Cross-border food and grain trade, import/export policies, and global market impacts.
In 1998, Italian truffle giant Urbani Tartufi had 47 tonnes of Chinese truffles seized, having long blended them into black winter truffles for profit. On 29 September, Kunming Institute of Botany mycologist Yu Fuqiang and Yi returnee farmer Kang Li discuss online Chinese foragers’ plight under climate change.
Marius Korsnes (Ma Li) and his NTNU team investigate the salmon, dairy and live-pig industry chains across borders, arguing that China’s animal protein consumption follows a logic of construction distinct from the West—plant protein has not been displaced, while farming’s resource costs have been “outsourced” overseas.
Musang King and Black Thorn oversupply triggered this year’s Malaysian “durian tsunami”. Balik Pulau’s Kampung old-tree smallholders are caught in it: tree-ripened fruit has an extremely short shelf life, sold cheap or discarded first – and many farmers have already felled their old trees, switching to grafted premium cultivars.
The award-winning documentary Whose Table, Whose Pasture documents the reality of plummeting cattle and sheep purchase prices and damaged livelihoods among herders after imported frozen meat flooded Qinghai’s markets. It will be screened at Zhejiang University on 12 June, followed by a discussion between food systems scholars and the audience.
Foodthink will screen the documentary Whose Table, Whose Pasture in Ürümqi, documenting the livelihood impact on herders around Qinghai Lake after imported frozen meat flooded the market. After the screening, local Xinjiang organisations and guest speakers will discuss pastoral and herder issues.
Mercosur and the EU formally signed their free trade agreement after nearly ten thousand farmers hurled potatoes at EU headquarters in Brussels. Grain-price trauma, double environmental standards and transition costs stack up—fairly, who bears the cost of green transition? China’s low-carbon agriculture faces the same question.
Gail Borden’s canned condensed milk, Henri Nestlé’s infant milk powder and the transnational competition of the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company turned perishable fresh milk into an ocean-crossing industrial commodity in the nineteenth century.
Food-history researcher Zhang Sirui traces milk’s path to globalisation: once a “barbaric drink” to the ancient Greeks, an everyday beverage in China for barely more than a century, its history interwoven with science, politics and global trade.
A 2023 study by Feng Xiaojun and team at China Agricultural University in a major dairy-farming county in Shandong found family dairy farms surpass large-scale farms on income, import resilience, environment and dairy cow welfare. Smallholder exclusion by dairy processors stems from unequal bargaining power; policy and organisation must combine.
Lamb prices have slumped for years and imported frozen meat has flooded the market, trapping generations of Qinghai Lake herders in revolving debt: some sold their yaks at a pittance to deliver food in town; others carry 200,000-yuan loans, hoping each year for sheep prices to rebound.
