Photo Credit: Zain Jaffer/AFP
23rd December 2025
What began as a tool of settler colonialism in Palestine now circulates worldwide as a development template, financed by international capital and imposed on rural economies from Latin America to North Africa.
Israeli agribusiness has become a powerful export industry, one deeply entwined with the settler-colonial project in Palestine and now being exported abroad, marketing their high-tech solutions all across the world.
Its water and irrigation industry is a central node in this system. Mekorot, the state-owned water company, has long enforced an apartheid water regime in Palestine, restricting Palestinians access to water (less than 82 litres per person a day, compared to 247 litres for settlers), and selling stolen water back to Palestinians at 10 times the prices it charges other Israeli water corporations. Today, it is aggressively expanding overseas, advertising and signing consultancy deals for irrigation and water management in Latin America and elsewhere, including cooperation with Mexico’s national water authority and consultancy agreements in Argentine provinces. Critics in Chile have also raised formal complaints about a Mekorot contract in the Biobío region that they say lacked transparency and guarantees of company accountability.
Similarly, Netafim, the world’s largest drip-irrigation firm, was founded by Zionists to “make the desert bloom” in Israel, and it has since embedded itself in illegal settlements. WhoProfits documents Netafim’s experiments in West Bank plantations, noting that its drip technology “was instrumental in making the economic case for agricultural settlements.” Netafim’s smart irrigation platform (NetBeat) was even developed via a Rafael Iron Dome subsidiary. Today Netafim is majority-owned (80%) by Mexico’s Orbia and sells to large agribusiness projects in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Critics note that farmers using Netafim platforms must upload detailed land and crop data, which is then controlled by Israeli firms, a form of “state-sanctioned industrial espionage” if politics sour.
Other Israeli-rooted firms follow similar international trajectories. In 2015, the Chinese state-owned conglomerate Bright Food Group acquired (from UK-based fund Apax Partners and Israeli investment firm Mivtach Shamir Holdings) a 76.8% stake in Tnuva, which controls 70% of the dairy market in Israel and has operations and partnerships in over 30 countries, particularly in the United States and the United Arab Emirates. Tnuva uses and markets milk produced in Beit Yatir and Carmel, two illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and in Katzrin, an illegal settlement in the Golan Heights. Francesa Albanese’s recent UN report notes Tnuva “benefits from land seized from Palestinians” and has profited from the collapse of the Palestinian dairy sector.
The seed and agrochemical links are equally telling. Haifa Group, an Israeli fertilizer and plant nutrition supplier, and a regular provider of fertilizer and consulting services to settlers in the West Bank and Golan Heights (in addition to supporting the inclusion of special needs adults into the IDF as part of its corporate social responsibility strategy), operates globally, with production facilities in France, USA, and Canada. Herbicide, insecticide and fungicide manufacturer ADAMA, originally known as Makhteshim Agan before being acquired by ChemChina, functions today within large cross-border agribusiness circuits, selling its products in 100 countries. Its products have been used in “agricultural experiments” in the occupied territories, and its ties to the IDF allowed for the use of their herbicide Diuron in aerial spraying campaigns to destroy crops and poison the water along Israel’s border wall with Gaza.
The close link between the sector and the occupation forces is only a part of a much broader relationship with the Israeli state. In fact, the expansion of Israeli agribusiness abroad is often explicitly tied to defense and finance interests. As a 2022 article by the non-profit GRAIN shows, Israeli corporate delegations routinely pair agricultural projects with arms deals or surveillance contracts. For example, Israel’s agriculture minister inaugurated “smart village” projects in Azerbaijan and traded grain-for-weapons deals. In Africa and Asia, Israeli irrigation and farm technology contracts often followed massive military sales, like Angola’s post-war farming schemes being bankrolled by Israeli weapons merchants, and Côte d’Ivoire’s big rice project being brokered by Israeli financiers with ties to arms exports. These are nothing but neo-colonial “modernisation” schemes to tie Southern agriculture to Northern capital and security agendas.
This is not new. In the early 1980s, Israeli arms dealers and agricultural consultants worked alongside USAID in Guatemala, then ruled by de facto president Efraín Ríos Montt. His regime presided over one of the bloodiest phases of the civil war and the Maya genocide, and Ríos Montt himself credited Israeli military and agricultural advisers with helping consolidate his coup against the previous military regime. The projects they supported took the form of tightly controlled “agricultural villages,” built on the ruins of ethnically cleansed Indigenous settlements and partially modelled on Israeli cooperative settlements, or moshavs. These villages were then used to force displaced people to grow beans and coffee for the global market. The use of Israeli “expertise” and weaponry was no accident, as “Guatemalan officers drew explicit parallels between the Indigenous people living in the highlands of Guatemala and the Palestinian people living in the West Bank. They argued that both Israel and Guatemala faced a similar dilemma: hungering for the land to grow coffee, but not wanting the Indigenous people on the land.”
Morocco offers a clear example of how this resource transfer currently operates. Following the 2020 Abraham Accords, Netafim and other firms were welcomed into a country already strained by drought and shaped by export agriculture. As reported by the Middle East Research and Information Project, Israeli irrigation systems and agronomic consultancy were presented as solutions to water stress, particularly for high-value export crops grown in arid zones, with official portrayals describing local farmers as backward and needing Israeli tech. But their proposed techno-fixes draw on aquifers and surface water already contested by small farmers and rural communities, so that other Israeli companies like Mehadrin can use it for large-scale cultivation of water-intensive crops. Land is consolidated into larger units capable of servicing export contracts, while seasonal and migrant labour absorb the social cost of intensified production, “Israel now treats Morocco as a source of cheap natural resources and labour to lower production costs.”
What ties all these cases together is not simply Israeli participation in foreign agriculture but the way that participation is structured. When Israeli firms operate abroad, they do so with the backing of a state that treats agribusiness as part of its diplomatic and strategic toolkit. Export credit guarantees and security cooperation smooth the path for agricultural contracts. In return, overseas profits reinforce corporate groups that are intertwined with Israel’s broader political economy and settler-colonial project, including firms that supply surveillance systems, military hardware and border technologies. Agriculture becomes one strand in a web of influence, less about the business itself than about stabilizing revenue streams and political alliances.
Written by Kevin Picado
The WCCA 