Food production, farmers, rural society, and agroecological practices.
Farmer Sun Wenxiang stood barefoot in the concrete courtyard to greet us, his feet broad and weathered. It was early July in Hongya County, Meishan City, Sichuan Province, and a series of heavy downpours had just moved through. These marked a rare few days of respite from the seasonal workload.…
The gardenias are just beginning to bloom in the mountain ravine. My flowers have finally opened. June 16, a month ago, marked the anniversary of Evil Man Valley. By 2025, it will be the fourth. The modest patch at the front of the house provides more than enough for self-sufficiency,…
Foodthink Says The ongoing saga of rice “shortages” and soaring prices in Japanese supermarkets has stretched from last summer to this one. Despite repeated government interventions, prices refused to drop. Instead, the crisis intensified, earning the media moniker the “Reiwa Rice Turmoil”. Japanese consumers were up in arms, and farmers…
Foodthink Says “Stories about food are the best stories we can tell.” This is what Dan Saladino, a senior BBC correspondent, said in an interview with Foodthink at the Third International Congress on Agricultural Biodiversity this past May. Saladino specialises in food and agriculture journalism. Over the past decade, he…
Foodthink Says “Half the year we bake, the other half we drown.” Farmers across parts of Guangxi are weathering unprecedented natural disasters. It started with an once-in-sixty-years drought. From November last year to April this year, average rainfall across Guangxi fell nearly 70 per cent short of the long-term average,…
This episode of Food Talk features an impromptu conversation recorded at ‘Jishi’, the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market’s physical space at Sanyuanqiao. We’ve welcomed back two old friends: Kang Li and Jin Peng. One is a Yi woman from Chuxiong, Yunnan, who funded her studies by selling mountain mushrooms and matsutake.…
The Amazon rainforest is vanishing at a rate of several million hectares a year. Over the first two decades of the 21st century, deforestation across Brazil’s Amazon region totalled 44 million hectares—larger than China’s Yunnan Province. Livestock expansion is the primary driver of illegal deforestation: low-cost pastureland and feed have…
Foodthink Says 5 June is World Environment Day, and Foodthink continues to monitor the link between global meat consumption and illegal deforestation in the Amazon. Early in 2024, a joint investigation by the *Hong Kong Free Press* and the non-profit *Repórter Brasil* found that four trading companies in Hong Kong…
Summer arrives, and with it, another season for watermelon. Watermelons are inseparable from summer, just as the farmers behind the fruit evolve alongside their crop. Wherever there is land, you will find the watermelon farmers of Taizhou. Their history of enterprise dates back to the 1980s, forming another chapter in…
Foodthink Says Since this spring, Shaanxi has experienced its most severe drought since 1961. Combined with extreme weather such as high temperatures, strong winds, and sandstorms, these compound disasters have seriously threatened agricultural production and rural livelihoods. In May, with the support of the Oxfam Hong Kong Beijing office, Foodthink…
