Cross-border food and grain trade, import/export policies, and global market impacts.
At the World Nomadic Film Festival in Jiagedaqi, young filmmakers including Aolunna, Jiao Xiaofang and Tong Cheng used angles such as the Camel Culture Festival, the imported meat market and the severing of Mongolian, revealing how the contract-like bond between people, livestock and the grassland is fraying.
In 1953, Swanson & Sons launched the “TV Dinner” – modelled on the aluminium foil trays served on planes – to deal with unsold Thanksgiving turkeys, bringing frozen pre-prepared food into American homes.
In Britain’s world food system, class and race determined who could eat their fill, famine was “outsourced” to Ireland and India, and industrialised slaughter hid its violence at “the end of the earth”.
On World Rainforest Day, Foodthink has compiled over a hundred reader comments via Jieshengzhi on “Fake Meat” Drives Out the Real Thing: from “Brazil’s deforestation has nothing to do with us” to “Forest-burning concerns every creature”, laying bare the full consumer-side divide over imported beef’s environmental cost.
A joint investigation by Repórter Brasil and Hong Kong Free Press found that four Hong Kong-based companies purchased beef offal from 163 Beef, a slaughterhouse that repeatedly bought cattle from the Heller family farm, charged with deforesting 6,500 hectares.
After the 2019 Rice Tariffication Law abolished import quotas, the paddy procurement price fell from 20 pesos to 14 pesos while middlemen sat back and profited; smallholders in Mindanao are now reclaiming autonomy over production through participatory plant breeding.
Gannan herders call imported grain-fed meat “fake meat,” yet with local yak prices steadily falling since 2020 — a single adult yak fetches just over 6,000 yuan — many are forced to buy “fake meat” themselves.
Repórter Brasil built a traceability database combining satellite data and on-the-ground collaboration with indigenous communities, proving JBS was not “unable to trace” but actively used three-legged journeys to launder cattle from deforested ranches into the supply chain, ultimately prompting six major European chain supermarkets to boycott.
Sangje, a herder settled in the county town driving a sanitation truck, cannot afford his own yak meat—he boils imported frozen meat with sheep intestines in one pot. Cheap JBS-chain beef is driving live livestock prices into loss, from Gannan to Brazil, and burning the Amazon’s forests.
Joya, formerly head of Fairtrade International’s China office, experienced firsthand the predicament of trading companies monopolising cooperative decision-making and Western standards frequently misaligning with rural Chinese realities, as she helped farmers obtain Fairtrade certification and connect with overseas markets.
