Analysis of agricultural product prices, supply chains, corporate behavior, and industry trends.
Apollo Go in Wuhan leaves drivers with nothing but remote fire-fighting; Bianlifeng locks store managers’ experience outside the algorithm; Meituan’s system turns the time riders save by running red lights into new standards — power is accelerating toward the platforms.
Researching tomato flavours, American writer Chris St. Cavish found that ingredient quality is already determined the moment a seed is chosen; China’s rice varieties have shrunk from 46,000 to 1,000, yet living seeds in farmers’ hands still guard the last of that diversity.
Foodthink, together with Sanlian Academic, Yali and the Peasant Seed Network, hosted a series of Seed Empire book-launch talks in five cities, where researchers, returning farmers and university scholars discussed how Monsanto and agricultural capital intervene in public scientific discourse.
On the eve of the Paris Olympics, more than 100,000 people signed a petition calling on the International Olympic Committee to terminate its Coca-Cola sponsorship contract. The reasoning mirrors that which once banished tobacco from sport: sugary drinks are using sport to sportswash their health and environmental harms.
Tanker trucks loaded edible soybean oil without cleaning; even public attention can hardly break industry collusion. New mothers, facing pesticide-treated fruit and baby formula ingredient lists, feel even more at a loss. Keeping food sources within a knowable, controllable range has become the most realistic response.
At Yinlin Village, Taiping Town, Conghua, Guangzhou, Sister Hu’s 400-plus lychee trees yielded over 8,000 jin last year — this year, not even 100. At Pengcheng Ecological Farm, 200-plus trees produced just a dozen or so lychees. Prices up several times over still cannot recoup the costs.
A shop manager demoted by a single system message; shop assistants grinding non-stop under the commands of 70-odd tasks and 30-odd cameras. Bianlifeng, which handed all decision-making to algorithms, has shrunk from nearly 3,000 stores to just over 1,000.
From the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844, cooperatives have connected members at both consumption and production ends for 180 years. Foodthink gathers cooperative practices in food and agriculture worldwide, tracing this movement’s paths to health, fairness and sustainability in the ‘food empire’s’ gaps.
With over a decade in the villages – growing rice, raising chickens, brewing green plum wine, running rural tourism – Huang Yajun of Conghua’s Deep Cultivation centre offers, after multiple setbacks, a practitioner’s response to the academic judgement that rural work runs counter to modernisation.
In a tea-growing village in the Hunan–Hubei borderlands, after a leading tea enterprise entered under the “company + farming household” model, all-round producers — from growing and picking to pan-firing and selling — were reduced to “partial tea farmers”, with value-added stages like tea-making and branding monopolised by the firm.
