This TED Talk features social entrepreneur Muhammad Madaris, recorded live at TED Residency 2019.

It's been about a decade since the last financial crisis, and yet this industry has never been bigger.

Legislation that was meant to better regulate its largest players has hurt its smaller ones,

resulting in most of the industry's assets to be controlled by the top 1%.

They've become too big to fail.

I'm not referring to big banks, but the world of big agriculture.

As a public health practitioner who has worked with small-scale farmers in

Rwanda, and now as a small food business owner who sits at the intersection between our

consumers and producers, I've been exposed to one of the most ecologically and economically

intensive industries in the world. And throughout my work, I've witnessed a chilling irony.

Our farmers who feed our communities cannot afford the very foods they grow.

Today, a handful of corporations continue to consolidate the entire food supply chain.

From the intellectual property of seeds seeds to produce and livestock,

all the way to the financial institutions who lend to these farmers.

And the recent results have been rising bankruptcies for family farms

and little control for those who are just trying to survive in the industry.

Left unchecked, we will head into another economic collapse, one very similar to the farm crisis of the 1980s,

when commodity market prices crashed, interest rates doubled, and many farmers lost everything.

Fortunately, there's a very simple, three-part solution you can be part of right now

to help us transform our food industry from the bottom up.

Step one.

Shop at your local farmers' markets.

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