification reduces information asymmetry. When both parties can see real-time data on outcomes — soil health metrics, carbon sequestration, yield impacts — skepticism decreases. The partnership creates its own evidence of whether it's working. This is why AI-powered traceability and digital monitoring tools can be powerful tools to rebuild trust at scale. Shared measurement frameworks, third-party verification, real-time data sharing — these aren't bureaucratic overhead, they're trust infrastructure. When claims can be substantiated, skepticism decreases and investment follows.

  
  

• Multi-year commitments signal seriousness. One-year pilots tell farmers: “We’re testing whether we want to do this." Five-year contracts tell farmers: “We’re committed to making this work." The timeline itself communicates whether transformation is a core strategy or an experiment.

  
  

• Governance structures create reciprocal accountability. When farmers have genuine decision-making power in program design — not just consultative input — partnerships shift from extraction to reciprocity. Farmers know what works in their context. Companies that create governance mechanisms to actually use that knowledge build better programs and deeper trust.

  
  

• Transparent benefit-sharing aligns incentives. If sustainable practices create premium value, who captures it? Partnerships that explicitly design benefit-sharing mechanisms — premium pricing for verified practices, shared savings from efficiency gains, carbon credit revenue splits — align self-interest with collective outcomes.

  
  

• Shared risk changes the dynamic. When corporations co-invest in transition costs, provide technical support, or offer price guarantees during adoption periods, farmers don't bear all the downside risk of experimentation. This isn't altruism; it's recognition that asking farmers to transform at their own expense while corporations capture the value is a non-starter.

Why This Matters Now

The Davos 2025 theme was "Collaboration for the Intelligent Age." But collaboration on anything won’t work without a solid foundation of trust.

We have the technology to track food from soil to shelf. We have the capital to fund transformation at scale. We have the policy frameworks to incentivize change. What's missing is the trust infrastructure that makes farmer-corporate partnerships work at scale.

The $121 trillion opportunity isn't waiting for better technology or more capital. It's waiting for companies to recognize that transformation happens at the farm gate, and it only happens when farmers trust that transformation is worth the risk.

The gap between the companies that do this well and all the others isn't sustainability ambition. It's partnership design. Leaders recognize that asking farmers to bear transformation costs and risks while companies capture the value is a failed model. They design partnerships that share risk, co-invest in transitions, create verification mechanisms, and build reciprocal accountability into the relationship structure.

The companies getting farmer-corporate partnerships right aren't just improving their sustainability metrics. They're building competitive advantage in an era where supply chain resilience, regulatory compliance, and consumer trust increasingly depend on verified sustainable sourcing.

The trust deficit is real. But so is the opportunity for companies willing to design partnerships that address it.

Global Impact Collective specializes in designing strategic partnerships for sustainable food systems transformation. Our human-centered approach addresses the trust deficits that make farmer-corporate collaboration fail, creating partnership architecture that enables transformation at scale. Learn more about our work in corporate sustainability strategy and strategic partnerships on our Impact page.