Cross-border food and grain trade, import/export policies, and global market impacts.
Foodthink’s Lianhe Programme-funded “Fake Meat” Drives Out Real Meat drew over a hundred reader comments, from “herders just want higher prices” to “rainforest burning across the ocean concerns every living creature”. Imported Brazilian beef’s link to Amazon deforestation is far more complex than “nothing to do with us”.
Tracing how cattle from rancher Heller, whom Brazilian police called “the greatest destroyer of the Amazon rainforest,” moved from illegally deforested ranches to legal abattoirs, then to four Hong Kong trading companies — while import checks focused on food safety, with no requirement to trace the source of deforestation.
Under the Rice Tariffication Law and the impact of imported rice, smallholders on Mindanao in the Philippines face falling paddy purchase prices and high retail rice prices. They are turning to breeding and agroecology to seek food autonomy.
Grass-fed yak meat prices on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau have fallen year after year, while imported grain-fed meat from Brazil, New Zealand and elsewhere floods Tibetan-area shops at half price — leaving herders who live off livestock in a bind: they cannot sell their animals, nor afford to eat meat.
From deforested ranches in the Amazon to European supermarket shelves, Marcel Gomes of Brazil’s investigative organisation Repórter Brasil pieces together the route by which JBS and other Brazilian meat firms put illegally deforested beef into global markets.
From meat shops in county towns in the pastoral areas of Qinghai and Gansu to ranches in the Brazilian Amazon created by deforestation, low-priced imported beef and mutton push down local grass-fattened meat prices and affect herders’ income from livestock sales and their livelihoods.
Foodthink’s Perspective Since the 1950s, a “Fair Trade” movement has emerged globally. Cheap agricultural products from developing countries are constantly imported into developed nations, yet the vast majority of profits from commodity prices are seized by large capital interests within the trade chain, leaving farmers and labourers with only a…
In the UK news of 2022, alongside the death of the Queen, the accession of King Charles, skyrocketing heating and electricity bills, and the revolving door of Prime Ministers, there was also the “egg shortage” towards the end of the year. For several weeks between November and December, egg supplies…
Grain that once shipped from Odesa to Africa and Asia is now funnelled into EU markets, prompting farmer protests in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, while the developing nations that depended on Ukrainian wheat have received a smaller share.
From Missouri’s $140 million-plus grain fraud to India’s organic cotton supply chain, a ‘pay-for-certification’ model and untraceable cross-border production chains have left the organic label repeatedly failing at multiple stages.
