Food production, farmers, rural society, and agroecological practices.
Sili partners with agricultural technology stations and social organisations across Yunnan to promote ridging-and-furrowing low-water rice cultivation. From Yilong Lake’s shores to the Hani Rice Terraces, the same approach has grown into different forms, shaped by differences in subsidies, water conditions and varieties.
Fish cages shattered, mud crabs all escaped with the seawater, orchards and sugarcane groves blown flat. Farmers in Hailing Island, Taishan and elsewhere, barely ten-odd days from the Mid-Autumn harvest, were ruined overnight. The salinisation left by seawater inundation is even harder to repair in the short term.
In this model village for rural revitalisation, coaches carry visitors along the same route almost every day—yet the scorched paddy bunds beneath the rice ears, scattered fertiliser bags and pesticide bottles, and ever-worsening light pollution never feature in the script.
With support from Oxfam Hong Kong’s Beijing office, Foodthink surveyed 29 social organisations and 11 scholars, finding that the real bottleneck for rural climate projects is not carbon emission reduction targets themselves but structural challenges such as hollowing and ageing.
During three months pulling weeds, catching insects and raising seedlings at Xiqing Farm in Daxing, Beijing, Tianyi—participant in Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme—came to realise that the moments when body and land are honestly joined are far more precious than the harvest itself.
In Villain Valley, Fujian, Grandma Kouzi builds this permaculture system through layered planting, duck-shelter symbiosis and perennial herbaceous crops — plant once, eat for a lifetime, and the primary task of humans is simply to harvest.
In Britain’s world food system, class and race determined who could eat their fill, famine was “outsourced” to Ireland and India, and industrialised slaughter hid its violence at “the end of the earth”.
Foodthink and Beiye Books’ online book-club on Vanishing Foods: from the Ark of Taste, with 6,592 endangered varieties, and Norway’s Doomsday Vault, to Wangjingzhuang, Shexian, Hebei farmer Liu Yurong letting a Little White common bean idle for eight or nine years take root again in the Taihang Mountains.
Kouzi, a farmer at the Valley of Villains, accompanied her parents through their final four and forty-four days in the ICU. She has since signed an advance directive, refusing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, a mechanical ventilator and oesophageal tube feeding – fighting for a natural farewell not blocked by instruments.
On the edge of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, farmer Louis spent 16 years transforming a banana monoculture into an agroforestry “forest”; philosophy graduate Zhang Zhiwei, who laboured on African and Brazilian farms for nearly a year, now plans to bring this method back to Yunnan.
