Environmental pressures, climate change, biodiversity, species protection, and pollution.
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,…
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…
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…
I. The Early Blooming Flowers On the morning of 3 May, in Jinqu Town, Meixian County, Shaanxi, Xu Yuanlin spotted the messenger flowers in his own vineyard. He was taken aback. The messenger flower is the first spike to bloom in a vineyard, acting as a herald to remind growers…
The film *Nei Sha* opens with an immediate explanation of its title. On the banks of a reed bed in winter, Teacher Tang, an organic farmer, explains to a visiting professor: this is the mouth of the Yangtze River, where shifting sands have deposited over time to gradually form islands.…
Foodthink’s Take When discussing the impact of climate change on rural areas, we often say that “farmers are at the mercy of the elements”. But is it really as simple as that? What kind of agricultural systems and rural realities do today’s farmers actually live in? How should the macro-issue…
In celebration of World Book Day on 23 April 2025, Foodthink has gathered book recommendations from our editors, authors and peers. Without any prior discussion, these selections have all independently converged on a foundational relationship vital to human existence: our connection to food, the land, and the natural world. From…
Foodthink Says On 7 March, Foodthink published an article titled *Farmland Polluted by Plastic Mulch Film, Absurd Buck-Passing Between Authorities*, documenting a farmer’s predicament: his fields were contaminated by plastic mulch film discharged during processing by a neighbouring enterprise. Yet the local ecological environment bureau and agriculture and rural affairs…
