Burning Questions
Fellowship Award Winners

Ambarish Karamchedu, Ben Coles

Location: U.K.
Primary academic field: International development (Karamchedu), Economic geography (Coles)
Award category: PhD Holder

Guidance Memo

• Title: Who owns chickens: Corporate control and industrial broiler production in the global south
• How to cite: Karamchedu, Ambarish, and Ben Coles. Who owns chickens: Corporate control and industrial broiler production in the global south. Tiny Beam Fund, 13 August 2025, https://doi.org/10.15868/socialsector.45034.
• What We Learned From It:
  

  • Worldwide, 376 companies are responsible for 75% of broiler chicken production, with ownership increasingly concentrated through mergers and institutional investment. In Brazil, Mexico, India, China, 91 firms control 36% of production.

  • To understand the power of the corporations and financial institutions, it is first necessary to grasp the sheer scale and the underlying logic of the industrial system they control. The global chicken industry is not merely large; it is built on a relentless pursuit of efficiency that has profound consequences for animals, people, and the planet. This context is the foundation upon which corporate power is built and exercised.

  • Brazilian chicken production is concentrated in just a handful of key firms. JBS, BRF, Aurora Alimentos, Lar Cooperativa Agroindustrial, and Copacol slaughtered an average of 6.2 billion chickens per year between 2018-2024.

  • Mexican chicken production is dominated by two major firms, Industrias Bachoco and Pilgrim’s de Mexico. Together, they are responsible for approximately 1.2 billion chickens slaughtered in 2024, 50% of total chicken production in Mexico.

  • The Indian market is dominated by privately-owned companies, but global financial and corporate actors are increasingly present. The largest producer from 2018-2024 was Suguna, a private company, averaging 472 million chickens per year. A major new entrant in 2024 is LDC India, which entered the rankings with 477 million chickens slaughtered. LDC India is a subsidiary of the French agribusiness giant Louis Dreyfus company (LDC). The key takeaway for India is that even in a market dominated by private, family-owned firms, global agribusiness and development finance institutions are key players shaping the industry’s growth.

  • Compared to Brazil, Mexico and India, China presents a more complicated picture, with a rapidly growing and diverse set of owners. In 2024, 19 firms slaughtered a total of 7.2 billion chickens, up from nine firms slaughtering 4.1 billion chickens in 2018. While the ownership landscape in China is more fragmented, it nonetheless shows the significant footprint of powerful U.S.-based multinationals operating alongside publicly-traded and state-influenced domestic firms.

  • Key takeaways: 1) A critical finding of this research is that major U.S. investment firms, including Blackrock and Vanguard, own significant stakes in the largest publicly-traded chicken companies in Brazil and Mexico. This financial relationship is a key pressure point. 2) The industrial model is the only game in town. The intense market pressure exerted by these financial giants forces nearly all producers, regardless of their ownership structure, to adopt the same industrial model. The dominance of this model is so complete that non-industrial production is statistically invisible. 3) This extreme concentration of corporate and financial power creates a cascade of negative consequences. In particular, corruption and collusion; animal suffering, labor exploitation; systemic risk to the food supply; displacement of more resilient, localized food systems.

  • Four levers of action in both the global north and south: 1) Financial activism targeting the public companies and their investors. 2) Legal and investigative action targeting private companies. 3) Push corporations for higher animal welfare standards. 4) Urge governments to support research and development of resilient, local alternatives including indigenous chicken breeds and expansion of backyard, small-scale poultry schemes.

Links

• Read the Guidance Memo
• Read the Annotated Bibliography

Some of the Things We Really Liked when We Read the Application:

• With the enormous, unprecedented increase in the production of industrial chickens in LMICs in recent years, chicken production beyond Global North countries has become an emerging issue that is a new frontier in academic research.
• This issue is getting more attention among NGOs and funders. But they may not fully realize that a key driver of this global expansion is that corporate agribusinesses specifically target Global South countries with populations and/or economies that have strong growth. Corporations consider these countries as "untapped" places with huge opportunities to expand industrial chicken production and reap profits. NGOs and funders also may not understand how industrial chicken production in developing countries is financed. The topics to be addressed by the applicants' will increase the understanding significantly.