Analysis of national and local agricultural policies, food policies, regulatory changes, and governance mechanisms.
Foodthink Says A previous Foodthink article, “Have Nutritionists Become Shills for Food Giants? Perspectives from Registered Nutritionists”, exposed how North American food corporations sponsor influencer nutritionists and industry organisations to sway public perception of food through misleading, quasi-scientific popularisation. Similar issues exist in China: health supplements and food advertisements are…
Qingming is a festival for ancestral worship and tomb-sweeping. This year, Qingming falls on 4 April, which happens to be 404. This brings to mind those articles that have been 404 not found. Last year, several Foodthink articles “disappeared” from our WeChat official account—the highest number in our history. Yet,…
Only the soil Old Li contracted was sampled and sent for testing; restoration has not begun. After the processing plant involved moved equipment, film fragments were buried in soil; the ecological environment and agricultural and rural affairs departments have still not acted, citing unclear jurisdiction.
I. Airborne Plastic Blight With spring ploughing imminent, Li Jidong, a farmer from Nuomizhuang Village in Luanzhou, Hebei, found himself unable to plough his land. Across his 70 mu of farmland, fragmented pieces of plastic mulch of various sizes, blown in from a nearby farm, were scattered everywhere. They covered…
Foodthink’s Perspective Before the Spring Festival, Ren Yingying, a post-90s farmer from Lianxiang Farm in Chengde, Hebei, was invited by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture to attend the Global Forum for Agriculture and Food (GFFA) in Berlin, where she helped draft a position paper for young farmers.…
From Liuzhou in Guangxi to Kunming in Yunnan, fall armyworm in the maize fields of farmer Old Lei and Yanta Village farmers has made spraying more frequent and costly, drawing out issues of climate warming, pesticide resistance and genetically modified maize.
Foodthink’s Perspective Some media outlets have dubbed 2024 the “inaugural year of GMO commercialisation” in China. In 2023, 37 varieties of genetically modified maize and 14 varieties of genetically modified soy passed variety certification, and 26 companies were granted permits for the production and operation of GM maize and soy…
Foodthink Says This year is expected to be the hottest on record. However, at the recently concluded 29th UN Climate Change Conference, nations continued to clash over funding issues, leaving negotiations repeatedly deadlocked. The climate funding gap for agriculture is particularly vast. When we talk about agriculture adapting to climate…
“The American system considers itself a very successful culture because we have more people in prison than we have farmers. To feel smug about such statistics is utterly contemptible.” Five years have passed, and I still remember the shock of first reading Joel Salatin’s *Everything I Want to Do is…
Autumn harvest has arrived once more, and the question of whether straw should be burned has again become a focal point of public debate. In October, several areas in Hunan saw a rise in unregulated open-air straw burning, which worsened air pollution in some regions and led to the provincial…
