The toxic harvest of Israeli agribusiness

“They can do whatever they want. They have no limits. They have access to water and land,” explains Khalil Alamour, a farmer from the Naqab region, interviewed by Luke Carneal. He is referring to Israel’s systematic dispossession of the increasingly isolated Bedouin communities in this desert area bordering Gaza. While the Palestinian population on the other side of the border is subjected to genocide and famine, Israeli agribusiness continues to thrive. Its water-intensive industrial monocultures have displaced Bedouin crops adapted to the region’s arid climate for hundreds of years. Today, even Israeli agave produced in a US$2 million project requires irrigation.

Thousands of kilometers away, a "smart agriculture" platform owned by Israel’s Netafim, proposes drip irrigation to increase yields in industrial agave plantations in Mexico, mirroring the devastation of its countryside. Netafim's collaboration with Israeli military technology companies and its pivotal role in the development of illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories has been widely broadcasted for a long time. This year, Netafim is also among the corporations denounced by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, due to its connection to the economy of genocide.

UAWC*, a farmers’ organization member of La Via Campesina, has long pointed out to the very clear purpose of the attack on Palestinian food systems: ethnic cleansing and the replacement of the Palestinian population. Just as they violently uproot ancient olive trees in Palestinian territory, the army and the illegal colonial settlers are implementing a strategy to uproot the Palestinian people from their land. Israeli agribusiness is one of the pillars in this strategy.

Furthermore, foreign investment has played a significant role in the growth of this business sector, as it has become intertwined with global agribusiness and exported its toxic model to other countries. For example, 80% of Netafim is owned by the Mexican group Orbia Advance Corporation, which operates in the chemicals and plastics industry. Meanwhile, Bright Food Group Co. (controlled by the Shanghai Municipal State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission) owns the dairy company Tnuva. The latter is mentioned in Albanese's report for having profited from Israel's destruction of the Palestinian dairy industry, exploiting Palestine’s increasingly captive market. Other companies in the sector have a similar profile: Adama, which sells pesticides, is owned by the Syngenta Group (China/Switzerland); seed company Hazira belongs to the Limagrain Group (France); and Tahal, which builds water infrastructure, is controlled by Kardan NV (Netherlands/Israel). Rivulis, an irrigation systems company, belongs to the Singapore Ministry of Finance; and Haifa Chemicals has investments from the US group Trans-Resources, Inc.

Several of these Israeli corporations also have subsidiaries registered in other countries, particularly in tax havens such as the Netherlands or Switzerland. This strategy allows them to circumvent the problematic identity associated with apartheid while simultaneously benefiting from the political (and financial) support of foreign countries. A large portion of Netafim's sales are conducted through its subsidiary in the Netherlands. This gives it preferential access to foreign markets through European Union trade agreements, also enabling it to access funding from Dutch public agencies.

In other cases, these companies hold on to their Israeli identity, as is the case with Mekorot, which is rapidly expanding into several countries in the Global South. In Mexico, it has a cooperation agreement with the National Water Commission for a project valued at over U$5 million. In Chile, it obtained a water management contract in the Biobío region, which is currently being challenged by civil society due to irregularities and its involvement in Israeli apartheid. In Argentina, the “Fuera! Mekorot” (“Out with Mekorot”) campaign demands several provincial governments to terminate their contracts with the company. Furthermore, it has mobilized against the privatization of the water and sanitation company Agua y Saneamientos Argentinos (AySA), which has a contract with Mekorot.

This company enjoys a virtual monopoly on water distribution in the Occupied Territories and is also mentioned in the Albanese report for contributing to the transformation of water into yet another instrument of genocide. According to Who Profits, it systematically restricts the Palestinian population's access to water, despite exploiting water resources located in the Occupied Territories (including the Syrian Golan Heights). Furthermore, it charges the Palestinian Authority a price nearly ten times higher than that paid by Israeli cities. Thus, while the average Israeli consumption is 200 liters of water per person per day, the population of the West Bank and Gaza can only use between 77 and 85 liters per person. Today, the population in Gaza lacks water 95% of the time because Mekorot has drastically reduced distribution since October 2023.

Following the model tested in Palestine, the Israeli agribusiness sector has consolidated its presence abroad in connection with the military-industrial complex. The countries where it invests are typically of geostrategic importance to Tel Aviv or attractive destinations for arms sales.

In Latin America, the martyred Guatemala of the 1980s is the country where the origins of this agro-military diplomacy can be traced. An investigation by Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn reports how, during those years, Israeli arms dealers and agricultural consultants, in conjunction with USAID, supported militarization. They trained the police and the army in the construction of “agricultural villages.” This model was inspired on the Israeli moshavs (characteristic of the colonization of Palestinian lands since the mid-1950s). Farmers provided their cheap labor in beans and coffee monocultures destined for global markets; but what mattered most was experimenting with the control of the rural population, who were forbidden from leaving the villages under death penalty. Presented as development projects, the villages were essential to the counterinsurgency tactic deployed by Ríos Montt, which resulted in the death or disappearance of hundreds of thousands of people. Guatemala quickly became a market for the sale of Israeli weapons.

Currently, Guatemala remains an ally of Israel in the region and one of the main recipients of Israeli agricultural “cooperation.” For example, in 2022, coinciding with the signing of a free trade agreement between the two countries, the Agricultural Modernization Center was inaugurated at the National Central School of Agriculture. Guatemala is one of Central America’s countries from which Israeli border surveillance technologies and migrant caravan monitoring are deployed, extending as far as Mexico.

Another Latin American country that has imported Israeli weapons as well as military and agricultural technologies for decades is Colombia, as highlighted in a BDS report. In Colombia, Israeli agribusiness has developed costly projects, some of which have failed under dubious circumstances. For example, in the 1990s an Israeli company called Isrex, which supplied Colombia with weapons and irrigation services, became involved in a 300-hectare agricultural project involving 198 families in Altamira and Cantilleras. The project was valued at 1.5 billion Colombian pesos, 60% of which was to be contributed by Isrex and the Colombian Institute of Agrarian Reform (INCORA). The remaining funds came from a loan taken out by the farming families. Eight years later, Isrex's investment had still not materialized, and the project failed. Colombian authorities washed their hands of the case, and a judge ordered the communities' lands to be auctioned off to pay the debt. A few years later, Luis Vicente Cavalli Papa, the former Isrex representative, reappeared on the scene as a director in Colombia for the Israeli company Innovative Agro Industry, owned by the LR Group, which was planning to expand its Ecuadorian cacao plantations into Colombia. In 2022, the project developed by Bean & Co., a subsidiary of the LR Group, was confirmed in the Colombian towns of Santa Lucía and Suan, as part of a cacao project covering 1,500 hectares.

This group, along with the Mitrelli Group, with which it shares founders, is part of a network of little-known Israeli agribusiness companies. They don't necessarily operate in Israel, but they are closely linked to its military and security services and benefit from high-level political connections. They have used Africa as a testing ground for their “turn-key” agricultural megaprojects. They also operate in Asia and are looking to expand in Latin America, where they have a smaller presence. In these types of projects, the Israeli company is hired to design, secure financing, build, equip, and manage the operation. It obtains financing through loans provided by Israeli or European banks, guaranteed by an export credit agency in Israel or another country, through a subsidiary of the company itself located in a tax haven. Despite the promises of development, these multi-million dollar ventures often collapse when the money runs out and due to a poor ability to adapt to local conditions. In some cases, there have been indications of corruption. But usually, it is the country where the project takes place that ends up bearing the brunt of the consequences, becoming even more indebted. Cheap local labor is often used, leading to accusations of labor exploitation.

In Guyana, civil society and the local BDS movement are currently demanding the termination of the LR Group's contract with Demerara Distillers Limited (DDL). This US$20 million project involves 500 cows imported from the United States, whose milk will be exported to other Caribbean countries starting in late 2025. The contract was brokered by Joseph Haim Harrosh, an LR Group executive, who was also involved in a dubious 600-hectare agro-industrial park project in Suriname, valued at US$75 million (€67 million at the time). Investigations by the newspaper Parbode report that the contract, signed secretly in 2018, was backed by a loan from Credit Suisse, guaranteed by the Surinamese state. Concerns about the project's economic viability, which threatened to generate more debt for the country, were a major point of contention among various sectors of society, including the government itself.

As we go to press, several governments are negotiating an uncertain peace agreement in Sharm el-Sheikh. Many questions remain, particularly regarding Israel's impunity for the genocide and the very future of Palestine. Meanwhile, over one hundred volunteers, mobilized by the UAWC, are working hard in the olive harvest, supporting West Bank farmers under constant aggression from settlers and the army. This is just one more example of the growing global popular mobilization, with people taking to the streets, ports, and seas in support of the Palestinian people. For years, and now more systematically, one strategy has been to boycott companies linked to apartheid. At the same time, it is increasingly important to expose the modus operandi of Israeli agribusiness, which contributes to the global agro-industrial system that threatens the food sovereignty of peoples and exports its colonial model developed at the expense of Palestine.

*On 1 December 2025, the Israeli occupation forces raided the offices of UAWC in Ramallah and Hebron. The forces detained members of the organisation, subjecting them to harsh and humiliating treatment, while conducting violent searches throughout the building . The raid caused destruction and confiscation of all office materials. It also targeted specifically infrastructures of the Palestinian seeds bank in Hebron, destroying seed stocks that represent their plant genetic heritage. At the time of publication, two persons were still in detention, and international condemnation of the attack continues to rise. https://viacampesina.org/en/2025/12/alert-la-via-campesina-strongly-condemns-attacks-against-its-member-organisation-in-palestine-and-denounces-the-arbitrary-arrests/

The article was originally published in Biodiversidad, Sustento y Culturas, núm. 126.