February 2, 2026 – The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) changed an obscure policy last week that could make it much harder for shareholders to pass resolutions that call on companies—including food and agriculture companies—to improve environmental and social outcomes.
Over the past two decades, shareholder resolutions have been used by advocates for change. They have been deployed to force Starbucks to discontinue plastic straws, for example, and to push fast-food chains to reduce antibiotic use and food waste.
Most recently, shareholders filed resolutions requesting companies with regenerative agriculture programs—including Campbell’s, PepsiCo, and commodity grain giant ADM—to report on how those efforts are reducing pesticide use.
To build support for the resolutions, shareholders often post a memo called a “notice of exempt solicitation,” which provides details on the issue, before a vote. Going forward, the SEC now says it will object to those memos if they come from shareholders with less than $5 million in holdings. SEC officials claim that the agency has found a “vast majority” of notices of exempt solicitation in recent years have come from smaller investors, primarily to generate publicity.
But in a press release, the shareholder advocacy nonprofit As You Sow said those notices are critical to investor engagement and transparency and that the SEC is effectively silencing most shareholders.
“Communications on material issues central to informed investor decision-making is the underpinning of our free market system,” said As You Sow CEO Andy Behar. “Restricting exempt solicitations to the few largest investors harms the core tenets of capitalism—information and trust between corporations and their beneficial owners.”
In December, meanwhile, President Donald Trump also issued an executive order that could stymie shareholder proposals. (Link to this post.)
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