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wealth inequality
Wealth of Global 1% Has Skyrocketed by Over $33 Trillion Since 2015: Report
"Governments should heed widespread demands to tax the rich—and match it with a vision to build public goods from healthcare to energy," said the executive director of Oxfam International.
Jun 26, 2025
An Oxfam report published Wednesday estimates that the richest 1% globally have seen their wealth surge by more than $33.9 trillion over the past decade, with just 3,000 billionaires accounting for $6.5 trillion of that increase.
The report, released ahead of June 30 development financing talks in Seville, Spain, argues that the international community's plan to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals agreed upon in 2015 has failed utterly as global inequality has continued to expand, efforts to end poverty have stagnated, and the climate crisis has spiraled further out of control.
"There is glaring evidence that global development is desperately failing because—as the last decade shows—the interests of a very wealthy few are put over those of everyone else," said Amitabh Behar, executive director of Oxfam International. "Rich countries have put Wall Street in the driver's seat of global development. It's a global private finance takeover which has overrun the evidence-backed ways to tackle poverty through public investments and fair taxation."
"It is no wonder governments are abysmally off track, be it on fostering decent jobs, gender equality, or ending hunger," Behar added. "This much wealth concentration is choking efforts to end poverty."
According to Oxfam's analysis, the roughly $34 trillion wealth increase enjoyed by the global 1% since 2015 would be enough to eliminate annual poverty "22 times over."
"It's time we rejected the Wall Street Consensus and instead put the public in the driving seat."
The report argues that "a new agenda is needed" to break free from the private profit-centered global development model that has allowed international crises to run rampant while letting the ultra-wealthy continue growing their massive fortunes unabated.
The upcoming conference in Seville, the report states, represents a key opportunity for countries that are willing to "work together to tackle extreme inequality" and "reject the 'Wall Street Consensus' around financing development."
"They can start by taxing the very wealthiest—a new global survey finds 9 out of 10 people support taxing the super-rich to raise the revenue needed to invest in public services and climate action," the report notes. "Reforms to the international financial architecture and restoring aid are also key."
The report comes as the world's wealthiest countries, including the United States under President Donald Trump, are making unprecedented cuts to development aid spending, a surefire way to reverse any recent progress toward reducing global hunger, poverty, and disease.
Behar said Wednesday that "trillions of dollars exist" to tackle such emergencies, "but they're locked away in private accounts of the ultra-wealthy."
"It's time we rejected the Wall Street Consensus and instead put the public in the driving seat," said Behar. "Governments should heed widespread demands to tax the rich—and match it with a vision to build public goods from healthcare to energy. It's a hopeful sign that some governments are banding together to fight inequality—more should follow their lead, starting in Seville."
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US Pension Fund TIAA Linked to Brutal Land Grabs and Evictions of Farmers in Brazil
The 10 largest transnational landowners in the world control an area larger than Japan, according to a new report. This accumulation fuels human rights abuse, inequalities, and environmental destruction, and underlines the need for redistributive policies.
Jun 03, 2025
Angelim is a small rural community in Piauí, northeastern Brazil, where small-scale farmers and artisans have lived for generations. Their way of life dramatically changed a few years ago when a company arrived, claiming it had purchased the land. Residents report being threatened by armed men. They have faced forest clearances and the destruction of native vegetation that is essential for their livelihoods and way of life. New monoculture plantations began to dry up the wetlands. The plantations also used pesticides, polluting the ecosystem and threatening residents’ health and livelihoods.
Angelim is located in the municipality of Santa Filomena and is just one of many communities affected by land acquisitions by Radar Propriedades Agrícolas, a company formed in 2008 as a joint venture between U.S. pension fund TIAA and Brazilian agribusiness giant Cosan. In recent years, Radar has acquired more than 3,000 hectares in Santa Filomena, adding to the land it already owns throughout the Matopiba region, which includes the Brazilian states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia—the latest frontier of industrial agriculture in Brazil.
Elite Group
This region sits in the Cerrado, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas, home to 12,000 plant species (35% endemic) and 25 million people, including Indigenous Peoples and small-scale food providers. But 40-55% of the Cerrado has already been converted to commercial tree plantations, large agro-industrial monocultures, and pastures for cattle production. Land grabs, speculation, and deforestation are displacing communities and damaging the environment. One of the major players in this expansion is TIAA and its asset management company, Nuveen.
Tackling land inequality is crucial for a more just and sustainable future.
As revealed in our new report, TIAA is one of the world’s largest landowners and has almost quadrupled its landholdings since 2012. Managing 1.2 million hectares across 10 countries, it ranks 7th among the world’s top 10 transnational landowners, who together control 404,457 square kilometers—an area the size of Japan.
Others in this elite group include financial investors like Blue Carbon from the UAE, Australia-based Macquarie, and Canada’s Manulife; agribusiness giants Olam and Wilmar from Singapore; Chilean timber company Arauco; and U.K.-based Shell via Raízen, a Brazilian subsidiary.
Global Land Grabbing and Concentration Trends
This accumulation of land in the hands of a few transnational companies is part of a global trend of land grabbing that surged after the 2008 financial crisis. Since 2000, transnational investors have acquired an estimated 65 million hectares of land—twice the size of Germany. This has accelerated a dynamic of land concentration, which has resulted in 1% of farms controlling 70% of global farmland, a trend that jeopardizes the livelihoods of 2.5 billion smallholder farmers and 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest, most of whom depend on agriculture.
As the case of the Angelim community shows, land grabbing and land concentration have devastating consequences for communities and ecosystems. Like U.S.-based TIAA, virtually all the top global landowners have reportedly been implicated in forced displacements, environmental destruction, and violence against local people.
Land concentration exacerbates inequality, erodes social cohesion, and fuels conflict. But there are deeper consequences as well: The fact that vast tracts of land, located across different state jurisdictions, are brought under the control of distant corporate entities for the sake of global supply chains or global financial capital flows runs diametrically counter to the principles of state sovereignty and people’s self-determination. In particular, it undermines states’ ability to ensure that land tenure serves the public good and enables the transition to more sustainable economic models.
“Net Zero” Fueling Evictions
The question of who should own and manage land becomes even more pressing in light of climate change and biodiversity loss. Transnational landowners are associated with industrial monoculture plantations, deforestation, and other extractive practices. In contrast, up to 80% of intact forests are found on lands managed by Indigenous Peoples and other rural communities. Moreover, small-scale food providers practicing agroecology support higher biodiversity, better water management, and produce over half the world’s food using just 35% of global cropland.
Ironically, the environmental value of community-managed land has sparked a new wave of land grabs. So-called “green grabs” (land grabs for alleged environmental purposes) now account for about 20% of large-scale land deals. Since 2016, more than 5.2 million hectares in Africa have been acquired for carbon offset projects. The global carbon market is expected to quadruple in the next seven years, and over half of the top 10 global landowners now claim participation in carbon and biodiversity markets. “Net zero” has become a pretext for expelling communities from their lands.
From Deregulation to Redistribution
While global land policy debates in the past 10 years have focused on limiting the harm of land grabs on people and nature, the scale and severity of these trends demand a shift from regulation to redistribution. Neoliberal deregulation, as well as trade and other economic policies, have fueled the massive transfer of land and wealth to the corporate sector and the ultra-rich. Redistributive policies are needed to reverse this trend.
Tackling land inequality is crucial for a more just and sustainable future. However, only very few countries implement land policies and agrarian reform programs that actively attempt to redistribute and return land to dispossessed peoples and communities.
The international human rights framework requires states to structure their land tenure systems in ways that ensure broad and equitable distribution of natural resources and their sustainable use. The tools at the disposal of governments include redistribution, restitution, and the protection of collective and customary tenure systems, as well as measures such as ceilings on land ownership (including by corporate entities), protection and facilitation of use rights over publicly owned land, and participatory and inclusive land-use planning. These efforts must also be matched by redistributive fiscal policies, such as progressive land and property taxes, which remain regressive or ineffective in most countries today, thus perpetuating inequality and enabling wealth concentration.
International Cooperation
Because land grabbing is driven by global capital and the accumulation of land across jurisdictions by transnational corporations and financial entities, international cooperation is essential. The upcoming International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) in Colombia in February 2026 offers a critical moment for governments to agree on measures that end land grabbing, reverse land concentration, and ensure broad and sustainable distribution of natural resources.
To be effective, these discussions should connect with initiatives on a global tax convention and an international mechanism to address sovereign debt, empowering states to have the fiscal space to implement human rights-based, redistributive policies and just transitions. Also important are binding legal provisions that prevent transnational corporations from using the power of their money to bend national rules in their pursuit of profits.
In a world facing intersecting crises—climate breakdown, food insecurity, persisting poverty, and social inequality—and a reconfiguration of the global balance of power, there is an opportunity to move away from neoliberal policies that have benefited very few, and to create a more just and sustainable global future for all.
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Prosperity Sharing: Not Just for the 10%
To win back voters, Democrats should propose a nationwide public fund through a Financial Transaction Tax.
Jun 02, 2025
The Alaska Permanent Fund, established by a Republican governor nearly a half-century ago, has allowed Alaskan residents to share in the profits from oil and mineral extraction in the state.
As The New York Times explains, "Similar socialized funds—sometimes called sovereign wealth funds—are common in other conservative states." In fact, The National Interest reports that "the great majority of states that have a domestic sovereign wealth fund are solidly Republican states." Texas, Wyoming, and North Dakota, for example, all maintain multi-billion dollar public wealth funds.
Democrats need to think even bigger if they want to win back respect—and the vote. They need to consider that American productivity goes well beyond oil and gas, that it's the result of 75 years of progress in technology and medicine and finance and numerous other industries, and that it derives from the sweat and inspiration of all of our parents and grandparents. Stock market gains reflect our productive past. All of us should reap some reward from that long-term effort.
All families, rich or poor, would share in America's prosperity.
New wealth should not be taken only by the 10% of Americans who own 93% of the stock market. While the S&P 500 has gained a pre-inflation average of over 10% annually over the past half-century, the returns on that growth have accrued passively to the richest among us.
Large-scale public wealth funds have been proposed to correct the imbalance. Funding will ideally come from a Financial Transaction Tax or some form of levy on market capitalization. The argument for a Financial Transaction Tax has been made for years by Dean Baker and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). An alternative is a small tax on stock holdings. The Peoples Policy Project noted that "at the end of 2017, the market capitalization of listed domestic companies was $32.1 trillion. A one-off 3% market capitalization tax would thus bring in around $1 trillion of assets."
Current U.S. stock value is over $50 trillion. Just a 2% tax on that amount would return $1 trillion. Each one of America's 127.5 million households would earn nearly $8,000 per year. All families, rich or poor, would share in America's prosperity.
Of course, the millionaires who own almost the entirety of the stock market will resist even a small percentage payback to the country that made them rich. Despite the unlikelihood of getting the super-rich to part with their money, there's a good reason—other than the fairness of recognizing society's contribution to long-term wealth gain—for stockholders to embrace an American Permanent Fund. As noted by reliable financial sources, consumer spending directly influences stock market performance. With the massive trillion-dollar surge in consumer spending, stock market growth is likely to make up that tiny transaction or capital holdings tax, and then some.
It's certainly worth paying a nominal amount to stimulate the economy and boost one's own stock portfolio.
But where is the political will to make this happen? Perhaps a proposal by Democrats for a nationwide public fund through a Financial Transaction Tax will convince a cynical middle-class America that the Democratic vision focuses on the needs of society rather than on rich individuals.
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