Policy, institutional, economic, and technology trends shaping food systems.
“Save our rice!” “IRRI, get out!” In October 2023, these furious chants echoed across several Filipino farmer protest rallies. The demonstrations took direct aim at the Sixth International Rice Congress, hosted by the International Rice Research Institute (hereafter IRRI). Against the backdrop of climate change and the drive to cut…
I. The fruit buyers didn’t come this year On 13 December 2023, in Huichang County, Ganzhou City, Jiangxi Province – the heartland of Gannan navel oranges – Liao Hai, a farmer born in the 1990s, and his mother, Auntie Zou, were getting ready to start the harvest. Early that morning,…
In this episode, we’ll take you into the fascinating world of fermented foods—cheese—and introduce the story of Liu Yang, founder of Bleu Cheese, a master cheese artisan from China. Originally from Beijing and trained in IT, Liu Yang stumbled upon milk churning and cheesemaking while studying in France. This “incredibly…
In Part One of “Internship Notes from a Desert Oasis”, I attempted to revert to my instincts as a business journalist, examining the operational struggles faced by ecological farms. Yet, during my two-month internship at Zhiliangtian Farm in Alxa, being a barista was, in reality, my day-to-day routine at the…
In May, I left my job, said a temporary goodbye to Beijing, and headed to the Zhi Liang Tian Ecological Farm in Alxa, Inner Mongolia, where I spent two months. I didn’t expect that during my first month at the farm, I would be drinking every single day. Two-thirds of…
Picture a plate of vegetables before you, not harvested by muddy-handed farmers out in the fields, but cultivated as a technological feat within a vertical farming tower built of metal and plastic. How would you react? In 2018, while in Berlin, I found myself utterly captivated by the vertical farming…
A Note from Foodthink In early August this year, Wuchang in Heilongjiang province was struck by rare torrential rain and severe flooding, submerging around 40 per cent of its 2.5 million mu of farmland. Two months on from the floods, live-streaming hosts were already pushing Wuchang rice on e-commerce platforms.…
“When yellow croaker graces the table, it’s worth its weight in gold.” In Zhejiang and Shanghai, wild large yellow croaker has long been a traditional banquet centrepiece, chosen as much for its auspicious symbolism as its flavour. Along China’s coastline, perhaps no other fish has experienced a fate so fraught…
The 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) has opened in Dubai. While humanity continues to squabble over how to shoulder the burden of saving the planet—over who should bear the costs, and who must step outside their comfort zones to transform entrenched…
Power generation above the panels, crop cultivation below: a single plot of land yields two streams of income. “Agrivoltaics” claims to deliver multiple benefits—including clean electricity, efficient land use, agricultural modernisation, and rural development—and is frequently hailed as a win-win technological innovation that simultaneously addresses food, energy, and climate challenges.…
