Analysis of national and local agricultural policies, food policies, regulatory changes, and governance mechanisms.
Peking University Professor Zhang Dandan says flexibility itself is a benefit, but food delivery riders face platform controls like peak-hour online mandates and KPI assessments. Gig work is more an employment model to cut costs and transfer risk than work freely chosen by workers.
In the wheat–maize rotation zone of southern Hebei, farmers say straw incorporation makes emergence harder, increases pests and weeds, and raises the cost of spraying and rotary tillage; even when the yield loss feels limited, they still want to burn the straw.
Under the straw burning ban, Dongting Lake area farmers in Hunan are forced to incorporate straw. Oilseed rape costs 60–70 yuan extra per season, yields nearly halve, and rice stem borer and other pests worsen year on year; one large-scale grower simply abandoned over 200 mu.
A state-owned agricultural company in a development zone on the lower Yangtze runs a mini-program for the district agricultural committee, deploying marketing calendars, brand packaging and community livestreams in turn. The one who actually moves volume, though, is a supplier selling through WeChat groups and 181 downline group leaders.
In the strictest straw-ban season of 2025, Village A in Hunan’s Dongting Lake region patrolled for three months and liaised with collection-and-storage firms to bale and transport the straw. Still, no outlet was found; villagers seized a window when tower cameras turned away, burning over a thousand mu.
Inspection and loss assessment, random sampling and premium refunds mean that agricultural insurance payouts to smallholder farmers often diverge from expectations; in widespread disasters, claims-paying capacity and catastrophe risk pooling remain under pressure.
Yi Fujin of Zhejiang University begins with one cow, one mu of maize and a late spring cold snap to explain how agricultural insurance works and why smallholder farmers struggle to get their claims paid in extreme weather.
Under the 2016 straw-burning ban, village cadres hired guards and satellite-detected fires meant docked pay; ten years on, Heilongjiang farmers waited for a weather-forecasted “burning window” – simply because one pass of the deep plough for residue incorporation scrambles every plot boundary marked by ridges.
On 31 May, Foodthink invites Professor Lü Chensheng, author of The Vanishing Bees, to DT51 RDV Bookshop in Beijing to discuss the ecological and health risks of neonicotinoid insecticides, from seed to table.
Four Foodthink articles on delivery riders, corn mould in North China, rural heating in Hebei, and high-standard farmland — none a traditionally “sensitive” topic — were successively taken down from the platform, and the space for public discussion shrank with each recurrence.
