Rural revitalization, rural infrastructure, social change, and public services.
Foodthink Says Since this spring, Shaanxi has experienced its most severe drought since 1961. Combined with extreme weather such as high temperatures, strong winds, and sandstorms, these compound disasters have seriously threatened agricultural production and rural livelihoods. In May, with the support of the Oxfam Hong Kong Beijing office, Foodthink…
The film follows a woman with no salary and no decision-making authority on an organic farm at the Yangtze River estuary. After bearing multiple physical and emotional labours, she loses her hometown, her mother, and the farm in turn — then leads the last cow into the reed flat.
Farmers, grassroots social organisations and funders at the Nanning workshop discussed cases such as Huanglongbing (citrus greening disease) in navel oranges and pasture degradation in grazing regions: market conditions and policy gaps often shape rural climate resilience more than extreme weather.
For World Book Day, Foodthink’s editors, authors and peers recommend books that connect food, land and the natural environment, including Bruno Latour’s ecological politics, French rural transformation, China’s environmental movement, vanishing foods and industrial additives.
Last April, I arrived at Baicao Garden through Foodthink’s ecological agriculture internship programme. In Wule Town, Guigang City, Guangxi Province, where we were based, almost everything outside of Baicao Garden is chemical-based agriculture. On the drive into town, the sight of people spraying herbicides is a constant presence. I remember…
I. The Seed Bottleneck In Guzhai Yao Township, Mashan County, north of Nanning, farmers’ incomes had soared thanks to growing chayote seedlings, but since last year, they have been plunged into a crisis: they have no seeds to plant. Guangxi experienced several bouts of extreme rainfall in 2024. In Mashan…
Qiaoyun’s family moved from the Nanling Yao Mountains to the plains beside Shaoguan Danxia Airport in the 1990s. The mountain-and-forest intuition sharpened by generations of shifting cultivation lets them find Summer Solstice Mushrooms earlier than others in the mushroom-foraging army.
I. Returning to 2011 The reserve’s shuttle stopped by the side of a narrow concrete road, flanked by karst limestone mountains that seemed strangely familiar. We passed through a sugarcane grove; in fact, countless bare stone peaks in the area are surrounded by sugarcane. Unlike the black-purple skin of fruit…
Beijing University of Agriculture graduate Wu Longlong, back in Gansu’s Ning County since 2015, free-ranges black pigs beside Ziwuling Reserve at half a jin maize each daily. This spring, the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market headed up to see mountain-roaming pigs sharing a ridge with the North China leopard.
Liu Juan, associate professor at China Agricultural University, uses fieldwork in Chongqing, Hebei and elsewhere to show how droughts, windstorms and other shocks hit smallholder farmers facing labour outflow and low grain returns — arguing that climate adaptation must first address these fundamental questions in the agrarian transition.
