Policy, institutional, economic, and technology trends shaping food systems.
Farmer Pierre inherited more than twenty cows from his parents. When one shows BSE symptoms, he must choose between culling the whole herd or concealing the medical history — a dilemma that echoes French farmers now taking to the streets against EU policies.
The Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market is China’s most mature Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) initiative, but high organisational costs, the care burden on female consumers, and mainstream scale-oriented competition are constantly compromising the ideal of producers and consumers co-negotiating food standards.
The marketing rhetoric of premium supermarkets, the Specialty Coffee Association’s flavour wheel, legislation shaped by lobbying from large agribusinesses—quality is no natural concept, and consumers and smallholder farmers remain ever on the margins of this chain of power.
Early 2024: over thirty thousand farmers drove five thousand tractors into Berlin against scrapping the agricultural diesel tax rebate. The real fury was systemic injustice: after over 170 years of subsidies tethering agriculture to fossil fuels, small farms bore the cost crisis alone while large farms harvested theirs.
At Ji Shi in Beijing’s Sanyuanqiao, all produce comes from local ecological smallholder farmers—cabbages alone span multiple varieties from different farms, and farmers come in person to recommend how best to enjoy their produce. The Foodthink conversation extends from selling vegetables to efficiency, consumption and gentrification.
Several new Foodthink colleagues once again occupied Ji Shi before the Spring Festival of the Year of the Dragon to sell vegetables for a day, sharing first-hand experiences — from not being able to recognise wutai cai to reconciling receiving invoices from over twenty farmers.
From ready-to-heat dumplings to central kitchen ingredients, pre-made dishes have permeated takeaways, school meals and New Year’s Eve dinners. Five contributors — including an anthropologist, a domestic worker and a sustainability practitioner — shared their views on identification, plastic packaging and the impact on Chinese chefs.
At Letian Haiwan Farm in Fengxian, local elders averaging over seventy are still tilling the land. After eight months alongside them, a Chinese-literature student found they mostly come for company and chat; the pay of just over ¥100 a day is the afterthought.
From the Green Revolution to carbon credits, Bayer and IRRI’s schemes have consistently placed hidden costs on smallholders. Yet farmer networks such as MASIPAG in the Philippines and DDS in India are rebuilding a different emissions-reduction foundation through local varieties and agroecology.
Gannan navel orange output nearly doubled year on year, yet purchase prices plunged from nearly 3 yuan per jin to under 1 yuan. A cold snap forced fruit farmers into a rushed harvest with no sales channels in place, and merchants who had booked orchards broke their contracts.
