Food & Climate
Ivanka Trump announced that she will support food security in U.S. and boost fresh production through through a for-profit company she co-founded two years ago. In the same time, her father, the president, cuts Agriculture Department support to farmers at home and deprives food projects worldwide of USAID grants.
Arwa Mahdawi wrote an article was seen by “Food & Climate” platform: “It’s a little bit rich to talk about food insecurity in the US when your last name is Trump. But after stints as a feminist influencer and political adviser, the president’s favorite daughter has found a new path”.
On Thursday, May 8, 2025, Ivanka resurfaced in Arkansas to speak at the Heartland Summit, one of a million conferences that seem to exist purely so that extremely rich people can sit around patting one another on the back. The president’s daughter was center stage with Ariana Huffington, the CEO of Thrive Global, who interviewed her about her mission for tackling food insecurity in the U.S.
In 2023, you see, Ivanka co-founded a “profit-for-purpose” company called Planet Harvest with her friend Melissa Ackerman. According to Axios, the Heartland Summit interview was the first time Ivanka has spoken publicly about her role in the company, which she promises will “reimagine the food supply chain through private-sector innovation”.
Food as medicine
The Ivanka Trump venture (which talks about food as “medicine”) has some overlaps with Robert F Kennedy Jr’s conspiracy-heavy Make America Healthy Again movement – which has helped bring a number of crunchy moms into the Maga fold, according to Arwa Mahdawi.
But there are plenty of grifts Ivanka could be involved with: just look at some of the other Trumps, who are now raking it in with a number of extremely dubious cryptocurrency projects.
In March, farmers and food organizations across the U.S. are cutting staff, halting investments and missing key funding amid the Trump administration freezing on a broad swath of grants of USDA, more than two dozen of U.S. farmers and agricultural support groups in seven states said.
All this comes as president Donald Trump has imposed new tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China, sparking trade wars with the biggest buyers of U.S. farm products.
That said, it’s a little bit rich to be talking about food insecurity in the US when your last name is Trump. I don’t know if Ivanka is aware, but her father’s aggressive federal spending cuts have negatively affected a lot of government-funded food programmes with the same sort of mission as Planet Harvest. Earlier this year, for example, the US Department of Agriculture slashed two programmes that provided more than $1bn for schools and food banks to purchase food from local farms. Which is certainly convenient for private-sector companies such as Planet Harvest: now they can swoop in to innovate, she said, according to “The Guardian”.
Talking about food security in U.S.
Ivanka Trump is trying to expand Americans’ access to fresh produce through the company she co-founded two years ago.
“So many of the challenges we face today — from rising healthcare costs and chronic disease to food waste and the pressure on small farmers — can be traced to a common root: how we grow, distribute, and access our food”, Ivanka, 43, wrote on Friday, May 9, 2025.
President Donald Trump’s oldest daughter, co-founded Planet Harvest with Melissa Ackerman, who serves as its CEO. It’s described as a profit-for-purpose company with a mission to not only support small farmers but increase access to fresh produce, reduce waste and advance nutrition, according to her post.
“We’re focused on scalable solutions and whole-harvest sourcing that gets fruits and vegetables, including surplus and overlooked crops, from farmers to grocers, food service companies, retail brands, Food-as-Medicine boxes, and emergency feeding programs,” Ivanka wrote in the social media post.
According to the most recent USDA data, from 2023, 13.5% of Americans struggled at some point to secure enough food, the highest rate in nearly a decade, according to “Fox business”.