Analysis of national and local agricultural policies, food policies, regulatory changes, and governance mechanisms.
Qingming Festival is a time for ancestral worship and tomb-sweeping. This year it falls on4 April, which just happens to be404. This naturally brings to mind articles that have been marked404 not found. Last year, Foodthink saw several of its articles ‘disappear’ on its WeChat Official Account—the highest number to…
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…
I. The Sudden Mulch Film Crisis Spring ploughing is imminent, yet Li Jidong, a farmer in Nuomizhuang Village, Luancheng City, Hebei, finds himself unable to till his land. Scattered across his 70-mu (approximately 11.5 acres) field are fragments of plastic mulch of all sizes, blown in from a neighbouring operation.…
Foodthink Commentary Ahead of the Spring Festival, Ren Yingying, a post-90s farmer from Lianxiang Farm in Chengde, Hebei, was invited by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture to Berlin for the Global Forum on Agriculture, Food, Nutrition and the Environment (GFFA), where she helped draft a position paper…
I. Why is maize sprayed with pesticides six times? “I wouldn’t dare buy maize from outside,” Old Lei said with a smile. The remark threw me off. As a city office worker, a boiled cob is my favourite breakfast on any morning I oversleep. I had set out to conduct…
Foodthink Commentary Some media outlets have dubbed 2024 “the inaugural year of GMO commercialisation” in China. In 2023, 37 genetically modified maize varieties and 14 GM soybean varieties passed varietal approval, while 26 companies were granted production and operation licences for GM maize and soybean seeds. In 2024, regional roll-outs…
Foodthink Says This year is on track to be the hottest on record. Yet at the recently concluded twenty-ninth UN Climate Change Conference, nations continued to dispute funding allocations, repeatedly bringing negotiations to a standstill. The climate finance gap for agriculture, in particular, remains staggering. So, when we talk about…
“The American system prides itself on being a highly successful culture because we keep more people locked up than we have farmers. To feel smug about such a statistic is utterly contemptible.” Five years on, I still vividly recall the shock I felt when I first read Joel Salatin’s *Everything…
It is autumn harvest season once again, and whether crop stalks should be burnt has once more become a widely debated social issue. In October, open and uncontrolled burning of crop residue showed a rising trend across several areas in Hunan province, worsening air pollution in some districts. As a…
Sichuan Pepper Trees Are Moving Uphill In 2004, I was conducting field research in a village in Mao County, Sichuan. A local resident remarked, “Sichuan pepper trees are moving up the mountains.” He meant that these trees once thrived in the river valleys, but conditions have changed. They now grow…
