Rural revitalization, rural infrastructure, social change, and public services.
Meishan farmer Zhao Lishun watched rice paddies transferred to outside large-scale lessees go mouldy and be left unharvested. Across villages in Sichuan, Guizhou and Henan, high-standard conversion has stripped away topsoil, water-conservancy facilities are empty shells, and the “large-field” model is pulling villagers further from their land.
Nearly a decade on from the Ten Air Measures, Hebei’s coal-to-gas conversions, Shandong’s clean heating upgrades and the blanket straw-burning ban were rolled out one after another. Yet nearly one-sixth of converted households have already abandoned their systems; the green transition’s extra cost has long fallen on farmers.
Disaster relief worker Hao Nan retraced the flood’s path through the Xinglong and Miyun disaster areas to reconstruct how flash floods unfolded. Community disaster prevention and mitigation, he finds, has long lacked funding and manpower, with grassroots evacuation timing relying largely on on-the-spot judgement.
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.
Home Action director Hu Xiaoping on how Sichuan’s project villages have responded to extreme heat — from recovering heirloom varieties to cutting growing costs — and how climate change forces them to rethink what agriculture means for their lives.
The charity Home Action promotes ecological rice cultivation across Sichuan villages — no-till mulching, no chemical fertiliser, no pesticide — so farmers who have stayed behind can grow food well amid successive droughts and heatwaves without external inputs.
Ecological farm owners in Shunyi, Changping and Baoding have endured year after year of torrential rain flooding their fields, making difficult adjustments from digging drainage trenches to switching crops, yet remain trapped by the absence of public drainage and ever-mounting costs.
Heat-driven crop losses and surging tourist numbers are merely the fuse. The legacy of the rice acreage reduction policy, JA’s monopoly on procurement and pricing, and a farming population averaging 68.7 years of age are the agricultural crisis truly reflected by the “rice disturbances of the Reiwa era”.
Foodthink has compiled four firsthand accounts of Guangxi’s floods from Liuzhou, Nandan and Du’an. Amid sudden swings between drought and flooding, flash floods destroyed water systems, ponds lay empty, and White-trousered Yao women braved the downpour to rescue hand-sewn ceremonial outfits — a season’s livelihood faces rebuilding.
