Cross-border food and grain trade, import/export policies, and global market impacts.
Supply chain data show four Hong Kong companies bought tripe and omasum from slaughterhouse “163 Beef”, which made repeated purchases from the family farms of Brazilian rancher Heller, who is accused of illegal deforestation in the Amazon. Supermarkets including Wellcome still sell Brazilian beef.
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.
Fieldwork in the pastoral areas of Gannan and Qinghai shows that low-priced imported meat from New Zealand, Brazil and other countries, called ‘fake meat’ by herders, is both squeezing local grass-fed meat out of the market and driving down herder household incomes.
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…
In early November, Odesa had not yet succumbed to large-scale missile strikes and power outages, and the shops along the streets remained open as usual. Aleksey, a farmer, arranged to meet me at a café in the city centre. Aleksey’s farm is located near Odesa. He told me it covers…
