Analysis of national and local agricultural policies, food policies, regulatory changes, and governance mechanisms.
In Texas, a home kitchen can legally sell homemade baked goods after completing a $15 online hygiene course. Zhang Yiqing began there, aiming to build organic food exchanges among neighbours and asking what kind of food law leaves room for small producers.
From a short film about delivery riders to a Parliamentary vote, Singapore used its unique system of tripartism over three years to close the institutional gap for more than 70,000 platform workers, securing protections in CPF, Work Injury Compensation and collective bargaining.
From saccharin and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) to genetically modified seeds, Monsanto kept its profits and left the pollution to society for a century. Sun Yat-sen University’s Xu Zhun, Zhejiang University’s Zhou Mujun and others discuss The Seed Empire: who sets the rules, and who pays?
Once small workshops for frying pork rind were banned, tofu makers swapped black oil they could skim clean for chemical defoamers—and the caregiver has since refused all soya products. One “people-first” crackdown has severed not just farm livelihoods but trust at the dinner table.
Twenty-four years after its ban, “lean-meat powder” is still detectable in pork, and residues of hormones such as trenbolone and metandienone are almost absent from food safety spot-check lists—behind athletes’ positive doping tests lie hidden risks of everyday hormone ingestion for ordinary people.
Ecologist Zou Yi at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University finds that land consolidation reduces natural enemy richness in rice paddies, driven by the loss of linear habitats such as field bunds and irrigation channels. She recommends rebuilding these semi-natural habitats and considering the economic and ecological costs of insecticides.
Wang Xiaoyi, Chinese translator of Seeing Like a State and researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, traces the three stages of Scott’s reception in China, the historical “loosen–tighten–loosen–tighten” cycle between state planning and grassroots spontaneity, and the confidence grassroots adaptive change brings after project failure.
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.
A Nature Communications serum study of 5,696 people across 15 provinces found 74 environmental hazardous chemicals at high detection rates, closely linked to 12 chronic diseases including diabetes and obesity; China’s blood residue levels of organochlorine pesticides and PFASs are significantly higher than in other countries.
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.
