Analysis of national and local agricultural policies, food policies, regulatory changes, and governance mechanisms.
In Lanhe Town, Nansha, black-skin sugarcane prices have fallen from 99 yuan per dan to a low of 5 yuan; clearing a mu for free means a loss of over 6,000 yuan. After “non-grain conversion” campaigns cleared out bananas, 30 years of continuous cropping leaves only one crop.
In Andaman Sea mangrove villages, Muslim fishers, working with NGOs, have established community-managed protected areas—repairing seagrass beds destroyed by channel dredging, fighting for dugongs’ food, and shaking their heads at carbon-sink projects fencing off mangroves.
Nearly 10,000 EU farmers hurled potatoes at the EU headquarters building in Brussels to protest the Mercosur free trade agreement. Ukraine’s grain price collapse, Brazil’s deforestation for cattle, and China’s smallholder green transition dilemma point to one question: who bears the cost of structural transformation?
From Trang to Satun Province, fishers’ associations and grassroots NGOs build community-protected areas—countering trawls, patrolling, and advocating for fisheries legislation to balance conservation and livelihoods—then plot responses once the fine-mesh provision is approved.
Extreme weather in the north, including flooding and successive droughts, has pushed the No. 1 Document to strengthen disaster prevention. The first appearance of low-carbon agriculture moves the climate agenda from adapting to risks to emissions reduction; the key remains involving small farmers and ensuring they benefit.
Farmers, construction contractors and researchers in villages in the southwest, northwest and central regions recount how some high-standard farmland has been abandoned because of water shortages, levelling and soil damage; they also discuss subsidies, acceptance inspection and squeezed profit margins, asking how food security can truly be safeguarded.
The Sugar Association bankrolled Harvard professors to publish papers claiming sugar was unrelated to heart disease, and the Seven Countries Study cherry-picked data from just 7 of 22 sampled countries. The half-century “low-fat” craze that followed left heart disease undiminished while obesity and diabetes spread.
A strike by over 40,000 riders failed to paralyse New Year’s deliveries, and Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal even mocked the riders on X. Indian riders working roughly 15 hours a day with no contracts are being organised by newly formed worker associations, fighting for safety and income protections.
From Sichuan to Henan—topsoil stripped, pumped irrigation stations dry, transferred fields with no takers—”high-standard” conversions have become low standards in many places. Engineering thinking crashes against complex agricultural reality; who safeguards food security’s foundations remains unresolved.
From Hebei to Shandong, subsidy phase-downs, equipment failures and high heating costs make rural clean heating hard to sustain, while the straw burning ban has led some farmers to burn straw secretly at night or push it into ditches; why does the cost of the green transition always fall on farmers?
