Instead, I forced myself to stay up, gnawing my fingernails as the results trickled in, and I’m glad I did.

I’d forgotten what it felt to be giddy about a political change for the better. Yes, yes, I’m well aware of the challenges ahead for Hungary but it was a good start to a very busy week.

April used to be my favourite month when I was growing up: school was over (our school year ran from June to March) and my favourite festival - Thingyan - was just around the corner.

Thingyan usually falls between April 13 and 16, during the hottest month of the year, and revellers spend multiple days throwing water at each other before ushering in the new year. The water symbolises washing away the sins and the bad luck of the past year, and welcoming clean, cool beginnings. There are similar Buddhist festivals in Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos.

Today, Apr 17, marks the start of the Buddhist calendar year 1388 in Myanmar.

For years, we had a scrappy little pandal like this on the street outside our house in Yangon, with bamboo poles lashed together and coconut fronds for the roof. We filled plastic drums with water, and used cups, bowls, and buckets, to douse anyone who walked or drove past.

Later, it was upgraded into a proper wooden structure, with pipes connected to a tank of ice-cold water. As we got older, I got bolder: I swapped the pipes for no-si-khwet (a condensed milk can with the top cut off). Fill it half way, hold it just right, and with a flick of a wrist, it can land like a big, hard slap. It requires dedicated practice and should only ever be used on the body.

We’d start around 9 in the morning, spend hours soaking people in hardy vehicles that are built to withstand the onslaught, break for lunch, then start again in the late afternoon. Rinse and repeat for three days. Four in a leap year.

It was also one of the very few times in our conservative society when we could tease our elders: shouting “father-in-law”or “mother-in-law” at the parents of pretty women, and the parents have to grin and bear it. Fairly tame, but fun nevertheless.

Food is central to Thingyan, because you need fuel to keep going for days.

In the mornings, we’d wolf down mont lone yay baw while playing. Literally translated as round dough floating on water, these glutinous rice balls are a traditional Thingyan snack.

Lunch was a home-cooked spread that usually includes a fragrant curry built on ginger, tomatoes, and shallots; a tamarind-laced sour soup with varying greens; a tangy salad with plenty of fresh lime and coriander or a sweeter one with peanuts and garlic oil; and a vegetable stir-fry.

This was often followed by my mother’s famous faluda, a Persian-inspired, maximalist dessert of colourful jellies, custard, ice cream, milk, sugar, and rose water.

If my recollections sound rose-tinted, it’s because I was fortunate, cocooned as I was in my extended family’s embrace and able to overlook - or forget - that I was growing up in an isolated military dictatorship.

There are darker sides to the festival, too, especially among groups in hired vehicles travelling between pandals: drugs, alcohol, groping and sexual harassment, and fights and accidents fuelled by both.

The last time I experienced Thingyan was exactly a decade ago, during the heyday of Myanmar’s opening, when it felt like we were moving forward, not backwards.

These days, April is when nostalgia settles in.

Thingyan Among Strangers

For several reasons, the nostalgia feels particularly sharp this year.

Firstly, Min Aung Hlaing, the architect of the coup, has installed himself as Myanmar’s president, five years after illegally seizing power and plunging the country into civil war. This followed a stage-managed election held between Dec 2025 and Jan 2026, covering only parts of the country, and widely dismissed as neither free nor fair.

More than one-third of the new cabinet members, including Min Aung Hlaing himself, is under international sanctions, according to Myanmar Now.

Secondly, I couldn’t help but contrast this with Hungary’s election results and the outpouring of joy that followed, remembering the first and only time in my life I’ve voted, when my vote counted.

Thirdly, I’ve just started reading Nation of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran, which has stirred a flood of images, memories, and emotions. A friend and former editor recommended it and I’m devouring it, even during a week of 12-hour workdays.

Ece is a Turkish writer frequently at odds with the authorities, and eventually went into exile in 2016 to avoid arrest. She has since been warning the world about the slide of democracy and the rise of fascism.

Her eloquent and searing writing about being homeless - not only of losing a physical space where you were born and raised and had to leave for whatever reason, but also of political and emotional spaces - struck a deep chord. So did her accounts of working relentlessly, putting on an armour of calm, navigating the never-ending bureaucracy, and dealing with the guilt and shame of leaving.

“Some of us, like myself, buy a plane ticket and convince ourselves that we are willing fugitives, privileged immigrants or nonchalant nomads, telling ourselves we have no right to feel pain.”

I’m nowhere near as accomplished or important, and I fell foul of the Burmese authorities much later, but the emotional contours feel very familiar.

She also wrote: “what ostracises us and makes us homeless even when we are at home - the sense of being under siege from inhumanity, madness and brutality”.

I now recognise this feeling almost everywhere these days: among journalists of all stripes and speciality; among climate and social justice campaigners; among thinkers, writers, and academics.

I’ve now spent more of my life - and more Thingyans - outside of the country and community I was born into. At this point, I’m pretty certain my memories of both home and Thingyan are selective and burnished by distance and longing, but the one thing that has stayed constant throughout the years has been the comfort of food from home.

Finding Home in Food

Food is the one thread I could always pull, whenever I’m feeling unmoored. I’ve written before about ‘finding home in a bowl of noodles’ and my attempts to recreate the foods I grew up eating.

No matter how off-kilter my versions turn out to be, I still enjoy them, because they remind me of home and the people who make it home. Like Mike Shaikh said in last week’s issue, food is more than just calories; it’s a shared language.

One of my favourite dishes is laphet thote (pickled tea leaf salad). It’s also the first dish I learned to make after leaving home, mainly because there’s practically no cooking involved.

You mix the leaves with the pack of crispy nuts known as a kyaw - a crunchy blend of fried garlic, broad beans, yellow split peas, peanuts, and sesame seeds - that’s usually sold alongside it. Add sunflower oil, fish sauce, and lime juice to taste. That’s it.

When I became more confident of my cooking abilities, I’d throw in thinly-sliced garlic, roughly cut tomatoes, and shredded cabbage.

Making it was easy. Finding the ingredients wasn’t. Ever since I left home in 1998, I’ve made sure I never ran out of them, relying on friends and family to keep up the supplies.

Then, a few months after the 2021 coup, I found myself with two large bags of stale a kyaw. Just when I was in desperate need of some comfort after writing, reading and speaking non-stop about what’s happening back home.

“I was devastated. My inedible laphet thote felt like a metaphor for the country and the food I love slipping away from me. It is a privilege to be safe at a time when millions of my fellow citizens live in fear, but safety comes with a gut-wrenching feeling of impotence and survivor’s guilt,” I wrote in Nikkei Asia.

To me, laphet thote is more than its umami flavours and crunchy texture. It reminds me of late afternoons when the women in our extended household gathered around a shared bowl, with a pot of freshly brewed loose leaf tea and leftover rice.

I also love the symbolism of its ingredients: the best tea leaves come from the hilly Shan State in the country’s east, the legumes and nuts that make up the crispy bits from the central plains, and the rice from paddies in the Ayeyarwady Delta. It graces dining tables across the country, and is often served at celebrations, including weddings.

I still make it often, especially for friends unfamiliar with Burmese food. But there are dishes I can’t replicate, or can only approximate, so I’m always on the lookout for them.

• Monhinga: the ginger-lemongrass-laced fish noodle soup, a national dish whose recipe varies depending on whether you’re eating it in Yangon, the Delta, Rakhine in the west, or central Myanmar.

• Nga pi chet: the quintessential Burmese dish of fermented fish with shallots, tomatoes, and fresh chillies. Here’s a famous recipe from a great aunt.

• Tohu thote: fresh Shan tofu made from yellow split peas is sliced and tossed in garlic oil, toasted chickpea flour, chilli, lime, and crispy garlic chips. Anyone who dislikes tofu hasn’t had this version and yes, I will die on this hill.

• Kayah rice wine: a fixture in any Kayah household, the smallest state the country. Made with rice, and sometimes other grains, and fermented at least for a week. Here’s a recipe.

• Anything with Naga pepper: almost every dish I ate in this remote region in western Myanmar has this spice, which provides a numbing and tingling sensation similar to Sichuan pepper. As a Naga friend once said, “It dances on your tongue.”

The memories of these dishes are what I carry across borders. If you come across any of them, try at least one. You might learn something about Myanmar, and also about what it means to keep a home alive in the only way you still can.

Thin’s Pickings

On Myanmar

• For more on food and Thingyan, check out The Kite Tales’ Food & Drinks page or my previous issues here, here, and here.

• “Where Even Flowers Stoke Fear”: This long piece from NYT’s Hannah Beech with beautiful - and at times heartbreaking - photos by Daniel Berehulak is well worth a read, covering a wide range of issues including last year’s earthquake and the daily terror faced by ordinary people.

On Hungary

• “What happens to Britain’s radical right if Orbán loses?”: Dan Nolan’s piece for Democracy For Sale, published before the election, focused on British personalities, but the vivid picture it painted of the influence and largesse of Orban’s Hungary on right-wing politics is likely applicable elsewhere.

• “What Orban’s Deafeat Means for the Rest of the World”: Michelle Goldberg’s op-ed from Budapest is a great read.

On Food, Climate, and Where They Meet

• “Why Did the Frankenchicken Cross the Road? How Megafarms Came For a Polish Village”: Wojciech Oleksiak’s piece is deeply reported, beautifully written, and both heartbreaking and inspiring.

• “Soy expansion displaces rice, beans and cassava crops across the Amazon frontier”: How agribusiness expansion affected traditional crops, by Julia Dolce.

• “Detoxing my life, resentfully”: I share many of Emily Atkin’s thoughts “on plastic, power, and personal responsibility”.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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Spring has finally arrived in my little corner, which means sunny blue skies, sitting outside without shivering, and a regular dose of Claritin most mornings.

The latest news is never far from my mind - an occupational hazard - so while I’m thankful we seem to have averted a nuclear war and I have the privilege of safety and security, I can’t help but wonder about those who do not share the same good fortune.

So it feels like the right time to speak with Michael Shaikh, a friend who has written a beautiful book about the need to protect our food cultures in the same way we protect physical buildings and artefacts in times of war and upheaval.

The Last Sweet Bite is a book that tackles a very heavy topic - the erasure of culinary traditions through state violence, including genocide - but does so with a lightness of touch that inspires as much as it enrages.

I also love how Mike’s writing shows food as something deeply political, even though it is often treated as apolitical or even trivial. Which is also what I’ve been trying to do in my journalistic work, including this newsletter, for nearly a decade.

I first met Mike more than 15 years ago when I gatecrashed his leaving do in Bangkok. We crossed paths multiple times in the intervening years - we have many mutual friends - but it wasn’t until around 2014 that we became friends while in Burma/Myanmar. Mike was doing human rights investigation and I was back home helping to set up a news outlet.

There was a group of us foodies who would regularly discuss the state of the world over home-cooked meals. For Mike and me, that would usually include the plight of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group that has endured decades of terrible discrimination.

We kept in touch after he and his wife moved back to the United States and I headed to Europe, so when I learned that he was writing a book about cuisines in conflict zones, I knew I had to read it, and then tell you all about it.

The conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

THIN: Let’s start with the main premise of your book. Can you take me through how you even got the idea that food, especially the kind of food that is cooked at home, is a form of culture worth protecting, comparable to, say, a manuscript or a monument?

MIKE: There were multiple lightning bolt moments that like coalesced into that idea.

In the beginning of the book, I talk about my father not teaching me Sindhi because of the legacy of Partition, and how that led me down this road of understanding the impact of violence on my family and culture. During a summer (before) going to graduate school, my dad and I had these conversations around Partition. The realisation that violence can linger long after the war is over and the guns fall silent was a big revelation to me.

Then in Afghanistan, with our mutual friend Tamim, I had this moment around a dinner table eating Saland-e Nakhod, this beautiful Afghan chickpea dish. When I asked if it was Afghan - kind of an arrogant question, when you think about it - it led to a conversation about why Afghanistan was at war in the first place.

In that conversation, I realised that culinary knowledge is as important as physical things. People take their culinary knowledge with them when they flee. They take their art, their music, their political philosophies. And if they don’t come back after a generation, it creates this kind of cultural amnesia.

Also in Afghanistan, I constantly drove past UNESCO projects trying to rebuild these old mosques and minarets. I understand why: it’s incredibly important to protect humanity’s shared culture. At the same time, I was interviewing Afghan victims of human rights abuses, of NATO and American airstrikes or Taliban bombings.

When you’re interviewing a victim of human rights abuse to collect testimony, to build a case to hold someone accountable, you’re often asking them to relive the worst moment of their life. I often did these interviews over a meal. It was a way to keep us focused, but also something to turn to outside the violence for a moment when needed a break. We’d talk about what we were eating and why we were eating it.

I remember this one moment where this family was talking about how hard it was to cook the meal we were eating: they couldn’t afford it, people were forgetting the ingredients. The way they were talking about their food disappearing was like losing a family member, and outside the door was this big UNESCO project. And it hit me: we spend all this money protecting physical culture, but nothing to protect this fundamental aspect of human culture.

We spend a lot of money protecting old art and architecture in wartime. There are even legal prohibitions against targeting cultural artefacts in war. But putting food culture on par with those other forms of culture, that’s really the crux of my argument.

To put it another way: food is more than just calories. It’s a language. It’s a way we communicate from one generation to another. It’s what, in a way, makes one community distinct from another. It shows our shared borders, it’s a way of dialogue, both positive and sometimes contentious. And because it’s so important, it should be protected in the same way we protect art and architecture in wartime.

THIN: Even as a foodie, I still found your argument quite revolutionary. Have others said the same and why do you think that’s the case?

MIKE: Almost uniformly, people have that reaction: “Oh my God, I haven’t thought about this.” But then, if you talk to Indigenous communities, they’re like, “We’ve known this is going on for 500 fucking years.”

It’s often new to people who write about food, and people who are interested in food. I wanted to use food as a bit of a Trojan horse to talk about human rights issues. But I also saw this really interesting phenomenon: even within communities experiencing this, there are people who haven’t necessarily thought about it in this way.

To be honest, there are a lot of communities where this is happening, and they don’t necessarily think about it either. But there are people who have thought about it, and it’s almost always women. They’re the ones doing the cooking, and they have that direct experience of the struggle of finding the ingredients in the midst of war to make the things that taste like home, to keep that taste memory alive in their family and for their children.

So I think if you want to be serious about protecting food culture more, you need to be serious about protecting the people who make food culture. And that’s women and girls. This boils down to a couple of things for me, particularly.

The laws of war - specifically the obligations around protecting cultural heritage in combat operations - were written by old rich white guys in Europe who didn’t contemplate the value of food culture, precisely because it was done by women and girls. Basically, because of misogyny, food culture hasn’t been put on par with other forms of culture in war. So if you want to protect food culture in war, you have to protect the people who create it. And that means better protecting women and girls in war.

But there’s another unspoken fact here: what surprised me while researching this book is the extent to which the powerful study their enemies’ food culture as a way to weaponise it against them when they want to erase or destroy them.

Look at what’s happening in Gaza and Palestine. Look at what’s happening in China with the Uyghurs, or what happened in Myanmar with the Rohingya. You see it in the Americas with colonialism. You can look at records from the founding fathers of the United States - they strategised about how to use food against Indigenous People to erase them.

To me, this says that if a community’s food culture is important enough to destroy it should be even more important enough to protect.

THIN: Speaking of wars and conflicts, you touched on the idea of providing culturally appropriate food aid to refugees, and why that’s seen as somehow a luxury in times of crises. I want to hear more about why that’s problematic.

MIKE: It is presented as “frivolous,” as “Well, they have enough calories to eat.” There’s also this colonial mindset: “They should just be grateful they have food to eat.” I know that’s not always the case, but it’s there.

Eating our own food is dignifying. It’s life-affirming. Why is this important? Embedded in art — music, writing, painting, sculpting, and cooking — are often the best of aspects of your community, its sense of beauty, history, culture, identity.

Art, and food is a form of art, is important in war, in times of violence, because you need to be reminded of beauty, your culture, your identity — because that’s part survival. If people can see beauty in time of violence, it gives them hope. And hope is the thing you need to survive. It’s the root of survival.

If we’re thinking long-term about refugees eventually going home, like the human right to life, their culture has the right to be preserved. They should have the ability to replant that culture when they get home. It’s frustrating that global institutions are able to pick and choose which forms of culture are worth protecting in war without fully considering the importance of others, like culinary heritage. Every community I talked to for this book, is frustrated if not angered by that too.

There’s also another fundamental fact: food helps maintain that sense of cultural identity and cohesion. It allows a community to see itself every single day and reaffirm its connections to each other. It’s often the last thing that breaks down and when it does, it’s like an accelerant on a fire of a community’s fracturing. It can lead to more violence, to people being preyed upon by human traffickers, armed groups, drug traffickers, prostitution, substance abuse - it just leads to all of this degradation.

Food is quite powerful in its ability to unite. If I was a leading a humanitarian aid agency working in a war zone, among the things I would try to do is help a community sustain its food culture. Why? Because food works to both keep a people intact and prevent more violence.

THIN: Your book covers quite a broad geographical space: from the Czech Republic to Rohingya communities to the Uyghurs to New Mexico. How did you decide which cuisines to include? I remember having this discussion with you a couple of years ago in Rome about Cambodia, but that didn’t make it into the book.

MIKE: The chapters in the book are places that I have lived and worked for the most part, and the ones that I could write within the timeline of my contract.

I wanted to include Cambodia, Syria, South Africa. I would also have liked to have written about Sudan, Ukraine, Palestine and even Indigenous Japan. I had a couple of life events that intervened and delayed the book, so I couldn’t get those chapters in there in a way that would be respectful to those communities.

There’s one chapter in the book, however, where I had never worked - Bolivia. But there was strong US connection. And being an American, I had long been interested in the impacts of the U.S. Drug War and wanted to show different forms of violence and their impact on culinary traditions.

In the end, I had to be selective based on time, money, my knowledge, my experience, and what would best show how different forms of violence can alter a food culture.

THIN: The Czech chapter is perhaps the least expected. Can you tell me what drew you to it? Was it to show, like you said, that it doesn’t have to be extremely bloody or violent for food culture to be affected?

MIKE: It’s one of the chapters I had a lot of fun writing. The chapter on the Czech Republic covers the Soviet occupation from 1968 -1986. That wasn’t a terribly bloody event, but it was brutal in other ways. I wanted to show that violence doesn’t have to be apocalyptic or genocidal to have profound impacts on memory and culture.

I also have a very strong personal connection to the Czech Republic. One of my dearest friends is from there, who ran a restaurant and hostel. I have spent a lot of time with him there in the past 20 years. Over this time, in very intimate ways, his family showed me the impact of the Soviet occupation and communism on both their family life and Czech and Slovak culture.

For instance, during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, everyone was forced the cook from the same cookbook. It had a devastating effect on the taste and quality of cuisine. I heard these incredible and often hilarious ways Czech and Slovak chefs used food to subvert the authority of their communist overlords. I thought that was fascinating.

There’s also idea in Europe and the United States that Czech food isn’t that good, that it’s leaden and monotonous, just beer and fatty pork. But actually, Prague and parts of the Czech Republic are some of the most interesting places to eat in Europe right now. Chefs are recreating and updating the food of the First Republic, the 1918–1938 period, often talked about as the highwater mark of Czech culture, when there was a democratic and cultural efflorescence underway.

The double-punch of the Nazi occupation followed by the communists almost killed that culinary knowledge. But now you have these incredible archaeologist chefs who bringing back the cuisine in way that reflect both past and the present. It’s awesome. 

THIN: On a personal level, I really appreciate you including the Rohingya cuisine because even though I’ve met many Rohingya and have been to the camps where they live, I’ve never actually tasted their food. How easy or difficult was it to capture a cuisine that doesn’t have a reference point even for people who were born and raised in that country?

MIKE: Rohingya cuisine is this beautiful amalgamation of South Asian and Southeast Asian cooking in its use of use of spices and cooking techniques. You can see Rakhine cuisine and the broader influence of Myanmar’s other cuisines in it. 

Their food traditions are indicative of how the Rohingya have lived for a long time in this very small strip of land along the Bay of Bengal where a lot of history has taken place, where a lot of people moved to and through it.

Sittwe to Chittagong, if this whole area was at peace, would just be one of the most fascinating places for people to visits and experience these wonderful people and food cultures. 

Rohingya cuisine really opened my eyes to the importance of writing things down, something Rohingya families urged me to do with some of their recipes. Because of decades of state violence and genocide, families are forgetting their culture; it’s cuisine that some Rohingya worry the world may never eat or know.

Their cuisine also challenged me. It taxes the idea of ‘authenticity’, given its interplay with other regional cuisines. What is ‘authentic’ Rohingya cuisine? It’s hard to say. It’s like any cuisine - it will naturally change and morph when it comes into contact with another culture. Chefs and home cooks expect and welcome that.

THIN: Speaking of authenticity, your book challenges the idea of “authentic” food. I find that topic fascinating because I’ve been in Italy for many years now and tradition is a big thing here.

MIKE: The Rohingya and Uyghur cooks I spoke to for my book said the same thing: “We’re not about our food staying the same. We understand it’s going to change, but we want it to change on our terms, not an invading army’s terms.”

That’s the idea of authenticity they have, they want agency over the change.

So it’s not about preserving things in amber. Cuisines change, that’s natural, but it should happen on their terms.

THIN: The chapters that saddened and infuriated you the most were Uyghur and Bolivia, because they vividly illustrate the inequality and power imbalances in the systems that enable this kind of cultural erasure.

MIKE: You’ve got it - power balance is the crux of violence. And in the context of food, it’s particularly acute.

The question of why food isn’t afforded the same attention and protection in war as other forms of culture comes down to this: home cooking, the kind of culinary culture that sustains communities, is primarily created and maintained by women and girls. There are arguments about gender inequality you can make here, and they’re valid, but as we discussed earlier, the fact is that women and girls have been the load-bearing pillars of our culinary cultures since time immemorial.

When we talk about why home cooking isn’t elevated to the same level as other forms of cultural expression - like fine dining or professional chef-driven cuisine - it’s because the work of women and girls has historically been devalued.

You know, the attack on the girls’ primary school in Minab, Iran has been angering me for weeks now. It’s the type of atrocity I investigated in other US wars but I was struggling to articulate why this had bothered me so much beyond the obvious. The other day, I was going to pull out Najmieh Batmanglij’s Food of Life, the Silver Spoon Persian food, and it kind of hit me.

The next Najmieh Batmanglij could have been among them, a woman who has shown the world not only the joys of Persian food but also joy of cooking itself. The next Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win a Fields Medal, could have been among them too. The next Shirin Ebadi or Nargis Mohammadi.

Those girls in Minab could have grown up to do what these other incredible Iranian women have done, and that was stolen from their parents, from the country, from humanity. You can say similar things about children dying every day in other contexts, but the thing that makes that different is this was entirely preventable and avoidable and predictable. Someone at the US Defense Department just had to go look at Google Maps to know a girls school was there.

When you flatten homes and villages and towns, you are flattening the places where culinary culture is produced, like home kitchens where women and girls spend most of their time.

When I wrote this book, I talked about including the crime of domicide - the intentional destruction of towns, villages and neighbourhoods - into international law. But now, we’re being forced just to defend the baseline, the basic Geneva Conventions.

You know, I woke up this morning and my president was talking about wiping out a civilisation to prevent it from ever coming back. That is genocidal. My secretary of defence is defending war crimes, saying the Geneva Conventions are “too woke,” that civilian protection is for weak people.

I hope we can get to a place quickly where Americans and our leaders realise the damage we’re causing and enabling, not only to other cultures but to our own. And find ways to correct it fast. If not, I fear the world may never forgive us… and they’d be right… We are led by dishonourable men.

THIN: Your book is on very heavy topics but the writing is very readable and poetic and lyrical. Did that come naturally, or did you have to find that balance on purpose?

MIKE: It was the latter. I have never written like this my entire life.

I wanted to draw in everyday people who aren’t familiar with what’s happening in your country, what’s happening with the Uyghurs, what’s happened in the United States over 500 years ago and is still happening today to Indigenous People, but also talk about this persistence of humanity to survive, to keep beauty moving forward.

THIN: What can foodies - people who love food and cooking - actually do to help protect food cultures and the communities behind them?

MIKE: There’s a lot we can do, but I think as an American in particular, one thing we can do is, call your congress people tell them the Geneva Conventions are important. I guarantee you, no congress person has ever gotten a phone call like that. It’s so mind-boggling and esoteric in some way but it’s where we are right now.

Food journalists and enthusiasts can write about these issues in a way that connects with people. They can highlight not just the recipes or the flavours, but the stories and the struggles behind them. Bret Anderson had a really powerful article in the New York Times recently about the role food played in Minneapolis in responding to the crisis there. That’s the kind of storytelling we need more of.

It’s also about cooking. The recipes in my book were given to me as gifts, with the express intention that readers cook them and learn about them. It comes back to simple thing: if you are interested in food, hopefully you’re interested in the people cooking food and what’s happening to them.

But ultimately what my book does is give you a way to participate in the good stuff making the world better. The idea that cooking can help us meet the better angels of nature seems quotidian or trite, but it’s not. Cooking and eating are easy entry points in tough subjects. They are incredibly meaningful and powerful way to hold off surrender.

THIN: Last question, I know you to be a fantastic cook yourself. Has writing the book changed the way you personally think about (or cook and eat) food?

MIKE: I’m a little bit more relaxed about cooking now.

Having to test all the recipes in the book - almost all of which were given to me orally, with measurements like “handfuls,” “spoonfuls,” “pinches”- I had to get the exact measurements. It just made me really understand and respect the flexibility of home cooking. It doesn’t have to be exact. Everyone’s going to cook differently.

I think that has forced me to be a little bit less rigid in my own cooking. If I can’t get an ingredient, I improvise. That’s what almost everyone in this book had to do.

I also had this bad habit: I’d only like to cook everything from the same cuisine. If I was making pasta, the appetiser had to be Italian-inflected, or if it was South Asian, everything had to be from the subcontinent. 

I’ve become much more flexible about letting different cuisines express themselves on my dinner table. I used to think everything had to be in the same flavour palette, but now I appreciate pot lucks a little more.

The biggest lesson I learned is that: food tells truth. If you truly want to understand what a cuisine is saying, you need to develop relationship with it just like you would a person.

Thin’s Pickings - in brief

• Eating: On Lamb by Alicia Kennedy (poignant), The Dogma of Meat by Lisa Miller (exasperating), A Brown People’s Version of White People’s Lives by Sharanya Deepak (brilliant)

• Agriculture: The Limits of the UAE’s Push for Food Security by Jack Thompson (eye-opening), Agriculture is taking over grasslands, wetlands, and overlooked ecosystems by World Resources Institute (informative), Why Forest Loss in the Congo Basin Requires Immediate Action by Global Forest Watch (concerning)

• Politics: It Was One of the Cold War’s Greatest Crimes. No One Has Paid a Price by Stuart R. Reid (infuriating, worth pairing with the Congo Basin piece), The president speaks genocide by Timothy Snyder (*speechless*)

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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Professor Andreas Rasche at Copenhagen Business School called the decision “deeply flawed” and pointed out that 92% of respondents supported coordinated action.

It can feel like we’re regressing on many fronts, but instead of going into my shell and hibernating for the next three years (or however long), I am doubling down on strengthening my communities, celebrating the wins, and supporting people doing good work.

That includes the Earth Negotiation Bulletin, whose incredibly useful reporting on environmental negotiations has helped me on many occasions. If you find it equally useful, please consider donating to support their independent, neutral conference coverage.

I’m heartened too that the UN Human Rights Council has appointed Sofía Monsalve (on Thin Ink) as the new Special Rapporteur on the right to food. The current SR, Michael Fakhiri, has done a tremendous job and I look forward to Sofia’s tenure.

Also, I’ll be in Oxford later this month for the Skoll World Forum, moderating a panel of inspiring women farmers and innovators. If you’ll be there and want to talk food systems, please come say hello.

Head In The Clouds: Challenging the false promise of digital agriculture and cultivating innovation from the ground up

“Lock-in” is a concept in technology and business that we’re now familiar with: a situation where a particular product, service, tech, or platform becomes so widely adopted that it becomes progressively harder, more costly, and more complex to switch to alternatives. We are then stuck with adopting each subsequent product, service, or tech just to keep up.

This IPES-Food report takes the idea of technological “lock-ins” seriously and traces what it actually means for the people who grow our food, especially when technological solutions are being sold as a silver bullet to many wide-ranging and complex issues threatening our food systems.

This isn’t a gotcha document or a Luddite screed, but a careful, structurally rigorous examination of who controls agricultural innovation, whose knowledge counts, and what gets systematically left out, and how, in the process, we may be accelerating the deskilling and the loss of lived knowledge.

I find the report most compelling when it goes beyond the individual products to show how this new frontier - where Big Tech meets Big Ag - is as much about narratives that make certain technologies feel inevitable as it is about the technologies themselves.

“Innovation” has, as the report notes, become a cure-all buzzword, today synonymous almost exclusively with AI, precision agriculture, bioengineering, and automation. But innovation is deeply political, and it reproduces specific systems of power.

“A powerful new alliance between Big Tech corporations (including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alibaba) and Big Ag firms is rapidly gaining control of farming under the guise of innovation,” it warned.

“Big Tech and Big Ag firms are turning farmers’ knowledge and work into profit, while farmers lose control over their own data. Digitalisation is outsourcing farmer decisions to distant algorithms, with little accountability. Control over data is thus becoming a new source of power and profit in agriculture.”

This op-ed in Civil Eats touches on similar themes, while Raj Patel, a member of IPES-Food, has published a piece on his own Substack covering the report.

The report breaks these dynamics down across three paired innovations - remote sensing versus manual tools for soil health; precision spraying versus ecological pest management for crop protection; gene-edited seeds versus peasant seed systems for climate adaptation.

In each pairing, the pattern is strikingly consistent: the corporate-led solution gets the billions in public and private R&D, the regulatory frameworks, the extension services, while the farmer-led alternative is systematically undervalued, underfunded, and in some cases actively criminalised.

Remote sensing tools, for instance, tend primarily to benefit large-scale monoculture farms and require the continuous capture of vast quantities of data, even though such data does not exist independently of the values and interests embedded in how it is gathered and interpreted.

Meanwhile, manual tools - time-consuming, difficult, and historically part of the exploitation of agricultural labour - are not straightforwardly solved by automation either, since mechanisation has a documented tendency to push women out of farming entirely.

But the report points to examples of farmer-led tools that allow them agency while improving working conditions. It also reminded me of one of my favourite TEDx talks from the heyday of Myanmar’s opening.

“The aim here is not to romanticise physical labour nor is it to reject high levels of mechanisation outright. Instead, it is about asking how to build farming systems where manual work is safe, valued, and supported.”

This is a theme that is repeated elsewhere in the report: it’s not a rejection of technology per se, but asking hard questions about ownership, agency, and dependence: who owns these tools, who designs them, and whose futures they are built to serve?

For example, every year, between 20% - 40% of global agricultural production is lost to pests and diseases. Clearly, we need to find ways to protect our plants. But are chemicals - the predominant response since WWII - the only answer? Is precision spraying with drones the necessary next step in a system where chemicals are now locked in?

Why aren’t we trying ecological pest management, by contrast, which works by preventing outbreaks in the first place through agrobiodiversity, crop rotation, and biocontrol, many of which also have the added benefit of improving soil quality? Maybe because it remains systematically underfunded? And is that because there isn’t a corporation that can profit from it so it doesn’t get intense lobbying?

On gene editing, the report points out how, despite the promotion of CRISPR and its cousins as climate solutions, the majority of gene-edited crops under development target traits for commercial appeal, shelf-life, or compatibility with chemical inputs, not climate resilience.

Meanwhile, “by positioning gene-editing as the benchmark of science-based innovation and painting resistance as ‘anti-science’ or ‘anti-innovation’, proponents of gene-editing reinforce knowledge hierarchies between biotechnology and its alternatives, including peasant and Indigenous seed systems.”

At the same time, the global minority countries that refuse to ratify or aren’t fulfilling their promises on international treaties designed to protect farmers and indigenous communities are pressuring Global South governments to adopt IP and seed laws that effectively lock smallholders into systems of patent payments and licensing fees.

Today, the six largest commercial seed and traits companies control close to two-thirds of the global market, and the top four also rank as the leading agrochemical companies. The concentration is a feature, not a bug. If you’re interested to learn more about seed sovereignty, see here and here.

The path the report sketches is not technophobia but something more demanding: a genuine reckoning with whose innovations get recognised, resourced, and protected, and whose remain hidden from view, whether it’s ecological pest management, or peasant seed systems that have been adapting to local conditions for centuries.

“Innovations tend to reinforce the system in which they are developed, whether extractive or inclusionary, corporate-driven or farmer-led, industrial or place-based.”

Capitalising (on) industrial epidemics: examining the influence of the ‘Big Three’ asset managers on corporate governance in key health-harming commodity industries

Australian researchers led by Benjamin Wood examined the influence of Big Three asset managers (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street), which between them own shares in thousands of listed companies worldwide, on the governance of 40 major corporations in industries that harm human health. These include ultra-processed food manufacturing, intensive meat production, fast food retail, and agrochemicals.

The findings are, frankly, damning:

“In 2024, the Big Three overwhelmingly voted against proposals calling for the incorporation of social and environmental objectives into the policies and strategies of these corporations, and invariably voted in favour of proposals seeking to boost shareholder payouts and authorise political activities.”

Not only that, despite well-documented evidence of their fossil-fuel-based activities, Exxon Mobil and Coca-Cola (“one of the world’s largest users and polluters of fossil fuel-based plastics”) appear on funds marketed as climate-friendly.

The authors analysed the voting behaviour of the Big Three in 2024 with respect to shareholder and management proposals.

Apparently this emerging form of corporate governance is called ‘asset manager capitalism’ whose main aim is maximising the total monetary value of assets under their management.

We’re talking trillions of dollars: the Big Three currently manage close to US$25 trillion in assets, equivalent to “more than 20% of the global gross domestic growth generated in 2024”.

What this means is that they can influence corporate governance in a variety of ways and they’ve used it to “routinely vote against shareholder proposals aimed at incorporating social and environmental objectives into corporate decision-making”.

“Similarly, the Big Three have consistently opposed public health-related shareholder proposals aimed at major ultra-processed food and commercial milk formula corporations.”

However, they “voted in favour of all 20 of the identified management proposals relating to authorising shareholder payouts, as well as political donations and expenditure”.

Corporate Vectors of Chronic Disease — Using Internal Industry Documents to Craft Counterstrategies

A growing body of research is reframing how we understand public health, not as a matter of individual choice, but of corporate design.

According to the Consortium of the Center to End Corporate Harm at the University of California, San Francisco, five industries - fossil fuels, tobacco, ultraprocessed foods, chemicals, and alcohol - are linked to 31% of global deaths each year. These are not incidental harms but systemic outcomes, shaped by how products are produced, marketed, and regulated.

At the core is what the authors describe as the “commercial determinants of health,” closely tied to political systems that allow corporate influence to shape policy. Drawing on more than 24 million internal documents from six industries, the research identifies three recurring strategies: controlling scientific knowledge, influencing regulation, and shaping public narratives.

Knowledge Capture: Chemical giants DuPont and 3M suppressed evidence of PFAS toxicity for decades, despite early internal findings linking the substances to organ damage and birth defects. Employees were reassured there was “no known evidence” of harm, even as data suggested otherwise—allowing widespread exposure to continue.

In another case, the sugar industry funded research that redirected blame for heart disease onto saturated fats, obscuring sugar’s role. This helped shape decades of dietary guidance, even as sugar-sweetened beverages became a major driver of global obesity.

Regulatory Capture: Tobacco companies worked through front groups like the “Consumer Tax Alliance” to oppose cigarette taxes, recruiting other industries to give the impression of broad public resistance. They also partnered with alcohol industry actors to undermine clean air laws.

Shaping the public narrative: Tobacco firms such as R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris, after acquiring major food brands, applied cigarette-marketing strategies to food—reformulating products, expanding flavour lines, and targeting children. Products like Hawaiian Punch were repositioned from cocktail mixers to brightly branded children’s drinks, while ultra-processed foods came to dominate supermarket shelves.

The paper doesn’t stop at diagnosis. It outlines five key counterstrategies:

• Increase transparency on corporate funding of research through publicly accessible databases.

• Require open science and mandatory registration of all industry-funded studies.

• Prohibit financial ties between industry and researchers, with independent public funding models.

• Protect policymaking from corporate influence, similar to tobacco control frameworks.

• Ensure scientific advisory bodies are free from conflicts of interest.

Resilient Food Systems Index

This inaugural index by Economist Impact, supported by commodity giant Cargill, covers 60 countries and evaluates country performance across four pillars that go beyond the availability of food: affordability, availability, quality & safety, and climate risk responsiveness.

It includes a report and an interactive index you can play around with. It “provides a benchmark of countries’ capacity to produce and deliver sufficient, affordable and nutritious food amid increasingly frequent, severe and interconnected risks”, according to the publishers.

“No country in the index is insulated from shocks or long-term pressures. Climate risk responsiveness and food availability are areas of weakness across most countries in the index,” it said.

Key findings:

1. A handful of countries dominate food production: 15 countries produce 70% of the world’s food, and 11 of those are also key exporters, making the system highly exposed to disruptions in just a few places.

2. Climate preparedness is the weakest link, just as countries’ exposure to intensifying climate shocks grow.

3. Early warning systems are not strong enough: many countries lack reliable systems to predict and prepare for disasters, meaning shocks are often anticipated but not managed.

4. Pest and disease management is uneven: only about one-third of countries are well-prepared to deal with pests and crop diseases.

5. Brazil is a rare exception, and the report credits the country for “the adoption of agritech solutions”, pointing to application of nature-based solutions with “digital precision” and how “large swathes of Brazil’s crop belt rely on AI-enabled platforms, which fuse satellite imagery, weather data and field-level scouting to flag pest pressure early and guide precisely timed interventions”. (Interesting to see this in light of the IPES-Food report above.)

6. Food may be “affordable,” but not necessarily nutritious. Healthy diets are still out of reach for many, often costing two-thirds of income for poorer households.

7. Cheap food is often unhealthy: ultra-processed, low-nutrient foods are more accessible and heavily marketed than fresh, nutritious options.

8. Even high-income countries struggle with diet quality: the U.S. ranks 51^st out of 60 countries on dietary diversity, due to its high consumption of low-nutrient foods.

9. Farmers lack basic services: access to credit, banking, infrastructure, and markets remains limited in many countries, holding back resilience.

10. Food waste solutions exist but lack investment: most countries have strategies, but underinvest in basics like cold storage, leading to continued losses across supply chains.

The Index also listed an overall ranking of all 60 countries, with Portugal coming out top. I was surprised to see the UK at number three, however, because it seems to go against recent news and reports that point out major challenges and gaps in UK food systems. These include DEFRA’s unpublished report covered in The Times, the ECIU’s 2025 analysis, and a recently published paper in Sustainability that called the UK food systems “a tinderbox”.

I reached out to Economist Impact for comment, but due to the long Easter break in many countries, I didn’t receive a response before publishing. I hope to come back to it.

‘Climate adaptation and mitigation in the agri-food system – Recommendations for coherent EU policies’,

At nearly 360 pages, the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change report is not designed for casual reading. Given limited time and attention, I focused on the recommendations, summary, and Chapters 1, 2, 6, and 10.

That was sufficient to understand its central argument: Europe’s agri-food system is nowhere near on track.

Agriculture sits at the heart of the climate challenge, responsible for roughly a third of EU greenhouse gas emissions. Farming itself accounts for the majority of this, driven largely by livestock, fertilisers, and land use. Despite this, progress has been slow, particularly for non-CO₂ emissions, which have barely declined since 2005.

Policy, the report suggests, is part of the problem. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), with its €50 billion annual budget, remains the EU’s central agricultural tool. But its climate impact is limited. Much of the system still incentivises production in ways that are misaligned with long-term climate goals.

“Taken together, the current EU policy framework lacks the coherence, strength of incentives and governance mechanisms needed to steer a systemic transition of the agri-food system.”

“Only a systemic transition, featuring both structural and technical change, can climate-proof the European agri-food system.”

The key word here is “systemic”. Incremental reform - tweaking subsidies, adding new schemes - is not enough.

The risks are not abstract. Climate impacts on European agriculture are already visible and are projected to intensify. Southern Europe, in particular, faces severe water scarcity, with availability potentially dropping by up to 40% under higher warming scenarios. In some cases, current farming systems may simply become unviable.

What stands out is the report’s insistence on both structural and technical change. It gives six key recommendations.

• Phasing out CAP payments that incentivise the most greenhouse gas-intensive practices, while exploring alternative income-support mechanisms consistent with climate objectives.

• Introducing a dedicated greenhouse gas pricing mechanism for the agri-food system, applying the polluter pays principle gradually and adaptively, while recycling revenues to support farmers and reward carbon removals.

• Providing targeted transition support to help farmers overcome financial and knowledge barriers.

• Strengthening tools that help farmers cope with unavoidable climate impacts.

• Promoting healthy, climate-friendly diets and reducing food waste.

• Ensuring adequate and timely public funding to finance the transition.

Diet is a particularly striking inclusion. The report links current consumption patterns - high in red meat and ultra-processed foods - not only to emissions but to public health costs, estimated at €530 billion annually.

Reading it, it’s hard not to think about what’s missing: the now-abandoned Sustainable Food Systems initiative (see preamble), and the Farm to Fork Strategy, many of whose policies remain unimplemented.

The EU policy landscape is fragmented, still struggling to connect agriculture, health, and climate into a coherent whole. The decision-makers continue to insist on loosening regulations in the name of cutting red tape and increasing competitiveness, while seemingly unaware of - or uninterested in - how these moves may be undermining the bloc’s resilience.

Without deeper structural change, the EU risks locking itself into a system that is both environmentally unsustainable and increasingly fragile and eventually forced to adapt under pressure rather than by design. By then, it may be too late.

Thin’s Pickings

1. Pitchfork politics and sausage-making: how the farmers ‘crisis’ rewrote EU green rules behind closed doors - EU Observer

   I’ve written ad nauseam about how the farmers’ protests got hijacked so it’s great to see Natasha Foote’s investigation into how the EU’s once-ambitious environmental policies were undone in a way that was quite unprecedented.
   

2. Seeds of doubt: The dark side of an Italian energy giant’s green jet fuel promise - Politico

   How Kenyan farmers who were enticed by the idea of higher income from planting caster seeds instead of something they can eat - like maize - were left holding the bag when harvests failed and buyers who recruited them on behalf of Eni, Italy’s biggest oil company, disappeared.
   

3. What (Who) is Driving Up Food Prices? - IPES-Food & Lighthouse Reports

   Thought it might be timely to reshare this webinar from last year, where Jennifer Clapp, my colleague Margot Gibbs, and yours truly talked about how to investigate food prices in a time of polycrisis.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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One looked at how Europe’s farm subsidy scheme fails workers by failing to curb labour exploitation and abuse. It was published in September (see my write-up here) and later won an award at the Voices - European Festival of Journalism and Media Freedom.

The second story, on the near-complete lack of data and planning around the impact of weather-related disasters on farm animals, was published earlier this month on Voxeurop.

It exposes a glaring contradiction: policymakers at both EU and national levels claim to support livestock farmers, yet have done little to protect them from increasingly frequent climate-related disasters.

The lack of support for farmers practising high animal welfare and extensive agriculture (the opposite of intensive farming - fewer animals, more space, lower inputs) is particularly striking.

Please read and share the story. Please also keep a lookout for the national-level articles that will be published in the coming weeks.

In last week’s preamble, I mentioned European policymakers’ fixation on livestock, and the political energy spent debating what names plant-based products can use.

After lawmakers agreed to “ban meaty names such as steak and bacon for vegetarian and vegan foods”, French MEP Céline Imart, who devised the amendment to ban meaty names, hailed the outcome as “an undeniable success for our livestock farmers”, The Guardian reported.

Perhaps I’m being facetious, but it raises an obvious question: what would a real success for livestock farmers look like?

One answer might be concrete plans to protect them and their animals from weather-related disasters that are increasing in frequency and ferocity on the world’s fastest-warming continent.

“As climate change-connected floods intensify across Europe, thousands of farm animals die unseen and uncounted. Farmers bear the losses alone while patchy data, weak planning and narrow compensation expose a blind spot in EU climate policy,” according to Drowned and forgotten: Farm animals are Europe’s silent flood victims.

This was a cross-border investigation looking at the impacts of and responses to floods in five EU member countries: Czechia, France, Germany, Poland and Romania by Leoni Bender, Louisa Bouri-Saouter, Maria Dybcio, Martin Vrba, Raluca Besliu, and Tom Brown, who came together over a shared aim of shining a light on this issue.

Raluca told me she was drawn to the story because farmers are often the first to face the consequences of climate change.

“One of the most significant impacts for farmers is the loss of livestock, which carries not only financial costs but also emotional and ethical ones, and can fundamentally change how they approach animal raising.”

The Losses

Between 1980 and 2023, climate-related disasters caused €738 billion in economic losses across the EU, the journalists wrote. More than 20% of this - €162 billion - occurred in the last three years, underscoring how rapidly risks are escalating.

Those of us who have lived in Europe over the past five years remember the repeated heatwaves, wildfires, floods, and storms.

Agriculture alone loses an average of €28 billion annually due to adverse weather, according to a 2025 European Investment Bank report:

• €17.4 billion in crops (about 6.4% of EU crop production)

• €10.9 billion in livestock (about 5.1% of EU livestock production)

Losses are expected to reach €40 billion by mid-century, yet only 20-30% of these losses are insured, with major disparities between member states, and in some cases no coverage at all.

This insurance gap - as well as the general lack of disaggregated data on livestock losses - has far-reaching repercussions for farmers, as the journalists found out.

There is no comprehensive EU-wide data on livestock losses, either historical or projected. Even the European Investment Bank’s analysis focuses primarily on crop production.

Yet we know the losses are substantial just from the value alone, at nearly €11 billion.

“Europe is home to 132 million pigs, 72 million cattle, 57 million sheep, and 10 million goats. As floods intensify, the continent lacks a systematic way to count, protect, or compensate for the animals that perish in them. Such losses are rarely recorded, often inaccessible, or buried in bureaucratic systems.”

“This structural blindness has tangible consequences: uncounted animals are undervalued, undercompensated, and unprotected, reducing incentives to prevent future losses,” the journalists wrote.

The Reality vs. The Rhetoric

Under the EU Treaty, animals are legally recognised as sentient beings whose welfare must be “fully regarded.” Yet in practice, livestock losses in disasters often fall through the cracks of both insurance systems and public compensation schemes.

Take French organic farmer Edouard Exilard, who lost 35 ewes after floodwaters swept through his meadow in October 2024. His losses came up to at least €12,000 but he received no compensation despite having insurance, because it only covered livestock found dead inside buildings, when organic farming rules require daily outdoor grazing.

In Romania, families affected by floods received two rounds of compensation: one covered housing damage and the other was legally earmarked for four goods: an oven, a television, a refrigerator, and a washing machine. Farmers like Maria received no compensation after losing more than €20,000 worth of livestock.

Germany says it reimburses livestock-related costs if farmers could prove “a direct link” to the flooding. For Sebastian Frey, however, it meant claims for his cows, who survived the evacuation but died of pneumonia days later, were mostly denied.

Some of the cases illustrate just how different the resilience of various farming systems can be, said Martin.

“For example, while small-scale family farms were relatively successful in mitigating the damage from floods and rescuing their animals, large-scale industrial farming easily leads to massive losses due to no realistic options to rescue such large numbers of animals in a short time span. Ironically, it’s these megafarms who afterwards benefit the most from the existing financial compensations, while small farmers’ financial needs were often neglected.”

Perhaps the most telling might be a response from an EU Commission spokesperson when pressed about the bloc’s lacking a system to track and compensate livestock losses from disasters.

“Animal welfare in disasters does not fall within the scope of EU animal welfare legislation.”

Data & Governance Blind Spots

The journalists discovered that governments systematically track human and infrastructure losses, but not livestock mortality. This creates a structural blind spot: animals that are not counted are less likely to be compensated or protected in future planning.

The Ministry of Agriculture in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia did not know how the 2021 catastrophic floods that damaged hundreds of farms affected livestock because it did not collect such data. France’s Direction Générale de l’Alimentation didn’t respond.

Romania is the rare exception, where private veterinarians play a critical role in keeping a count of all the animals in their assigned territory. This is why the authorities reported a detailed inventory following the September 2024 floods in Vaslui and Galați counties: 14,066 birds, 1,888 sheep, 564 pigs, and hundreds of other animals.

Louisa particularly remembered struggling with the lack of data. Often there were no answers or people just ghosted her.

“There are some datasets I could never confirm existed or not. Animals are dying, farmers say, and yet it’s so challenging to access official proof and to produce proper counts,” she said.

Leoni agreed the complete lack of systematic data in Germany was striking.

“Also alarming is the institutional fragmentation: authorities and ministries deflect responsibility, disaster preparedness plans largely exclude livestock and existing specialised animal rescue units are often disregarded or actively sidelined.”

In Germany, animal welfare is considered under the law even in emergencies, yet in reality, none of the 16 states require animals to be considered in disaster planning. Similar gaps exist in Poland and Czechia.

Romania, with a clear legal framework, seems to be an exception again, but interviews with affected farmers show most protocols were not followed in practice.

The Story Repeats Itself

Unfortunately, the challenges for the journalists didn’t stop with a lack of data or cooperation from officials. The story repeats itself when they wanted to get the investigation published.

“After months of failed attempts to find a media outlet willing to publish our piece, it became increasingly obvious that the fate of farming animals during floods wasn’t of interest to most of the media,” said Martin.

I’m glad they finally found a home at Voxeurop.

The same challenges - antipathy, lack of information, etc - also play out in conflict zones where livestock and their sufferings are often overlooked.

In a LinkedIn post, Jackson Zee, a conflict and disaster frameworks expert with animal welfare organisation Four Paws, pointed this out, and called for animals to be integrated into the very beginning of humanitarian planning and evacuation strategies.

“We must acknowledge that no community is truly evacuated until its sentient members are considered,” he wrote. “Protecting these silent victims is also a prerequisite for a community’s recovery. The collapse of animal health infrastructure creates a vacuum that quickly fills with secondary crises, including public health threats that drain already broken resources.”

This personal account by Robert, a 49-year-old Lebanese farmer, who risked his life to find fodder for his cows and then had to leave them behind as Israeli bombardment worsened in late 2024, is also worth reading. It was part of an interactive series about displaced Lebanese people by The New Humanitarian.

Inconvenient Questions

• Why are livestock still absent from disaster planning in one of the world’s most climate-exposed regions?

• Why do we accept systems where farmers bear the full cost of losses that are increasingly predictable and systemic?

• What does it mean to recognise animals as sentient beings in law, if their deaths in disasters are neither counted nor meaningfully compensated?

The contradiction becomes even clearer when placed alongside current concerns about fertiliser shortages triggered by the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran.

Fertiliser is not just about crops. A substantial share is used to grow feed such as maize and soy bean. Europe is particularly exposed:

1. The bloc is highly dependent on imported crops to feed its animals, and

2. Its farming systems are fertiliser intensive.

When fertiliser prices rise or availability goes down ⟶ higher feed costs ⟶ higher livestock production costs.

Yet even as these systemic risks become more visible, policy attention remains selective.

• Why is so much political energy spent on symbolic issues, like naming conventions for plant-based foods, while structural vulnerabilities in livestock systems remain unaddressed?

• Who benefits from this imbalance?

• If meat consumption is framed as cultural heritage or the best source of protein, why do the animals at its centre remain largely invisible when they suffer, and only become visible once they are part of the food system?

There is no shortage of lobbying power in the livestock sector. Investigations — including our own at Lighthouse Reports — have exposed how the meat lobby has successfully stymied animal welfare reforms and how they attempted to undermine making agriculture more sustainable. Many other media outlets have done the same.

A recent analysis by Animal Equality also showed that EU Commissioners responsible for animal welfare and agriculture – Olivér Várhelyi and Christophe Hansen – and their cabinets held at least 46 meetings with representatives of the meat, poultry and dairy industries between December 2024 and March 2026, reported The European. In contrast, the Commissioners met seven times with animal welfare organisations.

So the question is not whether livestock matters politically.

It clearly does.

The question is: why does that attention so rarely translate into protecting animals - or the farmers who depend on them - when it matters most?

Food For Thought

“‘Live…stock’ is, in itself, a term worth questioning. They are stock for our consumption and.. as it happens, they are also alive. It struck me in many conversations that we were talking about beings that somehow seemed devoid of life, and whose suffering was treated as just another parameter to be adjusted, if it served human needs. Our story is yet another reminder that the way we care for farm animals is not right.” - Louisa

Thin’s Pickings

1. What is Climate-flation? - Land & Climate Review

   An interview with Professor Pete Smith, one of the UK’s most prominent climate and environmental scientists who has been a lead author for IPCC and IPBES several times and is currently Professor of Soils & Global Change at the University of Aberdeen.

   His new project examines ‘climateflation’: “how extreme weather events disrupt harvests and supply chains and drive up food prices”.
   

2. We’re letting big corporations gamble with our lives. Act now, or the food could run out. - The Guardian

   George Monbiot is not everyone’s cup of tea, but he’s a brilliant writer who brings a much-needed urgency to this issue.

   “The same factors that would have brought down the financial system, were it not for a bailout amounting to trillions of dollars, now threaten to bring down the food system.”
   

3. Good pieces on the fertiliser crisis

   Conflict in the Middle East: The perfect storm for price gouging in Africa - Shamba Centre for Food & Climate

   Fertiliser Giants Make Farmers and Food Production More Vulnerable - Food & Power

   Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems - Climate Home News

   The Strait We’re In - Raj Patel

   The Strait of Hormuz shock - Gawain invites you to read this…
   FAO Chief Economist warns of severe global food security risks from disruption to Strait of Hormuz trade corridor - FAO
   The global food crisis unleashed by the war - Financial Times
   

4. The 20 Best Food Scenes in Movies - The New York Times

   Something fun to end what is otherwise a serious issue of Thin Ink. Happy to see some of my favourites - Tampopo, Ratatouille, Moon Struck - made the list.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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As a carnivore - albeit one who is trying to reduce her meat intake - I’ve always been perplexed by this debate. In all my years of grocery shopping, I have never accidentally bought a plant-based alternative thinking it was meat. It sounds like - dare I say it? - a narrative pushed forward by the meat lobby.

What’s even more perplexing - and aggravating - is the amount of time and political energy spent on this issue when there are so many more pressing food challenges policymakers in Brussels could be tackling.

Like the fact that 42 million people in Europe cannot afford a proper meal every two days, and that the right to food is still not enshrined in the constitutions of most EU countries.

This week’s guest post tackles that disconnect head-on. Drawing on research from community kitchens across Spain, it explores what hunger actually looks like in wealthy European societies and what it might take to guarantee access to good food with dignity.

Paola’s writing also resonated with me on a personal level because I’ve spent time in all the cities she writes about, and many of my memories of them are tied to food.

I hope you give it a read. And if you’re persuaded, consider signing the GoodFoodForAll European Citizens’ Initiative, which aims to force European leaders to finally confront the issue.

Paola Hernández Oliván is a project coordinator at Mensa Civica, working across Spain and Europe to connect environment, health, and social justice through strategic advocacy and local and European initiatives.

The queue starts forming before nine in the morning. By midday, when the doors open, it stretches down the street. This is Zaragoza - one of Spain’s wealthiest mid-sized cities, with good hospitals, a functioning metro, a proud culinary tradition - and what you are looking at, if you let yourself see it, is a food queue.

But it’s not the kind of food queue that nostalgic food writers romanticise about, outside a beloved bakery or a famous hole-in-the-wall.

Rather, this is the kind of food queue that Western governments promised they had made obsolete. People waiting, some of them for hours, in a city with a functioning social security system, in a country that helped write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for a single meal.

This is the Olla Comunitaria del Gancho (the Gancho Community Pot). Every Saturday, in the neighbourhood of San Pablo, one of Zaragoza’s most deprived, it serves between 150 and 200 portions for free.

The meal is always vegetarian, always built around legumes, served in reusable containers each person brings from home. There are no forms to fill in, no proof of poverty required, no means-testing at the door. In four years, they have not missed a single Saturday.

Standing in that queue, you begin to understand something that European food policy rarely confronts directly: hunger in wealthy countries does not look the way we imagine it. It is not acute famine. It is the slow, grinding arithmetic of a pension that no longer covers both rent and groceries. The single mother working two jobs yet still cannot afford a hot meal every day. The undocumented migrant who falls outside every system of state support. In Spain, a country that has signed every international treaty recognising food as a fundamental human right, yet has never enshrined it in its own Constitution, more than 6 million people are food insecure.

Europe has a well-worn response to this: Food banks, social canteens, emergency parcels. These systems do important work, but they carry a baked-in logic of charity that quietly shapes how people experience hunger and how institutions feel entitled to respond to it. To access most food aid in Spain, you must prove you are sufficiently poor, which means many others fall through the cracks: those who hover just above eligibility thresholds, those whose pride cannot absorb the bureaucratic humiliation, those whose immigration status makes them invisible to public services, those who simply don’t know the system exists.

In this gap, community kitchens have emerged over the past five years, and the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated their spread across Spanish cities.

We spent six months studying four of them. What we found disrupts comfortable assumptions about who goes hungry in wealthy Europe, and what it might actually look like to guarantee the right to food.

The thermopol pot at Cuina de Barri, in Valencia’s Cabanyal neighbourhood, does not look revolutionary. It is a large steel vessel, insulated so effectively that once brought to temperature it loses only one degree per hour without being connected to power. Four workers take turns to cook 220 portions a day, five days a week, but never more than four hours at a stretch. The meal costs €1.25. That price has not changed since 2020.

The Cabanyal is a neighbourhood whose existence has been repeatedly threatened. It was nearly demolished in the 1990s to extend an avenue to the sea; residents fought for decades to save it. Now gentrification is doing what the bulldozers couldn’t - pricing out families who have lived there for generations, and replacing neighbourhood shops with tourist accommodation. The community kitchen emerged as a strand in a web of responses built by a community that has learned, through hard experience, that it must organise for itself.

Cuina de Barri grew from Cabanyal Horta, an agroecological project with edible gardens growing on the ruins of houses demolished before the neighbourhood won its battle. Its founders spent five years building relationships with local producers and learning to cook seasonally before the pandemic gave them both the urgency and the pause to launch the kitchen. Their menus follow whatever the land around Valencia produces each quarter: wheat and fennel stew in autumn, and broad bean dishes in spring. More than 200 members sustain the project through monthly subscriptions.

In the cinemathic San Sebastian, Basajaun Elkartea occupies a different kind of space: a retirees’ social club that sat largely unused, in a district that lost its rural character within living memory. The Basque Country has a long tradition of communal cooking: the all-male gastronomic societies, the txokos, emerged in the 19th century as places for men to cook together away from the taverns, and which now number over 1,500 across the region.

Basajaun both inhabits and updates this tradition: members order meals a week in advance, by Thursday at noon. They choose from three seasonal dishes (vegetable, fish, or meat) plus 16 permanent plates built around pulses, pasta and rice.

The advanced order is not a minor administrative detail: it encourages diners to think about where food comes from, how it is produced, who prepares it, and what it costs. The kitchen uses software its founders built themselves to prevent any food waste: if it hasn’t been ordered, it isn’t bought. The 400 to 500 weekly portions are distributed across two neighbourhoods.

Membership costs €30 per month, plus €5 for each meal.

Each year, in a general assembly, members vote on which social cause receives the kitchen’s economic surplus — the funds left over after wages and running costs are covered — which this year means 200 free meals a week donated to another solidarity project across the city.

In L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, a dense, diverse, but historically overlooked municipality on Barcelona’s western edge, are three interconnected kitchens with a rich history. La Suculenta, the oldest, is a worker cooperative that employs four people on hospitality-sector wages, serving around 250 meals a week. Since its funding, it has also helped workers to navigate the administrative maze, building trust over hot meals.

A second initiative, La Xarxa de Suport (Support Network), where a vast majority of attendees are women, meets every Friday. They come bearing recipes from home, wherever that may be: Extremadura, Andalucía, Ecuador, Senegal, or Morocco. They cook together, and chat about their lives and experiences while doing so. The food becomes a medium for memory and connection across cultural distances.

The kitchens in these four cities share something beyond the cooking. They prioritise local, seasonal, organic ingredients and maintain direct relationships with farmers. They use reusable containers and are organised around the logic of food sovereignty rather than food charity. They are not simply responding to food insecurity but are challenging the agro-industrial system they believe creates it.

In doing so, they quietly prove something that European food policy debates too often treat as a dilemma: that feeding people well and sustaining the planet are not competing goals.

They are the same goal.

Across these kitchens, we surveyed 69 participants. Many were there for various reasons: economic need, support for the local economy, concern for sustainability, community, health, friendship. What surprised us more was the trajectory. Their perception of the kitchen had become more positive over time. Without exception.

One participant in L’Hospitalet told us: “We don’t just feed bodies. We feed souls and the hope that we can live differently.”

That is not the language of a social service. There are no requirements beyond being part of the community. Dignity is non-negotiable, said one organiser.

But here’s the disconnect with policymakers, who have been talking about “food security” constantly in Brussels declarations, farm-to-fork strategies, and agricultural summits. In these discussions, the term has become so elastic it risks meaning nothing at all.

More often than not, they are talking about trade dependencies, climate resilience, agricultural productivity, or geopolitical supply chains. Rarely does it mean what it means to the person in line on a Saturday morning in Zaragoza: whether you will eat today.

Food security, in European policy language, is a problem located somewhere else: in volatile markets, in droughts in the Global South, in the instability of shipping routes.

Across the EU, roughly 42 million people cannot afford a quality meal every two days, according to Eurostat (2023).

This numbers coexist with a different set of numbers: the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy budget of €387 billion for 2021–2027. The continent’s collective GDP of roughly €17 trillion. Spain’s GDP per capita of around €30,000.

The gap between these two sets of figures - between what Europe produces and what its people can access - is not a scarcity problem. It is a distribution problem. And distribution, unlike drought or conflict, is a choice.

Real food security is multidimensional: availability, access, nutrition, stability. The policy debate desperately needs to identify genuine risks to each of these dimensions and articulate strategies to address them, while also enhancing the food system’s contribution to climate mitigation, health, and biodiversity. Too often, we are told these goals conflict. Community kitchens prove, one pot at a time, that they don’t.

It is not just Spain where the right to food is absent from the Constitution, most EU member states do not have that either. In fact, the European Union, for all its sophistication in regulating food production, safety, and trade, has no legally binding framework to guarantee that its own citizens can actually access adequate food.

The pandemic made this brutally clear. As institutional support crumbled, community kitchens began sprouting in cities across Spain. Yet every kitchen we visited is in a precarious position: inadequate spaces, unstable funding, overwork and burnout, lack of institutional recognition, and in some cases, active hostility from local governments. They are doing work that institutions have abandoned, with none of the resources institutions command.

This is where the GoodFoodForAll European Citizens’ Initiative comes in. It is demanding that the European Union establish a legally binding framework for the right to adequate food, not as charity, not as conditional welfare, but as a fundamental right. The initiative calls for constitutional recognition of the right to food across EU member states, mandatory impact assessments for all EU policies that affect food access, and accountability mechanisms when governments fail. It needs 1 million signatures by the end of this year, 2026, to force the European Commission to respond.

This may sound legalese, but in real terms, it means the availability of locally, agroecologically-produced food that is nutritious, seasonal, and culturally meaningful, and the ability to access it without stigma or conditionality.

We called our study A Fuego Lento - Slow Fire - because community kitchens transform territories and lives gradually, without flashiness or headlines. But their slow burn is their strength. They are contemporary manifestations of something ancient: gathering around fire to cook, share, and build community. Spaces where heat isn’t just about preparing food, but to provide warmth to a social fabric that market forces have left cold.

Four community kitchens in Spain. Hundreds more across Europe doing similar work. One question running beneath all of it: whether we are ready to recognise them as what they are - essential infrastructure for just, sustainable, democratic food systems - and build the frameworks that allow them to thrive, rather than survive.

The fire is already lit. The pots are simmering. The question is who shows up to tend them.

This article draws from a six-month participatory study of community kitchens across Spain, conducted with support from the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation. The full report in Spanish is available at the website of Mensa Cívica.

Thin’s Pickings

1. What counts as a food story? - From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy
   Sharp questions from Alicia Kennedy amid all the noise about Noma and Rene Redzepi.
   ”When farmworkers are facing ongoing crises and meatpacking workers are targeted by Tyson and teenagers working on hog farms die, these stories aren’t considered “food” stories. They go into sections marked “U.S.” and “Politics.” So who counts in food? Do there need to be tweezers involved? Are more people likely to have Tyson chicken in their freezer or eat at Noma (the most rhetorical question of them all)?”
   

2. Why the Kids Won’t Farm - NYT Opinion

   A nuanced take by Brooks Lamb on why farming in the U.S. (and much of the world) is an ageing profession, and what needs to change.
   ”Many people claim that millennials and Gen Z-ers don’t want to farm, that the work is too hard and dirty and that rural lifestyles aren’t appealing. While it’s true that some young people feel this way, the bigger reasons the next generation isn’t flocking to the farm are much more complicated.”

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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There have been a lot of great writing about the food systems fallout caused by the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran. Much of it focuses on potential disruptions to fertiliser supplies and what that could mean for global food production.

Instead of retracing the same ground, I thought where I could add value was to step back and offer an explainer about fertilisers themselves, not just the current crisis.

We hear far more about pesticides and their impacts than fertilisers. Yet fertilisers have a fascinating - and often uncomfortable - history shaped by geopolitical exploitation, forced labour, and corporate concentration. Those forces continue to shape the industry today.

Thanks to the Lisa, Lena, and Rasmus, for responding to my queries despite their busy schedules, and to Jennifer, whose work on the history of fertilisers I relied on extensively.

In Myanmar, the agrarian country where I was born and raised, we call fertilisers မြေဩဇာ. We put ဓာတ် (pronounced “dhât” and meaning chemical) in front if it’s synthetic.

The name itself, a portmanteau of two Burmese words, is revealing.

မြေ (“myei”) stands for soil, while ဩဇာ (“aw-za”) refers to influence or power, but not the hard, institutional authority implied by အာဏာ (“are-nar”). Instead, ဩဇာ refers to a quieter kind of power accumulated through wisdom, virtue and respect.

When headlines about fertilisers started filling my news feeds, I thought about that word, the underlying meaning it projects to farmers and ordinary people alike, and a trip I took to the Ayeyarwady delta, Myanmar’s rice bowl, seven years ago.

Lying directly south of former capital Yangon, the delta is where the mighty Ayeyarwady River fans out into a vast web of channels before meeting the sea. It’s criss-crossed by rivers, creeks and tidal waterways, and many villages are accessible only by boat. It’s also home to countless smallholder farmers whose rice feeds much of the nation.

I was there with a team from Proximity Designs that was offering low-cost soil testing services to farmers panicking about plunging yields.

Sitting on wooden floors, I listened to them recount the same story again and again: their once-thriving farms had become less productive and they don’t know why. Government extension services were largely absent, and most relied on advice from input dealers selling fertilisers and pesticides.

“We knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what to do,” rice farmer Win Zaw told me.

When the soil test results came back, the problem became clearer: all the farms had very low organic matter and farmers were applying far more fertilisers than their soils needed, which was costing them a lot of money but with little to no benefit.

Armed with soil analyses showing levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, acidity and organic matter, the team offered relatively simple advice: retain crop residues after harvest, grow cover crops, and reduce fertiliser use to appropriate levels.

The farmers were relieved to finally understand the problem, but also anxious. Using less fertiliser ran counter to everything they had been told.

That trip left me with two lasting impressions: fertiliser is critical for plant growth but we are often using it badly, and powerful economic forces make changing course difficult.

The History

Many of us have become so used to seeing abundant food we rarely take time to consider what is required for plant growth: light, water, plus three key nutrients (nitrogen (N), potassium (K), and phosphorus (P)). These are also the macronutrients you find in fertilisers.

Concerns about soil fertility date back to the mid-1800s - yes, you read that right! - in Europe and Norther America, helping to spur the rise of the commercial fertiliser industry, Jennifer Clapp wrote in her most recent book.

Early fertilisers included “night soil” - a euphemism for human waste - distributed from urbanised areas to rural ones; bones of animals - and probably humans - ground into powder or burned to ash; and guano, the nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich droppings of seabirds, specifically from the Chincha Islands of Peru.

In the 1840s, foreign companies started extracting guano using African slave labourer and indentured Chinese workers under dirty and smelly conditions, according to Jennifer.

In 1856, the U.S. government even passed the Guano Islands Act, which “legalised and encouraged the appropriation of any unoccupied guano islands by US citizens, so long as they were not already claimed by another government”.

Later in the nineteenth century, phosphate rock deposits were discovered in the U.S., North Africa, and islands in the South Pacific, shifting fertiliser production from bones to mining. The work was as treacherous and exploitative as in the guano mines.

Potassium followed a similar trajectory. Once produced by leaching ashes from burned biomass, the discovery of underground potash deposits in Germany in the 1850s transformed production into a large-scale mining industry.

The Breakthrough

The true revolution for N fertilisers, the most widely used variety, came in 1909, when German chemist Fritz Haber developed a process to convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. The German conglomerate BASF financed Haber’s work, and Carl Bosch, an engineer at the company, found a way to scale it up.

The Haber–Bosch process, as it came to be known, solved a fundamental problem in agriculture: although nitrogen makes up about 78% of Earth’s atmosphere, plants cannot use it in its gaseous form (N₂), whereas ammonia (NH₃) is a form of nitrogen plants can absorb. See this TABLE primer, under “Nitrogen cycle in the Agri-Food System”.

By effectively turning the vast reservoir of atmospheric nitrogen into a usable nutrient for crops, the Haber–Bosch process removed a major limit on agricultural productivity, helped dramatically increase global food production, and became the foundation of modern synthetic fertiliser production.

The two scientists received Nobel prizes in chemistry: Haber in 1918 and Bosch in 1931. In a post last year and an earlier article, Our World in Data hailed them for topping the list of scientists whose innovations saved millions of lives. They estimated that Haber and Bosch saved more than 2 billion lives.

But as Jennifer pointed out in her book and Paul Martin in this 2021 piece, the story is not entirely heroic.

“Haber’s prize… was highly controversial because of his later work developing chemical weapons that Germany deployed during World War I resulting in thousands of deaths,” she wrote.

“Germany’s nitrogen production was so valuable that at the end of World War I, it shipped nitrogen-rich ammonia as part of its reparation payments to the Allies.”

Indeed, the first application of this process wasn’t to end hunger, but to go around the British embargo on guano and ensure Germany’s continued access to nitrate supplies. This allowed the country to continue World War I, according to Paul.

“Together with some other innovations, the Haber-Bosch process has enabled and locked in an agricultural system based on large-scale monocultures and industrial livestock operations (where animals are raised off the land and animal feed is grown elsewhere),” said Lisa Tostado, environmental policy analyst for the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).

“This model produces high yields, but also drives deforestation, accelerates methane and nitrous oxide emissions, pollutes waterways and deepens soil and biodiversity loss - making it fundamentally unsustainable.”

The Overuse

Since synthetic fertilisers became widely available, their use has skyrocketed.

In 1961, global nitrogen fertilisers use and production - usually in the form of ammonia-derived urea or nitrate - was about 13 million tonnes, according to CIEL.

By 1980, that number had jumped to 60 million tonnes and by 2020, had reached 107 million, according to a paper I covered two years ago.

Around half of the world’s crops are now grown with synthetic fertilisers.

Yet, fertiliser efficiency is surprisingly low.

Only 46% of nitrogen and 66% of phosphorous applied as fertiliser are actually taken up by the crops. Translation: more than half of nitrogen fertilisers and a third of phosphorous fertilisers escape instead of helping plants grow.

The Side Effects

Those unused nutrients cause widespread environmental damage.

The nitrogen and phosphorous that weren’t taken up by crops enter freshwater bodies and coastal areas with dire consequences for the environment: they can trigger eutrophication - explosive algae growth that depletes oxygen and creates dead zones..

Nitrogen fertilisers also release nitrous oxide (N₂O), also known as “laughing gas”. It’s the main man-made substance damaging the planet’s protective ozone layer. Also, as a greenhouse gas, N₂O is nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Globally, N₂O emissions have grown 40% between 1980 and 2020, largely due to the increased use of fertilisers.

The European Nitrogen Assessment estimated that nitrogen pollution costs EU Member states €70 - 320 billion per year in health and ecosystem damages.

“Such an amount of magnitude suggests that the social costs of nitrogen fertilisers in Europe now offset a large share of the gains. And that social benefits of reducing nitrogen use would exceed private losses,” according to this 2022 paper.

World Bank said nitrogen today “is a boon and a burden: critical for food production, yet its unbalanced use - worsened by misguided subsidies - is damaging soils, water, and air”.

“Nearly half of the global food supply comes from regions where nitrogen fertiliser does more harm than good to yields,” it added.

Government policies, particularly subsidies that encourage its overuse are partly responsible, as is a narrow focus on nitrogen at the expense of exploring other nutrient deficiencies and soil acidity that could also limit crop growth, the authors added.

Fertiliser production also carries a heavy climate footprint.

“Fossil fuels power around 58% of global fertiliser production, with mined ores providing feedstock for the rest. Of the fossil share, gas makes up approximately 70%, coal around 26%, and oil roughly 1%. Renewable energy accounts for less than 1%,” said CIEL.

“Synthesising ammonia is highly energy-intensive, requiring substantial heat and pressure, and it accounts for more carbon dioxide emissions than any other industrial chemical reaction. Nitrogen fertilisers alone account for 3-5% of global fossil gas use and more than 2 % of global emissions,” said Lisa.

This rivals commercial aviation, and while renewable ammonia is theoretically possible, current capacity is negligible, she added.

Potassium- and phosphorus-based fertilisers represent a smaller portion of global fertiliser use and do not rely on fossil gas as a raw material but they too have side effects: this beautiful essay traces how the ancient phosphorus cycle that underpins all life is being rapidly destabilised by modern agriculture, pollution, and extraction.

The Concentration

Like many agricultural sectors, fertiliser production is highly concentrated, both in terms of geographical regions and the number of companies involved.

According to GRAIN:

• Over 55% of global urea production occurs in just four countries: China, India, Russia and the United States.

• China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar account for 41% of nitrogen fertiliser exports.

• 70% of world phosphate fertiliser production and 61% of world exports are concentrated in China, Morocco, the U.S. and Russia.

• 75% of potash fertiliser production comes from Canada, Russia, Belarus and Chin. The first three alone are responsible for 77% of world exports.

The top fertiliser companies tend to be based in the producer countries, and they made a killing during the last food price crisis in 2022.

Globally, the top 10 fertiliser companies controls 39% of the market. Just four companies - Nutrien, Mosaic, ICL and K+S - control roughly half of the global market for potash fertiliser. Pages 24 and 25 of this CIEL report has profiles of some of these companies.

This concentration is not new. From Jennifer’s book: “By 1914, just six large firms dominated the US mixed fertiliser market”.

The Current Crisis

So why are analysis concerned about fertiliser disruptions from the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran?

“About 27% of the world’s oil exports, 20% of global liquified natural gas (LNG) exports, and 20%-30% of global fertilizer exports, including urea, ammonia, phosphates, and sulfur, pass through the Strait (of Hormuz),” said IFPRI’s Joseph Glauber.

Escalating attacks on shipping have already sharply reduced maritime traffic and driven up insurance costs.

“A prolonged conflict would likely choke global sea trade with the Persian Gulf region, raising the costs of energy and fertiliser prices globally, directly threatening food security in Gulf countries (which depend on imports of grains, oilseeds, and vegetable oils through the Strait of Hormuz), and potentially affecting food production and prices in other regions as well.”

Countries where agriculture is heavily industrialised (North America, Brazil, Central Europe) to places were small-scale farms dominate, like South Asia or parts of Africa, could be in for a shock.

Lena Luig, Head of International Agricultural Policy Division at Germany’s Heinrich Böll Foundation, said subsidies caused small scale farmers on the African continent to become highly dependent on cheap fertilisers, making them as well as whole economies vulnerable to price shocks.

“Eventually low-income households in many countries will lose out when fertiliser prices spike again, as the prices of oil & gas, fertilisers, and food are closely linked and fertiliser prices play a crucial role - besides concentration in the food industry and the retail sector - in pushing food prices.”

Of course, the latest crisis could be exploited by groups already looking for excuses to derail environmental policies. See the third recommendation under Thin’s Pickings in this issue.

It could also lead to more projects banking on the controversial carbon capture and storage (CCS) and related technologies to produce ammonia. CIEL had already pointed out how oil, gas, and agrochemical companies are partnering on these projects (see Page 27 onwards).

“The fertiliser and fossil fuel industries are increasingly collaborating to launder fossil fuels - particularly gas - as an ever-expanding source of both “clean” energy and “clean” agrochemicals. It is neither.”

CIEL’s Lisa said that as long as agriculture continues to be so dependent on fossil inputs, “our food system remains hostage to gas and oil markets and geopolitics”. Slashing our dependence would not only make food production more resilient, but also lead to cleaner air and water, a safer climate and healthier diets.

“Rather than only asking ourselves “How to feed the world?”, we need to be asking “How do we get food to people who need it? In the right quantity and the right quality? How can we ensure fair livelihoods for farmers? How can we produce enough food in a way that protects the planet?”,” she added.

The Alternatives

I want to end on an inspirational note, because it’s important to point out that change is possible.

Successive government subsidies that favour chemical inputs - fertilisers, pesticides, et al - have tied food systems not only to fossil fuels but also to industrial agriculture that tends to prioritise monoculture and neglect smallholder farmers. It has also led to a narrative that equates industrialised food production with food security.

But there are alternatives, and Lena from Heinrich Böll pointed out many. They include:

• Sabon Sake in Ghana, which turns sugarcane bagasse (dry, pulpy, fibrous material that remains after the stalks have been crushed) into a rich organic fertiliser using microbial agents and earthworms. The founder also trains smallscale farmers on how to produce their own biochar-based fertiliser.

• Smaller scale, on-farm solutions, from black soldier fly compost to bokahsi.

• New efforts to safely recycle “night soils”. While regulations still need to be sorted out, examples such as Switzerland’s Aurin already exists and a Europe-wide research project is underway.

Similar experiments are underway in Myanmar, where a combination of COVID-19 and a raging civil war forced farmers to turn to biological inputs such as the fungus Trichoderma as a substitute for chemical fertilisers and pesticides.

The Burmese word for fertiliser, မြေဩဇာ, is about a product that provides quiet power for the soil. For much of the past century, we treated that power as something we can manufacture endlessly in factories, pipe across oceans, and pour onto fields. The result has been astonishing harvests, but also a cascade of environmental costs and brittle supply chains.

These above approaches will not replace synthetic fertilisers overnight. Perhaps we may never eradicate them. But they highlight an important point: the current fertiliser system is not inevitable. We must explore other ways to restore soils’ power.

Further reading

• How Trump’s war could ravage global food security, by Good Apocalypse

• The Iran war: Potential food security impacts, by IFPRI

• The nitrogen paradox: Every sweet hath its sour, by World Bank

• Our phosphorescent world, by Aeon

• Top 10 agribusiness giants: corporate concentration in food & farming in 2025, by GRAIN

• Resilient Agriculture on the African Continent: The Proof will be in the Soil, by Heinrich Böll Foundation

• Fossils, Fertilizers, and False Solutions, by CIEL

• Nitrogen in the Food System, by TABLE

Thin’s Pickings

• USAID - Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

  Given the amount of pieces I’m recommending this week, I toyed with the idea of not having a Thin’s Pickings for this issue.

  But John Oliver, as usual, does a brilliant job of distilling the horror show that led to the dismantling of USAID and the aftermath, where he name checked Myanmar twice.

  I’ve not always been a fan of USAID but I also recognise a lot of the good it has done, and I’m not going to quibble that this video focused most of it on the latter, not the former.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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There is no doubt that fragile food systems will be among the casualties of so many cruel decisions like this and this. But there are people far better qualified than me to dissect the immediate fallout (see Thin’s Pickings below).

I’m sticking to what I had planned, which also speaks to a community disproportionately affected by both conflict and climate change: women.

Sunday, Mar 8, marks International Women’s Day. The United Nations has also designated 2026 as the “International Year of the Woman Farmer”. Besides, it has been two years since a landmark report provided hard data on how women farmers are affected by climate impacts.

We can be sceptical of what sometimes feel like symbolic gestures. But as a woman - and as someone who has reported on women farmers and the structural barriers they face - I cannot let this moment pass without stating the obvious: inclusion is not a nice-to-have. It is a precondition for resilient food systems.

Women are central to producing food, and they must be central to shaping its future.

Two years after FAO’s landmark report The Unjust Climate laid out how climate change hits women farmers harder, the question isn’t whether we know enough: it’s whether we’re acting on it. Thin Ink covered the report here.

As the International Year of the Woman Farmer gets underway, I spoke to Piedad Martin, Deputy Director of FAO’s Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Environment (OCB), about what happens when women are not treated as climate victims, but as architects, and why, in climate finance, what gets measured still determines what gets funded.

Note: The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: Two years ago, the FAO published The Unjust Climate, a landmark report on how climate change hits women farmers harder. As we head into International Women’s Day and the International Year of the Woman Farmer, what has actually changed for rural women since that report came out?

A: It’s impossible to say exactly what has shifted for rural women in just two years. But what has changed, I think, is that we now have much sharper evidence on how climate risk widens existing gender gaps and we know policy and finance have a very big role to play.

From our work on Global Environment Facility projects, we know that when women’s participation and leadership is at the centre - not just an add-on - local initiatives have stronger ownership, fewer implementation bottlenecks, and the outcomes, both environmental and economic, are sustained for longer.

One finding from The Unjust Climate that I think is very important: women farmers are as capable as men of adopting climate-adaptive practices when facing climate extremes. The problem is not willingness, it is the structural constraints: land ownership, access to credit, access to climate information, technical support, whether they are participating in cooperatives and water user associations.

Something that is very important I’ve seen in the field is time poverty, driven by unpaid care, and discriminatory norms that limit mobility and market participation.

These barriers are economic, institutional and cultural, but they limit the ability to act on climate action, even if women have the knowledge and the interest. When we dismantle these barriers, the transformation is immediate and visible, and awareness of these constraints is increasingly shaping better programme design.

Q: Some of the findings in The Unjust Climate - that women face steeper losses from climate shocks, that they are more exposed and less protected - felt almost intuitive. Why does it matter to put hard numbers behind something we might already sense to be true? And did anything in the data actually surprise you?

A: When it comes to the intersection between environmental, climate data and gender, we still lack enough data on how climate change is impacting women, because most systems are not collecting, analysing and reporting sex-disaggregated and gender-responsive information.

And something that has been discussed in the loss and damage discussion is that non-economic and qualitative losses - where many gender impacts are concentrated - are very difficult to measure. Until these gaps are addressed, women’s climate realities are only partially visible, and climate policies risk reinforcing existing inequalities instead of closing them.

Yes, it seems obvious that when there is a climate extreme, you need more time to look for water, or you have more burden if you are a woman because your children cannot go to school. But if we don’t have hard data, it’s easier to dismiss these issues.

Data turns the “women are vulnerable” theme into a quantifiable risk to food security and resilience, so we can have an appropriate response. And it matters because, unfortunately, what gets measured gets attention and funds. If the problem is not documented, it doesn’t show up in investment cases and monitoring systems, and if it’s not in those systems, it doesn’t attract sustained financing or accountability.

This data helps answer the “so what?”, not just that women are hit harder, but why. And this can lead to solutions that work best for them. I can give you an example.

I’ve been doing vulnerability analysis in the field, and when you talk to men, they tend to identify damages to crops. But when you talk to women, they tell you about the house, the elderly, the children - a completely different story about what the problem is and what the solution could be. That’s why it has to stop being only a collection of anecdotes and become more systematic.

Q: Women are so often portrayed as the victims of climate change: passive, exposed, waiting for intervention. From your work, where are women already acting as genuine decision-makers? And what happens when they are given real authority?

A: We are sure that women are not just experiencing climate impacts: they are actively shaping climate solutions. They are organising cooperatives, participating in Farmer Field Schools, managing restoration groups, and running producer associations. But the real shift is happening, as I said, when women hold authority over resources, decisions and economic opportunities, not just when they are consulted.

When women gain these leadership roles and economic power, we are seeing three things. Climate actions become more grounded in local reality and more effective. The adoption rate of those actions increases, because women can be true agents of change. And women tend to reinvest the gains in the family, which leads to more consistent stewardship.

In Cambodia, we have a project called PEARL where women are not just attending training - they are planning climate-resilient production systems, running business plans, and managing to access loans. Through cooperatives, they are designing planting calendars to manage climate variability, being trained in Farmer Field Schools, but also training others in pest management, increasing yields and improving quality. They are accessing markets and credit, shifting from decision-making power at the plot level to influencing decisions along the entire production and commercialisation chain.

In the DRC, we have Dimitra clubs that empower women to organise and lead community restoration, but also problem-solving processes. They are coordinating across the community to agree on what land use they want, how to manage conflicts, and how to plan the use of resources. As a result, we are seeing stronger, climate-resilient livelihoods, but also more social cohesion - which is very important for resilience - and restoration that is aligned with community priorities because women’s voices are shaping those collective decisions.

And in Barbados, we have women in the Central Fish Processor Association turning fish waste into livestock feed and fertiliser, entering higher-value markets. The fish industry is very informal, so they are adopting circular economy solutions, diversifying their income, and building commercially viable enterprises - participating not just in low-margin roles, but in innovation, value addition and enterprise development.

I think this is why portraying women only as victims is misleading. It hides the fact that their leadership is one of the most under-recognised accelerators of climate and nature action.

Q: Are there plans within FAO for follow-up work on these themes?

A: We are focusing now on developing a technical review of more than 40 Global Environment Facility projects. What we want to look at is what happens when women’s empowerment is included from the start, particularly in programmes that work across the entire value chain, not just pilots. We tended to have pilots to try how women’s participation works, but now we are looking at the entire value chain.

The focus is on real inclusion: what happens when women’s voices are in the decision-making, when they have access to resources and services, and when they can also control the benefits.

What we are seeing is a pattern of having stronger results - higher uptake of climate practices when women are in the information and training, stronger livelihood options when they access markets and credit is translated into income, more durable biodiversity and land results because the stewardship is anchored in the community, and better delivery with fewer bottlenecks, more legitimacy and more sustained momentum for environmental actions.

That’s why we think this follow-up work matters. It helps move from good intentions to seeing what is really working and what we can change, so these investments deliver for women as well as for everyone else. We are finalising it this year, we want it to strengthen all the programming for the next GEF cycle.

Q: What are the most common gender-related blind spots in the design of climate and biodiversity programmes?

A: I would name four. The first is time poverty. When you schedule training, the workload assumptions are normally built around men’s availability and often around urban people’s availability.

I have been in communities where people say: we cannot meet early in the morning because we need to care for the cows first. The care burdens and the extra labour are a real constraint for women. It is not a motivation issue.

The second is that solutions requiring capital without first fixing access to finance leave women behind. If women don’t have the collateral or access to banking and financial services, these beneficial practices are simply out of reach for them.

The third is land and tenure realities. Programmes promoting long-term stewardship - trees, restoration, soil improvements - need to address land rights and decision authority. If we don’t have tenure security in the community and for women specifically, investing in nature-positive practices is very risky.

And the fourth, which I think we sometimes miss, is the potential for backlash if we empower women without bringing men along as allies. There is a risk of resentment, or worse, or of undermining any chance of success. We have also seen issues with gender-based violence, and we have to be very mindful of these realities when working with men and women together.

Q: I’ll be honest. I get impatient about this issue. We have known for decades that women face structural discrimination. At what point do we stop producing evidence and start shifting money, land rights and decision-making power?

A: I think it is shifting. The number of countries where women have legal access to land is increasing, but of course it needs to accelerate. All the multilateral environmental conventions and the funds associated with them now have clear requirements related to gender action plans and women’s empowerment in the field. But I agree that we still need initiatives like the International Year of the Woman Farmer so people don’t forget.

I think it is even more important now to highlight the benefits of investing in women farmers - not only to have them in the projects, but as an investment opportunity, because we know they will deliver spillovers in food security and nutrition.

We are not paralysed by the limitations on data. We are trying to build the evidence with them. This means designing investments with them, implementing through them, and monitoring successes also through the women’s lens. But it is still a challenge, as I said at the beginning.

Q: Climate stress can tighten the squeeze on land and water in ways that spill over into conflict. Have you seen cases where women’s participation has actually reduced those tensions?

A: Yes. Climate stress is tightening the squeeze on resources - rivers are drying up, soils are eroding - and we are seeing tensions across communities on who gets the water, who gets access to productive land.

The control over those resources is not always including women. But where they are involved, it is improving trust and fairness in resource management.

In Yemen, in many areas, women have a traditional role as impartial conflict resolution actors - they are able to mediate across tribal and community lines. We implemented a project explicitly framed around mitigating water-based conflict, and we identified that role and built on it.

We supported the establishment of women’s water user groups and conflict resolution committees that mediate these disputes, alongside rehabilitating irrigation canals and other infrastructure. And we are seeing this mechanism work - an increase in access to irrigation water, but also an increase that is more fair across the community.

Q: It’s the International Year of the Woman Farmer. By the end of this year, what would make you feel it wasn’t just symbolic?

A: Success would mean it’s not a one-year campaign. I would like to continue seeing women farmers on the agenda of climate, biodiversity and food investments after the year ends.

Success would mean they are at the front and centre when it comes to finance and project design, and that we can actually see and visualise the changes on the ground - in finance, extension, time-saving infrastructure that makes participation more possible.

It will also mean that women have real authority, not just attendance - more women in decision-making roles in cooperatives, in committees, in value chain governance, with measurable gains in access to land, credit and markets. Inclusion should be framed as a smart investment that improves returns.

I would like to see higher uptake of resilient practices and more durable land and biodiversity outcomes, and to be able to scale up as an investment, including bringing in private investment to scale up what we know works.

Q: Any final thoughts?

A: Maybe that in environmental and agricultural projects, power dynamics shape who benefits and who participates.

Women rarely face one barrier - many are rural or indigenous, landless, they head households, or they work in the informal economy. These overlapping discriminations mean that they start with less access to land, credit, training and decision-making spaces, which limits their ability to adopt climate solutions or lead adaptation efforts.

That’s why, even in what we call technical projects, we cannot ignore power and discrimination. If women don’t control the land they farm, or they cannot access loans, or they are not part of the governance of cooperatives, climate interventions risk reinforcing inequalities.

When these structural barriers are removed, they can have real authority and they can move from being described as vulnerable to being the change agents we need them to be.

Maybe the final message is this: we cannot have projects that only address some of the results while remaining blind to all the multiple discriminations that are happening on the ground.

Thin’s Pickings

1. Two sharp takes on the latest war and food systems

   “How the war makes food more expensive” from Raj Patel is characteristically incisive. A long-time favourite voice (and former Thin Ink guest), Patel breaks down the ripple effects with clarity.

   Meanwhile, Million Belay warned of Africa becoming “an economic casualty” because of the continent’s heavy reliance on imports for food, fertiliser, and fuel, in “The Gulf Crisis and Africa’s Food Calculus: A Hidden Vulnerability”.
   

2. What might a tax on unhealthy food look like? Four things we learned from our modelling - Nesta

   Four lessons from a larger report on modelling a novel tax based on the UK’s nutrient profiling model (NPM), which evaluates food and drink products based on their overall nutritional composition rather than a single ingredient.

   Why does this matter? Well, around two-thirds of adults in the UK are living with obesity and excess weight. The politics may be tricky, especially when it comes to taxation, but the status quo is neither natural nor acceptable.
   

3. Grain of Hope - Fix the News

   A much-needed heartwarming - yet clear-eyed - story from Amy Rose.

   “Australian silos were full. Sudanese refugees were starving. Rob’s response was blunt. He told Ken it was up to them. If governments around the world were slashing aid, it was time for ordinary people to step in.”
   Pro tip: read this before the Picking below.
   

4. WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain to step down, citing health concern - Devex (registration required)

   Wishing Cindy McCain a full and speedy recovery.

   What’s more concerning is the part about her possible successor: Kip Tom, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. agencies in Rome during President Donald Trump’s first term who publicly trashed agroecology and runs a farm regarded as one of Monsanto’s largest seed producers.

   He’s “the frontrunner”, wrote Colum Lynch and Ayenat Mersie, citing a Republican source, who added, “He will implement an America First agenda in WFP and the UN more broadly. WFP could use a good DOGE-ing and Kip would definitely do that.”
   For anyone who cares about global hunger, that is not a minor subplot.
   

5. How feminist economics could change Europe - The Europeans
   Not related to food systems but this interview from friends at The Europeans with Emma Holten, author of the book Deficit: How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World, is timely and a good listen.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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After this week’s interview, I’m adding at least three more to this ever-growing pile. I probably should intersperse them with some good fiction, though, so if you have any recommendations, please drop me a line.

I first spoke to Stuart Gillespie some 18 months ago when I was researching the food environment and corporate tactics. He told me his book was coming out in a few months. I asked him to alert me when it did, and we stayed in touch via email and Substack, where Stuart has his own newsletter.

Food Fight was published last April. When I read it over the Christmas break, it felt less like a new intervention and more like the culmination of decades Stuart has spent tracing the political and commercial forces shaping what - and who - the global food system serves.

We spoke over Zoom about the books that shaped him, the misconceptions he had to unlearn, the growing sophistication of corporate influence, and why he still believes we may be approaching a moment of real change.

Note: The conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Q: You cite many interesting books and studies in Food Fight, some of them decades old. For someone trying to understand the political economy of food systems, what three books published before 2000 would you consider essential reading?

A: The first is How the Other Half Dies by Susan George (1976) - the first time I read anything that seriously interrogated the political economy and growing corporate capture of the food system. I came across it during a heatwave in Cambridge, in a second-hand bookshop, while on a school trip. It really galvanised my interest in food justice and understanding what was really going on.

It was a groundbreaking book and she was a great writer. That book was one of the main turning points for me. I heard the news that she had just passed away.

The second is A Quiet Violence by Betsy Hartmann and James Boyce (1983) - incisive storytelling that reflected the food injustice and silent violence of child hunger that I witnessed during my two years working in southern India (1984-1986).

I arrived at 23, completely out of my depth, and was working with indigenous tribal communities who were being systematically dispossessed. Incoming settlers were bribing government officials and farming land that had always been common land. When the tribal communities resisted, they were asked to show documents they’d never had. You see very quickly the deep political challenge and the injustice of the whole thing.

The third is Hunger and Public Action by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (1991) - an epic book from two brilliant minds, blending hard-nosed analysis with a powerful manifesto for change.

Other influential books but not so directly about food are Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), Putting the Last First (Chambers) and in early 2000s, Fast Food Nation (2001, Schlosser, just re-released) and Food Politics (Nestle, 2002).

Q: One of the most striking - and frankly unsettling - things about your book is how little of this is new. Power asymmetries, corporate capture, subsidy distortions, market concentration: these patterns have been documented for decades, as Jennifer Clapp also documented in her book. Why does the system seem so resistant to change?

A: That is the key question. If we’re serious about transformation, we have to ask it and answer it. To me, it’s the progressive entrenchment of power on the part of certain actors, with the facilitation of other powerful actors.

Transnational corporations are controlling ever-bigger shares of different stages in the food system. You’ve had a great conversation with Jennifer Clapp, whose book is fantastic - she talks about the CR4 ratios, where the top four companies holding more than 40% market share means you’re getting into trouble. That applies across the board in the food system, from farm to fork. On the downstream side alone, five companies - Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, General Mills, and Unilever - control at least 70% to 75%. It’s even worse upstream.

That corporate capture has gotten worse over time, helped by the fact that governments don’t use their power and authority to tackle it because there are too many ways in which corporate power is translated into political power through what I call “the dark arts.” And those tactics have become a lot more sophisticated, amplified by digitalisation and globalisation.

Much of this has been in play for decades, but we’re now seeing much more sophisticated approaches to infiltrating politics to block or delay regulation, and an amplification of the trends: heightened corporate concentration, ever more aggressive marketing especially to children, and throughout all of this, little in the way of a proactive large-scale response by governments. Too much has been piecemeal and ad hoc.

We just haven’t had anything like the push back - by the public, by media, by politicians - but we’re beginning to see those now.

Q: You’ve worked across academia, international institutions, and policy advisory roles for decades. What have you learned about how change actually happens in food systems, and what were your biggest misconceptions early in your career?

A: I wrote a blog on this in 2017, after starting an initiative called Stories of Change in Nutrition that, over a seven-year period, led to over 20 case studies of countries and Indian states. These shone a light on how change happens and more importantly, how we can change things, with individual, collective, political agency. Change happens when things come together at certain times. I think we are in one of those moments now.

One of the biggest misconceptions I had was in researching and writing a book on the double burden of malnutrition, a quarter century ago. My first misconception was that obesity was caused primarily by poor dietary choices by individuals. My second was that it didn’t really have much to do with deprivation, unlike hunger and undernutrition. I was wrong on both counts.

There’s a formula for change that I find useful. It’s simple: dissatisfaction with the status quo, plus a compelling collective vision of the future, plus the means of getting there. If those three things together are greater than the cost of changing, then you could be on the cusp of something.

And when you look at what we’ve tried - the kind of incremental, piecemeal stuff - you have to ask: is that sufficient vision? I don’t think it is. We need to go deeper into addressing structural drivers than we have in the past.

And I think, when a certain point is reached, you can get a cascade effect in a positive direction. Just as there’s been a cascade in the negative, you can turn vicious cycles into virtuous ones.

Q: In your chapter on “The Dark Arts,” you dissect how corporate actors shape narratives, research agendas and policy processes. How does conflict of interest most commonly manifest in food systems governance today and where are the most worrying blind spots?

A: Conflict of interest is a huge issue. I’ve spent 12 years digging into the research on it, including in this blog.

Big issues include industry “securing the science” by funding research, infiltrating dietary guideline committees and national food strategy advisory groups, sowing doubt, disputing evidence, denigrating other research and researchers. Industry also hides behind, or within, front groups who get to the policy table, including through policy conferences that were supposed to be run by the UN.

It’s a straw man, a false narrative. It’s like when Big Tobacco realised they were losing the battle on the science and said, right, we need to secure the science, we need to buy researchers. Now it’s not just researchers, it’s influencers online.

One of the “five deadly D’s” I write about in the Dark Arts chapter is disguise. The most powerful actors come into the big tent and they take over, as happened with the UN Food Systems Summit. The private sector didn’t come directly into that summit. They came in in disguise, through the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, as if they were normal partners in the policy discussion. They shouldn’t be.

One thing I’ve seen over the last few weeks is a new evolution: there are more and more influencers out there with quite significant social media followings who are not attacking the science directly but people like myself - people saying we need to transform food systems - accusing us of being anti-feminist and against the notion of convenience.

Q: Are we underestimating how sophisticated these influence strategies have become?

A: Yes!

Q: Some critics argue that structural critiques of corporate power or market-led governance risk being unrealistic or “purist.” How do you respond to that?

A: It’s a nonsense argument. Real history is made by addressing structural drivers of societal challenges, which is why slavery was abolished, why women can vote, why there’s a minimum wage.

I think it’s the incrementalists who are being unrealistic if they assume marginal tweaks will lead to significant and enduring change. We’ve been doing incremental for decades. It hasn’t worked.

Q: What genuinely feels different today compared to the 1990s? And what, depressingly, hasn’t changed at all?

A: There’s a higher level of discourse and engagement. The degree of naivety and ignorance around political and commercial drivers has changed - though not enough. People who would not previously have engaged with the political and commercial side are beginning to enter this sphere.

The level of discussion has become more differentiated, more detailed, less general. There are researchers, commentators, a few politicians who are realising there is an issue of imbalance of power and I don’t think that was really there before.

I should add a caveat: I may be biased. By the nature of what I’ve been doing the last few years, I’m looking for this and you find what you look for. But I do think it’s real.

The other thing I keep coming back to is purpose. What is it that we as citizens actually want from our food system?

Most people, I’d guess, want a system that nourishes us as humans and is good for the planet. What does the system we currently have do? It doesn’t do that. Its purpose is to maximise profit and the most profitable products are actually the least healthy, for both people and planet.

That is the crux of the entire challenge. Anyone who talks about incremental change without looking at purpose, power, and governance is not really going to get very far at this stage.

Q: After researching and writing this book, are you more optimistic or more pessimistic?
A: I believe in radical hope. Hope is more than optimism - it builds on agency. It’s a springboard to action. Rebecca Solnit and Byung-Chul Han have written brilliantly about this, as has Nick Cave, the musician. Why am I hopeful? Because I sense a coalescence of science, activism, and - belatedly - the stirrings of political will.

I also believe in radical realism. I think you have to be realistic: it’s not going to happen overnight. There’s a hell of a lot of work to do. You need to keep pushing, never be complacent when you think you’ve made a big step forward, consolidate it, and keep moving.

It’s a fight. It’s a food fight.

Q: If you could change one structural rule in the global food system tomorrow, what would it be?
A: That the “polluter pays” principle is grounded in principles of governance, law and regulation of harmful commodity industries, including the ultra-processed food industry.

The food system generates $15 trillion a year in net damage globally - 12% of GDP - significantly more than the net value it creates. It privatises the profits and socialises the costs, which fall on people and the planet. Industry doesn’t pay for that. And that has to change.

If we can start to tax the harms properly, and use that fiscal dividend to subsidise access and affordability for low-income families - balancing the see-saw towards healthier diets - that would be the goal.

But the bigger one-thing answer, if you’re asking me what to change in the system - it’s this: make those who cause the harm pay for it.

Thin’s Pickings

1. Agroecology has a PR problem. Here’s how we can solve it. - Arc2020

   A provocatively titled but truly insightful piece from Robbie at IPES-Food about shaping narratives and how those of us who want a fairer, greener, and healthier food system can improve our messaging.

   “Too many of us are more fluent in dense academic discourse than in the poetry of the dinner plate or the farm. And that leads to people tuning out. Especially in today’s fast-scrolling world.”

2. How public grocery stores could work in Canada - Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

   A quartet of leading thinkers on food systems - Raj Patel, Aaron Vansintjan, Anna Paskal, and Errol Schweizer - give practical advice on how to operationalise in Canada an idea made popular by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani during his campaign.

   They look at how and why the system has worked well in Mexico and the U.S. military, and point to Canada’s existing public retail options - provincial liquor stores and provincial-run cannabis shops - and the rapid rollout of the National School Food Program as evidence that the government can do this.

3. Holding the line on the EU carbon border adjustment mechanism - bruegel

   For readers not steeped in EU policy wrangles, here is a useful and concise piece on the latest big fight between Big Ag and environmental policies, written by four experts and published by a European economic think tank.

   It’s about CBAM, the European Union’s carbon border adjustment mechanism, which requires importers of carbon intensive products like fertilisers to pay for embedded emissions. With the support of farm lobby groups like Copa-Cogeca, a dozen countries have asked that fertilisers be exempted from CBAM, saying fertiliser prices have risen further and that imports have collapsed.

   Others say the collapse in imports was due to stockpiling before CBAM came into force (subscription required), and that an exemption is the wrong approach. This op-ed also argues that exemption would be “unwise”.

4. ‘Andor’ Creator Tony Gilroy Gives the Interview He Couldn’t During Its Release - The Hollywood Reporter

   Given the state of the world, it can feel vacuous to talk about a Hollywood - and Disney (!!!) - show but to me, Andor is an example of art that is excellent, thought-provoking, and entertaining, while capturing the zeitgeist so acutely. I feel compelled to share this illuminating interview with its creator.

   “You get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it.”

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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This issue also grew directly out of those conversations. After I posted my piece on LinkedIn, Maryam shared her commentary. I read it, admired its clarity and scope, briefly considered including it in Thin’s Pickings, and then decided that it deserved more eyeballs. With Maryam’s and ODI’s permission, I’m republishing it here in full.

And a quick PSA: stay vigilant online. A hacked email from a trusted contact cost me two full days of digital housekeeping. Nothing was compromised, thankfully. Just my nerves.

Maryam Rezaei is the food systems lead in ODI climate and sustainability team. The original article is here.

The World Economic Forum in Davos was dominated by talks around a paradigm shift in technology, AI and what organisers call ‘geoeconomic confrontation‘. Food systems rarely featured, but the geopolitical forces now influencing the global economy are impacting food security, trade and resilience more than ever.

That reality was captured by the Canadian Prime Minister who told the Forum that the rules-based international order is over, and countries must develop strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, and finance: ‘A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options‘.

Food systems are now being reorganised around national protectionism, and geopolitical alignment, rather than a shared global vision like the SDGs. The five forces below show how this shift is already reshaping who eats, who trades, who produces - and who is left exposed:

1. Humanitarian food assistance is being redesigned under scarcity - and millions of people are being left behind

WFP’s 2026 Global Outlook projects 318 million people will face crisis levels of hunger while the agency can only reach 110 million. Doing so would require $13 billion but funding is forecast to fall short by half. Pipeline breaks are already hitting DRC, Haiti, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan, with ration cuts and complete suspensions looming by early 2026.

For the first time in history, the four largest donors have slashed their aid for two consecutive years. USAID, the world largest agrifood donor, was dismantled in mid-2025, with 83% of programmes cancelled. At the same time, the UK is cutting overall aid to 0.3% of GNI (down from 0.7% in 2020) and Germany and France are reducing budgets. The OECD projects a 9-17% aid drops in 2025 alone, with further reduction through 2027. Humanitarian aid was always scarce, but in the past, scarcity triggered mobilisation and burden-sharing. Whereas now, chronic underfunding is no longer a global insurance mechanism, but a safety net tied to geopolitics.

Under these constraints, responsibility is transferred to national systems and communities without financing, procurement capacity, or governance protections to sustain it. Global summits like the UK’s Future of Aid conference may provide a new framing, but the lived reality is that humanitarian assistance will fall short in reaching the most vulnerable.

2. Defence budgets are displacing investments in food security at historic scale

Food insecurity and hunger have often been framed as a ‘threat multiplier‘. Post-conflict countries with high food insecurity are 40% more likely to relapse into conflict within a decade. Yet public budgets are being reallocated toward defence at the expense of social protection, nutrition and climate adaptation. The US defence budget will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in 2026, while non-defence discretionary spending faces 23% cuts. Europe is also increasing military spending. Much of this reflects real security threats - from the war in Ukraine to rising instability across multiple regions - but its consequences are being absorbed through cuts to development, climate and food security spending. The consensus that food security and nature loss are security issues has not disappeared; what has changed is how it is prioritised when budgets tighten.

Oxfam analysis shows that less than 3% of G7 military spending could finance hunger eradication and meaningful debt relief. Whether governments ringfence social protection and climate adaptation from defence expansion may prove to be one of the most decisive factors shaping food security outcomes in 2026.

3. Trade measures and market access rules are reshaping food systems

On 1 January 2026, The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism was operationalized. CBAM was designed to prevent carbon leakage, protect European climate ambition and create incentives for cleaner production globally.

While currently covering fertilizers (not food directly), CBAM fundamentally reshapes who can compete in European agricultural markets by redistributing costs and power along value chains. Developing countries are largely unprepared: Out of 70 low and lower-middle income countries, only one has carbon pricing in place, and only six are currently considering it.

Similar dynamics are emerging through U.S. tariff and subsidy policies, which are increasingly used to secure domestic supply chains and geopolitical leverage, with spillovers for agricultural export. Together, carbon pricing, sustainability reporting and tariff regimes are shifting value toward those who control data, certification and compliance and away from small producers who lack the capital to navigate them.

In 2026, the struggle over food sovereignty is shifting from farms to trade regimes, where market access is becoming the primary instrument of power.

4. Price stabilisation is mistaken for resilience, ignoring structural vulnerability

Some commodity forecasts suggest that global food prices could ease modestly in 2026. FAO’s Food Price Index fell for four consecutive months at the end of 2025, and USDA projects slower price growth.

But this should not be mistaken for enhanced food security and shift focus away from the structural fragility that prevents three billion people from having access to healthy diets: foods hit by extreme weather rising in price four times faster than others; climate-linked production losses can cascade across regions, eroding safety margins; La Niña patterns threaten disruptions in 2026; and energy-fertilizer linkages remain tight, with 60-80% of nitrogen fertilizer costs tied to natural gas prices.

But policy responses continue to treat volatility in the short-term, trying to mitigate it through export bans, universal subsidies and price controls. Without shifting from short-term price management to long-term risk reduction, food systems will remain permanently exposed to the next climate and energy shock.

5. Philanthropic capital is reshaping food systems financing, but not replacing public investment

As development aid shrinks, a structural shift is underway in how food systems are financed. This shift is occurring alongside state-backed investments and extractive practices by major powers that often operate beyond multilateral accountability.

Some philanthropies are filling different gaps: The Rockefeller Foundation committed $100 million to regenerative school meals; Gates Foundation pledged $1.4 billion for smallholder farmers, and IKEA Foundation is focusing its considerable resources on regenerative agriculture and renewable energy.

But philanthropic capital is not replacing public risk-sharing, it is selecting which parts of the food system deserve to be funded. When Gates’ COP30 position reframed climate action away from emissions cuts, it demonstrated how concentrated capital can reshape policy discourse, independent of democratic processes or multilateral consensus.

Corporate investment dwarfs philanthropic funds, but analysis shows most large companies are not taking sufficient action to transform systems, and accountability remains voluntary. Capital flows to what is profitable, not necessarily what is urgent. The poorest and most food insecure are therefore the least attractive to invest in, raising a question for 2026: whether food systems in low- and middle-income countries, already struggling to guarantee returns or align with philanthropic priorities, will be financed at all.

What this means for global food systems in 2026

The 2021 UN Food Systems Summit was built on aligning multilateral collaboration, national pathways and multi-stakeholder governance.

That architecture is now being tested by a world moving toward geopolitical rivalry, fiscal retrenchment and strategic self-insurance. It is not redundant - but it is being stress tested and challenged. In 2026, food systems outcomes will depend on political choices between who is protected and who is exposed.

Governments that allow defence spending, exclusionary trade rules and geopolitically aligned finance to crowd out nutrition, social protection and climate adaptation, will widen gaps in equity and resilience. Those that protect social investment, build compliance capacity for smallholders, and integrate food systems into climate and security strategies can still maintain progress under these constraints.

By the end of the year, these trade-offs will be clearer: whether humanitarian systems adapt without reducing coverage, whether sustainability trade rules become bridges or barriers, and whether food security and nutrition are treated as a strategic investment or a fiscal burden. Those choices will shape not just 2026, but the trajectory of food systems transformation for the years to come.

Last week’s issue sparked some thoughtful and pointed responses. Below are excerpts that add important dimensions to the discussion. (You can read the full comments by clicking on the names.)

“Great article, and I agree with most of your analysis. Except, for the title! We do have an enormous production problem in that we are trapped in a production system that by and large is built on mono-cropping annual crops requiring huge inputs of water, synthetic fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides, and soil tillage. This production system is the root cause of the degradation of soils, water bodies, biodiversity, and most importantly the diversity of the soil microbiomes that are at the root of soil fertility and crop productivity. These record yields you speak about are built on an essentially extractive system, mining soils and water bodies…” - Karel

“While it is true that the problem of hunger and food insecurity mainly concerns access and rights, we cannot overlook the issue of production.
Family and small-scale farming is now being brought to its knees by an economic system that favours large-scale production. Food poverty and the right to food also concern part of the productive sector - those who cannot compete in the market due to extremely high production costs and the lack of adequate state subsidies.” - Francesca Benedetta Felici

“Why do price shocks ripple across continents?
Why is volatility treated as inevitable rather than a failure?
Because grain is no longer primarily priced by farmers or harvests, it is now valued on financial markets, where futures trading volumes vastly exceed the physical grain actually produced. Food has become an asset class - and volatility has value.
And the physical flow of that food?
Concentrated in the hands of just four companies — the ABCD of global grain trading — quietly sitting between the field and the plate, shaping access, timing, and price…
👉 If we’re producing more food than ever before, why are financial markets and a handful of firms allowed to decide who can afford to eat?” - Seamus Higgins (In case you’re interested, here’s my piece on the ABCDs.)

“Also, there are some areas in which we might consider returning to our ancestors’ food systems! For instance, today’s grains bred for high yield are less nutrient-rich: https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/why-modern-food-lost-its-nutrients/“ - Chris Lewis

Thin’s Pickings

1. Beef and lamb get 580 times more in EU subsidies than legumes, study finds - The Guardian

   Ajit Niranjan on Foodrise’s report that also found pork was subsidised nearly 240 times more than legumes and dairy received 554 times more than nuts and seeds.
   

2. Good pieces on MAHA

   Professor Sara Silverstein appeared on Timothy Snyder’s substack with a piece titled Consumptive Capitalism, arguing that MAHA is offering “solutions that reject science and public health”. She draws a historical parallel to tuberculosis - or “consumption” as it was known - and how those with financial means could afford treatment.

   David Wallace-Wells’s “The MAHA Coalition is Falling Apart” touched on the less palatable aspect of MAHA - the vaccine sceptic branch - following official confusion over Moderna’s new mRNA flu vaccine.

   Perhaps this is why, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to be pivoting away form vaccines and towards food, where MAHA’s position is much more popular, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported in the NYT.

   There has often been “a huge gap between the administration’s rhetoric on food and its policy actions” but this might be changing, wrote FoodFix’s Helena Bottemiller Evich, an always-reliable chronicler of American food policy.
   

3. Improving the nation’s diet: the impact of ultra-processed food - British Medical Association

   This concise 18-page report contains sobering statistics: in England, 64% of adults are overweight or obese and 10.5% of 4-5 year olds and 22.2% of 10-11 year olds were classified as obese.

   The BMA argued that “the UK has suffered from a succession of voluntary policies alongside delayed and weakened regulation” and called for stronger policy intervention and move the focus away from individual responsibility.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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I’ve also talked about this ad nauseam in this little corner of my soapbox, most recently in The FAD That Won’t Die, and here’s fair warning that I’m talking about it again this week.

Here’s why: in almost every forum, conference, and seminar on food I’ve attended in the past two decades, I hear this refrain: “But we cannot do (fill in whatever actions that will make food systems fairer, greener, and healthier) because we need to produce more food.”

More often than not, they are talking about staple crops: the grains and cereals that form a major part of our daily diets.

Given how pervasive and persistent this talking point is, I feel compelled to debunk it every time I get the chance. This time, I sought help from two people whose work I admire: Sophia Murphy, Executive Director at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), and Jose Luis Chicoma, program chair for the Future of Food at The New Institute, to parse the differences.

Both are veterans on food and trade issues: Sophia’s 2012 report with Jennifer Clapp on grain traders was a key educational document for me (and so useful for this issue) and Jose Luis’s most recent report on power in food systems is an important read (I covered it here).

Special thanks to both for their insights and responding to my not-fully-formed queries so quickly.

So here we go… again.. about why record grain production does not equal food security because hunger is about access, power and rights.

Last Friday, the FAO released its monthly Cereal Supply and Demand Brief, with the headline: “Ample cereal production sustains stock recovery”.

It makes for joyful reading for anyone worried about whether we have enough staple crops.

Remember those hysterical headlines in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one of which said: “World just has 10 weeks’ worth of wheat left after Ukraine war”?

Even after they were debunked by lots of people - including me, here - that fear of food shortages continues to be used to justify the status quo or the failure to reform our food systems.

In Europe, farm lobby groups and right-wing politicians and parliamentarians have pushed back policies ranging from reducing pesticide use to keeping some land fallow to protect biodiversity, on the proviso that every square inch of land is needed and every possible input should be used to keep producing more food.

Anyway, here are some key findings from the brief:

• Record production: Forecast for global cereal production in 2025 has been revised to 3,023 million tonnes, “reinforcing the already anticipated record level”. This is an increase of 0.7% from the previous estimate, which was already an all-time high.

• Higher-than-expected yields: Output of wheat, maize, and rice in a handful of countries, mainly Argentina, Canada, the EU, China, United States, and India, is responsible for this upward revision.

• Growing non-food use: Utilisation in 2025/2026 is forecast to rise by 2.2% from the previous year, driven primarily by increased use as animal feed (for poultry, cattle, and aquaculture in Egypt), ethanol production (the U.S.), and other non-food uses (India, Pakistan and Viet Nam).

• Stocks riding high: “The global cereal stocks-to-use ratio in 2025/26 is anticipated to rise to 31.8 percent, its highest level since 2001”.

Decoupling Productivity From Food Security

The findings align closely with the estimates in the latest biannual Food Outlook report published in Nov 2025, where almost all the eight markets it analysed showed growth.

Wheat production is “expected to reach a new high”, “coarse grain supplies… remain ample”, “world rice reserves could continue rising to reach unprecedented heights”, “meat production forecast to rise”, “sugar markets… shift toward a production surplus”, “continued growth in… oilseeds and dried products”, “milk production forecast to rise”, and “fisheries and aquaculture production is projected to grow”.

Just to put the report into context, in case you’re thinking, “Hang on, why isn’t there anything about nutrient-dense foods like fruits, vegetables, and pulses?”: the Food Outlook focuses on a specific set of major food commodities that are traded internationally and have established global market data series.

Vegetables and fruits are less traded internationally and more perishable, which makes them harder to monitor with the same methodology as grains, oilseeds, and major livestock products.

Of course, there is a larger question about seeing food primarily as commodities but we will get to that later.

First, I want to continue my broken-record routine of decoupling food production from food insecurity: whether we have enough food to eat is not the same as whether people can access or afford that food.

• Chronic hunger: In 2024, an estimated 673 million people went to bed hungry, about 1 in every 12 people, while 2.6 billion people (nearly 1 in 3) could not afford healthy diets.

• Acute hunger: Nearly 162 million people in 16 countries are estimated to face life-threatening levels of hunger between Nov 2025 and May 2026.

Conflict, climate impacts, and poverty are leading drivers of these numbers.

I’m aware that hunger, malnutrition, and the price of nutritious foods don’t rely purely on our cereal productivity, but because cereal output is so often invoked as the decisive variable, I feel the need to keep pushing back.

“Global hunger is only modestly (you could say, selectively) connected to global grain supplies,” Sophia told me. “A lot of hunger is linked to access, and there, affordability is one issue, as are distribution networks, and dietary preferences (not everyone eats one of the three staples).”

Jose Luis pointed that production is concentrated in a small number of countries, which “weakens resilience”.

“It increases geopolitical, climatic and logistical vulnerabilities. Abundance at the global level can coexist with fragility at the local level.”

For example, the story of rice is overwhelmingly about India, highlighting “how much power a single country now holds to shape global markets, even in a year of abundance”.

“As long as abundance is decoupled from public responsibility for access, from ensuring the Right to Food, hunger will continue - even in years of record output.”

The Right to Food

The FAO calls this “a universal human right”, but as UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food Michael Fakhri argues, that right is routinely undermined not by scarcity alone, but by power.

“People go hungry either because those with power control the supply of food and are withholding food as a cynical tactic to maintain or enhance their power during times of peace and war, or because public and private institutions are undemocratic and unresponsive to people’s demands and are designed to control populations by concentrating power and preserving order.

“Usually, it is a combination of both scenarios. In effect, hunger has been the result of “planned misery”.”

He wrote this in a July 2025 report that also linked the increase in food prices to “the high concentration of suppliers’ market power”. He cites Yemen, where over 17 million people were food insecure and more than 90% of staple foods are imported, with distribution channels dominated by a small number of intermediaries.

I saw another example in a more recent report he wrote on land and right to food, published in Jan 2026.

He documented how restrictions on land and fishing access in Gaza progressively reduced Palestinians’ ability to grow and secure their own food, illustrating how political decisions about land and territory directly undermine the right to food.

Moving away from an output-focused system to one where the right to food is front and centre requires reforming agricultural subsidies - which remain heavily concentrated on a narrow set of crops regardless of whether they are used to feed people - and address income and purchasing power, said Jose Luis.

“Access to food ultimately depends on wages, social protection, and employment conditions. This requires wage policies, minimum income schemes, and social protection systems that explicitly account for food costs.”

Sophia said she have been looking at food - or at least access to a basic, healthy diet - as a reproductive right, similar to health care and education, and challenging the idea that food should be supplied solely through market mechanisms, an idea that has become deeply entrenched in policy circles over the past several decades.

“I don’t disagree that markets are really important,” she said. “But they are also far from perfect, especially when local businesses must compete with global corporations, when concentration is rife, and when prices are distorted.”

Where Do the Grains Go?

Of course, it doesn’t mean we should completely ignore the supply side . As Sophia said: “Without supply, there is no food security, no possibility of a fulfilled right to food. It is the first building block, arguably, of the whole structure.”

But she also noted that cereals are not the only supply needed, trade is highly imperfect and tied to relatively purchasing power.

“Grain that could be eaten might go instead to feed animals because those feeding the livestock can pay more.”

Jose Luis added the fact that higher production and exports do not automatically translate into better food security because the additional output is not for us, “reveals a persistent disconnect between agricultural markets and nutrition”.

“Productivity gains matter, but what matters even more is which foods become more productive, and who they are produced for.”

“The more grain we produce, the more ways we find to use it,” said Sophia.

“Until we actually count the cost of this food - greenhouse gas emissions, soil depletion, freshwater waste, biodiversity lost, etc, and until we start thinking like the right to food as something to ensure as a prior condition for the productive economy to flourish, I am not sure we can get away from the nasty moral problem that some cows outbid some humans in the grain market.”

What the world needs, she said, is “better forecasting… for a future when we’re not getting half of our calories from rice. That is the future that we need to get to.”

For Jose Luis, the main challenge in changing the current paradigm is in how staple crops are governed: as commodities, not as food.

“Their value is determined by global demand - shaped by trade and industrial uses - rather than by the nutritional needs of those who need food the most…. Without explicit public intervention - through procurement, regulation, subsidy reform, and income policies - markets will continue to allocate staples toward feed and fuel, even in a world where hunger and diet-related disease persist.”

“The problem is compounded by the fact that those who benefit most from the “food commodification” are typically large corporations with significant influence and power over political agendas and decision-making, while the right to food remains politically weaker. Still, I see signs for very cautious optimism: affordability and access to healthy food are beginning to move higher on the political agenda.”

On Industrial Food & Nostalgia

Hearing their insights allowed me to pinpoint what made me uneasy about this NYT op-ed defending processed foods and industrial food systems: “We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great-Great-Grandparents”.

To be fair, there are many good points: calls to revise agricultural subsidies, expand benefits for vulnerable populations, and regulating food environments and corporate power more effectively.

But the central premise - to borrow the authors’ own framing - feels like “an oversimplification”. It feels like a false dichotomy to say our choices are either romanticise the past or defend the efficiencies we have now.

I felt the authors were conflating improvements in supply chain - better storage, transport, and distribution systems that allow fruits and vegetables to reach urban consumers - with the proliferation of unhealthy, addictive, and resource-intensive ultra-processed products. These are not the same things.

I also felt they downplayed the environmental and public health harms of the industrial model and did not fully acknowledge how its products displace healthier - and often culturally-rooted - ingredients and diets.

Look, I’m a foodie. I get misty-eyed about cooking from scratch. I probably have rose-tinted glasses about smallscale, agroecological farming. I try to buy local and seasonal. I have ridiculously fond memories of the food I grew up with.

But I personally don’t know a single person who wants to return to pre-modern diets, unsafe food systems, or hours of daily labour over a wood-fired stove. The only people I see pushing this line of thought are right-wing politicians using food nationalism for political expediency and Tik-Tok trad wives engaging in nostalgic cosplay.

We don’t want to go back to a time when beer was a safer drink than water and food preservation was precarious. We just want a system where record harvests translate into fewer hungry people, decent wages, ecological stability, and diets that nourish rather than harm.

Thin’s Pickings

1. Wall Street Doesn’t Reward Resilience, Main Street Does - Food & Power

   As a regular reader of Claire Kelloway’s reporting, this one is deeply personal - she lives in Minneapolis - and still full of sharp insights, contrasting the community spirit displayed by small businesses with the deafening silence from some of the best-known companies headquartered in Minnesota, such as Target, 3M, United Health Care, General Mills, and Best Buy.
   

2. ‘I’m the psychedelic confessor’ - The Guardian

   David Shariatmadari profiled Michael Pollan, one of the most influential journalists to shape our thinking on food, on his next chapter: a book on consciousness.
   

3. To Improve How He Ate, Our Critic Looked at What He Drank - NYT Cooking

   This is the last in the series from NYT’s former long-time restaurant critic Pete Wells about how he changed his eating habits. This one focuses on drinks, as the name implies.

   As a copious tea drinker, I’m going to try some of his suggestions, and while I’ve reduced my consumption of alcohol, especially cocktails, which I find too sweet, I haven’t given up on wine, since I live in the world’s best wine region (😉).

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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As usual, I benefited from her energy and wisdom, but I hadn’t realised this little newsletter would too. So thanks again, Jess, for your time and for the shoutout.

One thing I’m learning as I get older is that no matter how busy we are - and pretty much everyone I know has been operating at 110% since 2020 - there is real value in making time to find your community and stay inspired. That feels especially important when it sometimes seems like we’re living in the end times.

Part of that feeling comes from the relentless stream of bad news, including about the state of the media landscape itself. I wrote about Myanmar media last week, but I also recently learnt that the news service of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, where I was the first non-London journalist hired, and where I worked for nearly 13 years, is shutting down.

As our former CEO wrote, it’s a sad development, especially “at a time when the world is craving unbiased information and human rights are increasingly sidelined”.

This week, news broke that Jeff Bezos has fired nearly a third of employees at Washington Post, including a significant portion of its climate team.

It’s tough out there. Stay safe, stay sane, and don’t give up.

It’s been a while since I did a round-up of interesting studies on food and related issues, so here are five that caught my eye.

Who Grows Our Food… and Who Eats It?

The question of how much food smallholder farmers actually produce is a hotly contested one in food system debates. It sounds technical, but it isn’t. It goes directly to who gets funding, who gets political attention, and whose model of agriculture is treated as inevitable.

A new paper published in Nature Food tackles this debate from a different angle, which made it interesting. Rather than looking at who produces food, the authors ask who that food ultimately feeds and that shift results in an intriguing picture.

The study, led by researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands, used FAOSTAT data to construct a global database estimating how agricultural production by farm size contributes to food consumption across 198 countries and 209 products. Farms are grouped into five categories: very small (≤2 hectares), small (2–20 ha), medium (20–50 ha), large (50–200 ha), and very large (>200 ha).

One of the paper’s core findings is that small- and medium-scale farms contribute about 31% of average food consumption in OECD countries. That should give pause to anyone who still frames “feeding the world” as the exclusive domain of large-scale, industrial farms.

There’s more: In rich, industrialised countries like Australia, Canada, and the United States, small-scale farmers contribute relatively little to domestic production. Yet these same countries rely heavily on imports from regions dominated by small-scale agriculture, particularly for nutritious products like fruits, vegetables, and pulses.

Australia, for example, sources 30.2% of its vegetables from India, 12.2% of its fruit from Iran, and 15.3% of its pulses from Myanmar, according to the paper’s modelling.

Similarly, the USA imports 49.7% of its vegetables and 17.7% of its fruits from Mexico, and an additional 13.3% of its fruits from Guatemala.

“Within this context, the challenge of ‘feeding the world’ is routinely accepted as the preserve of large-scale farms,” the authors wrote.

“Yet, assessments of farm size that address only the perspective of domestic food production without factoring in the realities of a globalized food system do not fully capture the roles of different farmers in meeting national food needs.”

The contribution of smallholders is even more pronounced outside the OECD, where very-small and small-scale farms account for 44.2% of total food consumption on average. That aligns with what many aid agencies and farmer organisations have long argued, but the paper adds something new: smallholders are not only feeding their own communities. They are feeding us.

The paper also documented a less comfortable dynamic: countries dominated by small-scale farming - China and India are key examples - depend heavily on imports of cereals and oil crops produced on large-scale farms elsewhere. As incomes rise and diets change, demand for these commodities is expected to increase, potentially accelerating the expansion of industrial farming in South and Central America.

This is where the politics come in. The authors noted that declining overseas aid from OECD countries will likely hit small-scale farmers hardest, particularly those producing for export markets. The authors also said small-scale production is often poorly captured in national accounts, and their contribution may be even higher than estimated.

There are limitations. The paper acknowledged the lack of data on very-small farms dedicated purely to subsistence, many of which are not engaged in international trade at all. Farms under two hectares range from highly specialised and technologically sophisticated operations to deeply impoverished subsistence plots. Lumping them together isn’t helpful or useful.

In an op-ed for The Conversation, the lead author was more explicit about the costs, writing that export-oriented production of crops like lentils and sweet potatoes from small-scale farms often comes at the expense of food security in low- and middle-income countries. Those same countries then import cereals and oil crops from wealthy nations to compensate for food and nutrition insecurity created by cash cropping and contract farming.

“These dynamics bear the signature of colonial extractivism in the global agri-food system.”

The latest paper drops into a long-running and increasingly heated debate about smallholder farms, one that shows no sign of abating.

In 2021, a research paper estimated that farms smaller than 2 hectares produce roughly 35% of the world’s food (I discussed this in an earlier Think Ink issue).

A wave of papers and analyses followed, including by Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data, which argued hat the contribution of smallholders is significantly lower than often claimed by aid agencies and farmer advocates. They were also taken up by proponents of industrial agriculture to argue that investment and policy support should be redirected accordingly.

I understand some of that critique. Small-scale, subsistence farming is often back-breaking work carried out by people living in deep poverty, and we shouldn’t romanticise it or pretend that hardship is inherently virtuous. But I’m also wary of how productivity-first debates tend to erase questions of power, land, and labour.

I’ve seen, up close, that the transition from subsistence farming to wage labour on large plantations is not always the development success story it’s made out to be. Losing land and autonomy in exchange for precarious work can leave people more, not less, vulnerable.

Yes, subsistence farming can be brutal, and we shouldn’t wish that on anyone. But neither should we assume that farms of thousands of hectares are the only - or inevitable - way to feed ourselves. There are small farms that are profitable, resilient, and thriving, and this paper shows that they matter far beyond their own borders.

Who Governs the Food System?

If the Nature Food paper asks who grows our food, a second paper by researchers from Australia and the UK asks who governs the system that decides how food is grown, traded, and consumed.

The review traces the evolution of Global Food Governance (GFG) from its post–World War II foundations to today’s fragmented, corporate-heavy landscape. The authors argue that the challenges facing food systems - climate change, malnutrition, biodiversity loss - cannot be solved by nation states acting alone. Yet the institutions meant to coordinate global responses have been steadily weakened.

The authors define GFG as “the systems, rules, and institutions that aim to manage and address global food security and related food system issues”.

Traditionally, they are centred around the UN system. Over time, this ecosystem has expanded to include regional bodies, forums like the G7 and G20, and an increasing number of public–private and corporate-led initiatives.

The result, they argued, is a highly complex system with overlapping mandates, blurred accountability, and widening power asymmetries.

The historical tour is worth taking. The paper moves from Bretton Woods and the Green Revolution - where a productionist paradigm took hold - to the 1970s food crisis, and then to the structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF and World Bank that promoted industrial agriculture while hollowing out public institutions in the Global South. They then trace it to the increasing presence - and power - of corporate actors in GFG today.

Four factors have consistently constrained reform efforts, the authors say.

1. Chronic underfunding that have weakened - often intentionally - multilateral food and nutrition institutions. This has forced them to chase external funding just to fulfil their mandates.

2. Neoliberal ideology. The legacy of Bretton Woods entrenched US dominance and constrained alternative knowledge systems through control of global financial flows.

3. Policy incoherence and competing mandates. One review cited found 167 organisations or consortia shaping action in the global food system, with no clear shared direction.

4. Corporate capture. The reformed Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has seen its authority challenged by a multistakeholder model that, in practice, grants corporations structural power over agenda-setting.

These four factors shaped where the global food governance is now, according to the authors.

1. GFG has shifted away from multilateralism to a more decentralised multistakeholder system.

2. It is ideologically and financially constrained.

3. Corporate actors have reshaped power relations due to the promotion of multistakeholder governance and public-private partnerships.

4. Recurring food crises not only reflect deep structural inequities but perpetuate them.

The authors are blunt about what’s at stake.

“A high-stakes power struggle is unfolding,” they write, between those pushing market-oriented, technology-driven solutions - often backed by corporations and financial institutions from the Global North - and those calling for a return to democratic multilateral governance rooted in public health, human rights, and environmental sustainability.

They made four recommendations, but I’m going to focus on the fourth one as it feels particularly urgent.

“Governance needs to move beyond reliance on voluntary, industry-driven self-regulation toward more robust legal mechanisms that hold all actors (especially the powerful) accountable for social and environmental harm.”

“There’s No Such Thing as Climate-Friendly Beef”

Speaking of regulation, the lack of accountability is on full display in the debate over beef.

A new report from the World Resources Institute (WRI), aimed at food purchasing organisations, tackles a deceptively simple question: how can institutions source climate-friendly beef? The answer, uncomfortably, is that they largely can’t. At least not right now.

The analysis dismantles a range of industry talking points, including the repeated refrain that cows are reared on land that cannot support crops.

But only 37% of land used globally to graze or feed cattle is unsuitable for crops (see page 19). The rest could either grow food directly or be restored to natural ecosystems.

Which means beef production in the US and Europe requires more than three times as much cropland per kilogram of protein as milk, eggs, pork, or chicken and seven times more than beans, WRI said in an op-ed about the report.

“Food purchasing organizations can make progress toward sustainability goals by serving less beef overall - and serving even less if prioritising organic or grass-fed beef - and engaging with producers and suppliers to adopt practices to reduce emissions,” the report said.

Even under a best-case scenario - implementing every existing and potential mitigation strategies - WRI finds that US beef’s total carbon costs would fall by only 18%, once land-use impacts are included.

This is where carbon opportunity cost matters. Traditional greenhouse gas accounting often excludes the emissions associated with land occupation: “carbon losses from plants and soils that occur when natural ecosystems are converted to agriculture”. When that cost is included, beef looks far worse.

Globally, the carbon opportunity cost of beef is more than four times the emissions from the agricultural supply chain alone. And because alternative systems like organic or grass-fed beef typically require more land, they often have higher total carbon costs per gram of protein, despite other benefits like better animal welfare and reduced antibiotic use.

The report is particularly scathing about labelling schemes. None of the existing US labels reviewed identified beef produced in ways that would result in a lower net climate impact than conventional beef, the report said.

Take Tyson’s “Brazen Beef “ label for example. It was approved by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and claimed a 10% reduction in production emissions compared to conventional beef. “However, apart from a mention of “practice changes associated with grazing management and feed production,” publicly available information about how such reductions were achieved is limited”, WRI said.

In addition, emerging “carbon neutral” labels often rely on offsets or unverifiable claims, with little publicly available data. See Table 4 on Page 35 for more.

It has three clear recommendations for food purchasing organisations.

1. Serve less beef.

2. Be explicit about trade-offs when sourcing alternative systems; and serve even less beef if what’s on offer is grass-fed or organic beef.

3. Engage producers directly to reduce emissions.

Life Is Plastic… and It’s Making Us Sick

If beef exposes the limits of technological fixes, plastics - primarily derived from fossil fuels - expose the cost of ignoring systems entirely.

A major Lancet Planetary Health paper provides “the first global-scale quantitative assessment of disability-adjusted life-years associated with greenhouse gases, air pollutants, and specific chemicals emitted across the lifecycle of the most common, predominantly single-use plastics under six different global scenarios between 2016 and 2040”.

Disability-adjusted life-years is expert-speak on how many healthy years of life are lost due to disease and pollution, and the numbers are sobering.

Under business-as-usual projections, the global plastics system would be responsible for 83 million years of healthy life lost between 2016 and 2040. In 2016 alone, plastics cost humanity 2.1 million years of healthy life, with 82% coming from primary plastics production.

The adverse health effects are associated with the whole life cycle of plastics, but “most crucially from plastics production, including the oil and gas extraction for petrochemical feedstocks, which contributed to the health effects of global warming, air pollution-induced respiratory disease, and toxic effects from waste chemicals”.

Reducing plastic waste helps, but not enough. Scenarios focused solely on recycling or waste management still see rising health burdens over time. The most effective lever is reducing primary plastics production. Even the most optimistic “system change” scenario still leaves the world with 2.6 million fewer years of healthy life in 2040.

“Alternative global scenarios centring on improving plastics waste management or increasing recycling alone were substantially less effective in reducing emissions and associated health burdens than scenarios that incorporated greater reductions in primary plastics production, underscoring the need for a full lifecycle approach to plastics pollution and harmful emissions,” the paper wrote.

The authors are clear that these figures likely underestimate the true harm. The lack of transparency around chemical composition means that health impacts from microplastics and nanoplastics are largely uncounted.

This matters for food systems. As I wrote in an earlier issue, agriculture and food packaging are deeply entangled with plastics, from mulch films to single-use packaging. Any serious food system transformation that ignores plastics is incomplete.

The global plastics treaty negotiations reflect this tension. Fault lines remain between countries pushing upstream production limits and those focused on downstream waste management. Industry resistance to production caps remains fierce. Last August, a sixth round of talks in three years failed to reach an agreement.

The Lancet paper reinforces what many health advocates have been saying: without deep cuts in production, we are simply rearranging the damage.

A Murder Development Banks Helped Fund

All of this - food, governance, beef, plastics - can feel abstract until it isn’t.

I met Berta Cáceres In August 2014 in Bali, at a four-day conference on women and climate change. The coordinator of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) told me about the risks she was facing and colleagues who had already been killed.

“As women, we are exposed to violence from businesses, governments and repressive institutions - but also to patriarchal violence. It is three times worse for an indigenous woman,” she said in rapid Spanish.

“The media criminalises us too. They try to take away our credibility, (they) say we’re armed groups, that we attack private investments, that we don’t exist, we’re from dysfunctional families, we’re bitches and corrupt. It’s systematic.”

Less than two years later, the Honduran indigenous leader was murdered in her home La Esperanza, Intibucá.

A new, explosive report by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), established to investigate her murder, leaves no room for ambiguity about what happened or who bears responsibility.

The full report (nearly 530 pages) is in Spanish but there’s a 14-page English summary.

“The armed break-in that ended Berta Cáceres’s life was neither by chance nor an act of ordinary violence,” it said.

“It was the culmination of a prolonged process of persecution, surveillance, criminalisation, and violence directed at the Indigenous leader who for years spearheaded the defence of Lenca territory against the imposition of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project.”

The hydroelectric project was imposed on the indigenous territory without consent and was enabled by international financing from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI, or BCIE in its Spanish acronym) and the Dutch Entrepreneurial Development Bank (FMO). Despite known risks and sustained opposition, funds flowed.

The GIEI concluded that the murder was foreseeable and preventable, and that state authorities failed in their duty of due diligence, and also found that development funds being diverted to support surveillance, intimidation, and violence.

“The GIEI determined that funds disbursed by international development banks… formally allocated to the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project were diverted from their original purpose and used to finance illicit activities… and ultimately, the murder of Berta Cáceres.”

“The GIEI’s financial investigation established that, out of a total of USD 18,540,325.62 disbursed in the project, approximately 67% - equivalent to USD 12,426,190.53 - was subject to diversion and/or irregular handling.”

“The GIEI identified financial operations carried out immediately after the murder through which checks were cashed for amounts consistent with at least part of the payment offered to the hit squad that executed the crime.”

Their findings also reinforced what she told me over a decade ago.

“Berta Cáceres’s identities as an Indigenous Lenca woman, a community leader, and a public figure who profoundly challenged masculinised and racialised power structures exposed her to differentiated and aggravated forms of stigmatisation and violence.

“The violence against Berta Cáceres must be understood not only as retaliation for her opposition to a specific project, but as part of a broader pattern of structural violence that disproportionately punishes Indigenous and Afro-Honduran women who defend land, territory, and the environment in Honduras.”

The findings are clear: the murder was an organised criminal operation, carefully planned and carried out through a criminal conspiracy. It is the result of a system that privileges investment over rights, scale over consent, and growth over accountability.

What All of This Has in Common

These papers and reports are about different things, but they point to the same fault lines: power, scale, accountability, and whose lives count.

Small farmers feed the world, but they often remain invisible and worse, dismissed. Governance systems are being reshaped to suit those with money and access. Beef isn’t getting greener, no matter how clever the label. Plastics are making us sick long before they become waste. And when communities resist, the consequences can be lethal.

None of this means giving in. But it does mean staying clear-eyed.

Stay safe. Stay sane. And don’t give up.

Thin’s Pickings

1. What we disagree about when we disagree about meat - Tangle
   A thoughtful and personal essay by Matthew Kessler on the knotty issue of meat that laid out all the complexities and why it isn’t such a black and white issue, no matter how some of us think it is.

   Matt is the host and producer of Fuel to Fork podcast who Thin Ink has interviewed before.

2. How to eat well and within Earth’s limits - Nature
   A commentary by Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

3. The NYT’s Pro-Big Ag Pundit Gets It Right on Manure, But Misses the Mark on Herbicides - John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future
   Four noted academics respond to journalist Michael Grunwald’s September 2025 Times Opinion piece, “Spraying Roundup on Crops is Fine. Really.”

4. Actually, I do know how to do this - Heated
   Emily Atkin’s clear-eyed piece on why it’s important keep our sights on polluters and climate change when the increasing authoritarianism in U.S. politics can make us feel overwhelmed and distracted.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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Sunday, Feb 1, marks five years since darkness again fell on Myanmar: the place where I was born, called home for the first 20 years of my life, and where many of my loved ones still live.

Sunday also marks five years since I became an involuntary exile. Like millions of others, including fellow journalists, I found myself abruptly on the wrong side of an authoritarian curtain, watching my country slip further out of reach from afar.

I would be remiss to not write about what’s happening in Myanmar this week, particularly to its once-thriving media landscape.

Thanks to my partner-in-crime Kelly for shaping The Wonder Years section.

One of the very first things the Myanmar military did when it staged its coup in the early hours of Feb 1, 2021 - just before a newly elected civilian government was due to take office - was to cut off communication networks across the country. The initial shutdown lasted hours, but would only mark the beginning of years of targeted blackouts and internet censorship.

In the weeks that followed, the junta continued to dismantle the infrastructure that allowed people to stay informed. Websites and social media platforms were blocked. News outlets were banned. Newsrooms were raided. Journalists were arrested when they could be found, and equipment was confiscated.

Myanmar’s lively and hard‑won media ecosystem went underground almost overnight. Hundreds of journalists fled their homes, working from safehouses, with many eventually crossing into Thailand or reporting from rebel-controlled territory. Many more lost their jobs. Being a journalist became synonymous with being a criminal. Some were even charged with terrorism.

And yet the reporting never stopped.

Newsrooms regrouped wherever they could, with whoever they had left. They continued publishing, broadcasting, documenting atrocities, and explaining - often at great personal risk - what was happening to their communities.

Journalism has long been in the cross hairs of Myanmar’s governments, democratic or otherwise. But the military has always been the biggest foe and most dangerous adversary. It is perhaps unsurprising that a murderous, corrupt, unaccountable, sexist, and xenophobic institution would find scrutiny intolerable.

What is much, much harder to digest is that the junta may finally succeed in silencing Myanmar’s independent media in a way it has not previously been able to, because of Western geopolitical drift, shifting ideologies, and myopia.

Essentially, Western governments that once championed a free press as a cornerstone of democracy have largely turned away, at precisely the moment their support is most needed.

Myanmar, Now

The first domino to fall was USAID. In early 2025, funding cuts under the new Trump administration crippled many Myanmar newsrooms that were already operating in exile and on shoestring budgets. Then in September, Sweden, the other major donor, announced it will end its support of Myanmar media from 2026 onwards.

The blows kept coming. In recent months, at least one other European donor quietly informed smaller, regional outlets that its funding would also be ending.

This could not come at a worse time. The crisis has faded from much of the world’s attention, but the junta’s violence has not diminished. It has continued to terrorise its own people, a vast majority of them unarmed and innocent. At the same time, the regime is finding more acceptance in the international community. Sham elections organised by the military and pushed by China appear to be leading to a thawing in Myanmar’s relations with its neighbours.

Away from international attention, things continued to worsen in Myanmar. A nationwide rebellion sparked by the coup has deepened long-running conflicts, and pushed the economy into collapse. In the ensuing chaos, corruption and lawlessness have flourished, with global spillovers ranging from online scam centres, drug production, to unregulated rare-earth mining.

I bristle every time I hear Myanmar journalists described as “resilient.” It is a word that has become a polite substitute for abandonment. Resilience should not mean being left to survive indefinitely without resources, safety, or pay, but this is what many have been doing over the past five years.

The Kite Tales, a non-profit storytelling project I co-founded, has been supporting journalists and illustrators both inside and outside of Myanmar. We provide them with a small stipend for a year and they provide us with vivid accounts of what life is like in a country under siege, and why they do what they do.

This support does not replace traditional journalism work. It’s about providing a modest but vital income boost that allows journalists to keep reporting, because let’s face it, courage and commitment don’t pay rent.

They report on airstrikes, food insecurity, prisons, displacement and a dozen other daily realities. They write about families, histories, heartbreaks, and futures tied to Myanmar’s fate. We publish them as “Resistance Diaries”.

Many have suffered personal losses: a home during one of the worst earthquakes to hit Myanmar in recent history, a baby due to work and personal stress, or freedom during months in prison.

Yet they never stopped reporting about the people of Myanmar: a youth who dreams of setting up his own small business, a former traffic cop who joined the resistance, or a boxer seeking justice.

For many journalists, the emotional burden of covering the junta’s atrocities, which include mass killings, lingers long after deadlines.

Describing the April 2023 airstrike on Pazi Gyi village, one says it was “the worst day of my life… My heart couldn’t bear it. I felt completely disoriented.” But her diary also captures the survivor’s guilt that many exile journalists feel.

“If I feel this way, imagine the depth of suffering felt by the women and children who directly experienced these events,” she wrote.

Another reporter describes it this way: “Compared to the worsening crisis in my country, my financial struggles seem trivial.”

He is one of the many reporters whose lives were first upended by the coup and later by the USAID cuts.

“Last year my newsroom secured money from the United States that meant I could finally begin planning to reunite with my mother. Then Donald Trump began slashing support for independent media and all my dreams unravelled.”

The Wonder Years

There have not been many opportunities in my lifetime to tell hopeful stories about Myanmar. But there was a brief, imperfect opening, and I remember it vividly.

It was Nov 13, 2011, and I was standing in a sterile, air‑conditioned press room at a conference centre in Bangkok when the rumours started: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi might be released from house arrest. The television was tuned to rolling coverage from Yangon. Like everyone else, I stood transfixed in front of the screen.

For most of the journalists there, it was simply the biggest breaking news story of the day. For me - likely the only Burmese person in the room - it was intensely personal.

You see, the cameras were trained on University Avenue. That was the street I grew up on, among extended family, in a leafy compound with swings on the front lawn, my mother’s anthurium plants in the back garden, and a constant stream of relatives and visitors. Just up the road, at number 54, lived Daw Khin Kyi - the widow of Myanmar’s independence hero Aung San - and after 1988, her daughter, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Politics had always murmured in the background, but until 1988 I did not fully grasp that I was living in an isolated military dictatorship. The years that followed saw multiple crackdowns against unarmed protesters, regular roadblocks on my street, and military intelligence moving into nearby buildings to monitor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The neighbourhood fell silent at night. I left the country a decade later to study.

For years my family forbade me to return, even for funerals, after a sibling’s passport was confiscated upon arrival. Like so many families, ours stretched across continents, held together by phone calls and longing.

My parents had hoped I would become a business executive. Instead, I chose journalism, a decision that alarmed them deeply. To them, being Burmese, a woman, and a journalist did not conjure images of press conferences, but of prison cells.

I clung to my crimson Myanmar passport nonetheless. It is an inconvenient document - onerous visa requirements almost everywhere, suspicion at borders - but it allowed me to return undercover when Cyclone Nargis devastated the country in 2008.

In 2015, 10 months before the historic elections that would usher in the first democratically-elected government in half a century, I returned home properly. I helped set up Myanmar Now, and later Kite Tales, and voted for the first time in my life.

There was genuine hope. Journalism flourished. Young reporters asked hard questions, often for pitiful pay, sometimes facing attacks even from civilian leaders. The period was imperfect - the Rohingya crisis and the rise of xenophobic nationalism remain a deep stain - but the press persisted.

What Disappears When Journalism Does

Today, that ecosystem is on the brink.

I was recently speaking with journalists at an international investigative conference when it hit me how many of the newsrooms I have been working with over the past three years are barely hanging on. Reporters from Kachin, Shan, Rakhine, Tanintharyi, Yangon, central Myanmar, the delta - all are still reporting, but utterly exhausted.

Revenue streams have collapsed. Advertising is impossible. Subscription models are a fantasy in a country at war. And yet donors increasingly insist on “self‑sustainability.”

Even the most storied news organisations in the West are under persistent financial pressure that raises questions about their future viability. The Guardian is owned by a trust intended to protect editorial independence, and legacy outlets like the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post are backed by billionaires precisely because commercial advertising can no longer sustain serious reporting.

The New York Times has diversified revenue aggressively - but still depends on subscriptions, corporate partnerships, and philanthropy to fund investigative work that rarely turns a profit.

In that context, insisting that exiled newsrooms operating under constant threat while covering a war-torn country become “self-sufficient” within a few years isn’t just unrealistic but also frankly unreasonable.

Journalism is not a luxury. In Myanmar, it is service journalism: tracking airstrikes, documenting land grabs, monitoring armed groups, explaining conscription orders, recording who has disappeared.

Through Kite Tales, we have been fortunate. Two private organisations have committed support through 2026 and friends have sent funds too (thank you so much, you know who you are!!!!). We keep overheads minimal: the founders volunteer their time, the board of trustees provides precious advice for free, and around 95% of our spending goes directly to fellows.

This funding means we will be able to support 10 storytellers, including eight new journalists, throughout 2026. We are committed to ensuring there is gender balance and ethnic diversity and we want to prioritise freelancers who are currently operating without any safety net. If you know talented journalists who could benefit from this kind of support - or organisations that might partner with us - we urge you to get in touch.

But this is a drop in the ocean.

This is not about supporting one organisation. It is about an entire information ecosystem. Even in the depths of the old military regime, there was a spirited exiled media scene. Now even that is imperilled.

We already see what a cowed media landscape does elsewhere. In Myanmar, where accurate reporting has largely been silenced inside the borders, the stakes are immediate and human. This is about people’s ability to live with dignity, to know what is happening to them, to be seen.

Five years on, the darkness has not lifted. But neither has the determination of those still telling Myanmar’s stories.

They should not be left to do it alone.

Thin’s Pickings - Myanmar/Burma Edition

1. Resistance Diaries: Life After the Myanmar Coup

   Here, you’ll find over 70 anonymous diaries by journalists and illustrators we’ve supported. This page began interviews with courageous young people who took part in the nationwide peaceful protests that erupted after the coup, which the military crushed by shooting, arresting, and killing unarmed demonstrators.

   A year later, we launched The Kite Tales Digital Storytellers Fellowship, after realising that sustained support was essential. We will continue adding new diaries to this page in the weeks and months ahead.

   Please read and share. And if that’s the only thing you’re able to do, we are still deeply grateful for your continued interest in Myanmar.

2. What’s Happening Inside Myanmar

   A selection of strong reporting that illustrates both the commitment and talent of Myanmar’s journalists.

   Myanmar Now’s in-depth piece on the military-organised elections widely viewed by citizens and observers alike as a sham (subscription required).

   Dawei Watch reported on people being pressured to vote in the south while fishermen in the region are bearing the brunt of the conflict.

   Shan Herald covered growing fears of forced conscription in eastern Myanmar, where multiple armed groups are competing for power and control over key resources.

   Kachin News Group released a video report (in Burmese) stating the KIA, the most powerful armed group in the north, has reached an agreement with Chinese companies to mine rare earth minerals in a more environmentally-friendly manner.

   There’s also an insightful interview with long-time Myanmar watcher Richard Horsey (full disclosure: he’s also a good friend) on DVB English, examine the complex relationship between the exiled government and China.

   Meanwhile, scam centres continue to flourish. This NYT piece provided “a rare look at the inner workings of the multibillion-dollar scamming business”.

3. What’s Happening Outside Myanmar

   Frontier Myanmar reported on 4,000 Myanmar nationals in the U.S. facing possible deportation following the Trump administration’s planned termination of Temporary Protected Status (registration required).

   There is a brief reprieve on this for now: a federal judge has blocked the move.

   The International Court of Justice, in The Hague, held public hearings in a case accusing Myanmar of committing genocide against the Rohingya Muslims.

   The proceedings appear to have stirred a troubling strain of right-wing nationalism, including within parts of the diaspora.

   The argument, in essence, is that Myanmar’s “integrity” must be defended at all costs, instead of recognising the simple truth - committing atrocities invites accountability.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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In some ways, it’s mind boggling that I’m still chugging along. In other ways, I’m proud of myself for sticking to it, even on weeks when I felt overwhelmed. It is all the sweeter when Thin Ink which is just me, myself, and I, gets mentioned by great newsletters, like Bloomberg’s Business of Food did a couple of months ago, or Devex Dish did this week.

The anniversary always brings up bittersweet feelings, BUT more on the bitter part next week. This week is more about sweet(ish).

Thin Ink began as a way to keep myself abreast on an issue I’m very passionate about and to maintain the discipline of writing every week.

I’d left a high-pressure job that required writing and reporting every day after nearly 13 years, and I didn’t want to lose that drive and direction. I was both excited and terrified, and decided that having something regular to do would help keep some of the anxiety at bay.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to have landed on my feet and to be part of a wonderful team of colleagues over the past few years. But I’ve kept Thin Ink because it complements the work I do with Lighthouse Reports and it allows me to wear my two hats (food systems and Burma/Myanmar).

Substack tells me I’ve published 242 issues so far (!?!?!), which felt like a good moment to reflect back on what I’ve learnt, how Thin Ink has evolved and were I’d like to take it next.

5 Key Changes in Food Systems

It was somewhat fortuitous that Thin Ink started in 2021, just as the term food systems was gaining traction, largely due to the Food Systems Summit held later that year. The conference was controversial and its legacy remains debated, but the terminology stuck.

Since then, there’s been a flood of interesting work in this space. I’m sure I’ve missed some important things, but these are the five changes I think about, write about, and refer to most.

• There is now broad recognition that systems thinking is essential when talking about food.

  Whether at the production, processing, or consumption level, food issues are deeply interlinked. The combination of COVID-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a third food price crisis in 15 years, and a succession of weather extremes forced us to look at the ways in which food systems intersect with conflict, climate, inequality, and so much more.

  We’re “focusing on single solutions rather than systemic solutions”

  COVID-19 showed the weakest links in our food systems. Can we change them?

  What I Talk About When I Talk About Food Systems

  Looking Forward… & Back

  The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

• There is also a more candid discussion about the elephant in the room: power.

  Specifically, the massive imbalance between millions of food producers and consumers on one side, and a small number of corporations and power brokers that control large parts of the food chain and profit handsomely from the status quo.

  Grassroots organisations have been banging on about this issue for decades. Yet we’re still being sold the idea that knowledge transfer, technical support, donor-funded projects, and the latest hi-tech fixes will solve stubbornly high levels of food insecurity, half the loss of smallscale farmers’ livelihoods, and rein in a growing public health crisis.

  Thankfully, a growing chorus of voices is pointing out why techno-fixes alone are not enough.

  Citizens vs. Industry

  Fight the Power… of the New Colonisers

  Sowing Bitter Seeds

  Fair Food Futures: Notes from Dar

  Who Owns Our Food?

  It’s About Power, Not Prices

  How to Eat an Elephant
  

• Healthy diets remain unaffordable for billions, even as food production increases.

  At the same time, many of us live in food swamps, where unhealthy options are cheaper and more readily available than nutritious ones. The result? A rise in multiple forms of malnutrition, non-communicable diseases, and premature deaths.

  This evidence is helping policymakers finally recognise the importance of food environments. We’re not yet at the stage where governments are truly governing - for example, prioritising public health over private profits and unrestrained markets - but hey, it’s a start.

  Two in Five People Cannot Afford Healthy Food

  Hidden Figures

  The Planetary Health Diet, Revisited

  Our Food Systems: Feeding on Junk & Inequality

  What We Eat Is Harming Us

• Global food systems are a major contributor to climate change and emissions still rising.

  Food systems account for around a third to total manmade greenhouse gas emissions. The good news is that food is finally becoming a regular feature in global climate negotiations. The bad news is that this visibility hasn’t yet translated into meaningful changes in how food systems function.

  Worse still, an industry-led backlash, particularly against reducing meat consumption, which has the largest carbon, water, and land footprint, is growing louder and gaining traction.

  We Emit What We Eat

  “An Unhappy Marriage With An Addiction Problem”

  A Dishonourable Harvest

  The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

  Path to a Liveable Planet
  

• Agricultural subsidies remain deeply skewed and environmentally unsustainable but the evidence is now overwhelming.

  We now have far better data on where subsidies go, who benefits, how they distort food systems, and what kind of social and labour harms they cause. What’s missing is political will to reform them. And perhaps a bit of spine-growing.

  How do you solve a problem like...

  The $470 Billion Problem

  Thinking Of Trade Offs

  In the Name of the Farmers

  How Europe’s Farm Subsidy Scheme Fails Workers

5 Big Myths About Food Systems I’ve Debunked

• That Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will lead to global hunger.

  Hunger isn’t caused by a lack of food but by access, affordability and politics. See: Are We Really Facing Food Shortages?
  

• That we freely choose what we eat, and that regulating food environments is ‘nanny-state’ overreach.

  Our diets are shaped by price, marketing, availability and policy far more than individual willpower. See: The Illusion of Choice
  

• That increasing agricultural productivity and producing more food will alleviate hunger.

  Decades of rising yields haven’t ended hunger or malnutrition, showing that productivity alone is a false fix. See: Moonstruck… and The FAD That Won’t Die
  

• That starvation is an inevitable result of conflict, rather than a political choice.

  Hunger is routinely weaponised or tolerated through policy decisions, from Ukraine to Gaza. See: Starvation as Strategy and I don’t see Palestine as an isolated story
  

• That economic growth will automatically reduce hunger and malnutrition.

  Growth can coexist with worsening food insecurity when inequality, food prices and power imbalances go unaddressed. See: We Are Going In The Wrong Direction

5 things I want to cover (or cover more) this year

If you are familiar with these topics and want to talk, drop me a line.

• Food as commons.

  I want to explore what it means to treat food not just as a commodity, but as a shared public good, and what that shift could unlock for equity, sustainability and democracy in food systems.

• Procurement as a key lever of change.

  It sounds like a boring administrative issue, but my trip to a community kitchen in Brasilia showed me how powerful procurement can be. I want to find more stories about how it can be leveraged to improve diets, support producers’ livelihoods, and restore ecosystems.

• Deeper dives into how our food choices are shaped.

  I’ve read two fascinating books - Food Fight and The Last Sweet Bite - over the past two months and am onto a third, Food Intelligence. I hope to interview the authors in the coming months, and I’ve got three more titles lined up before summer. Wish me luck.

• More interviews and commissioned essays from diverse voices.

  There are so many people doing amazing things, and I want to platform as many of them as my time and budget allow, whether that’s through conversations, or by letting their own writing do the talking.

• More success stories from the frontlines of food systems change.

  I’ve been guilty of what journalists are often accused of: focusing on what’s broken and not enough on what’s working. This year, I want to make a conscious effort to seek out stories that inspire as well as inform.

5 Ways Thin Ink Has Evolved

I started out focused on the nexus between food, climate, and where they meet, but I’ve come to see structural inequalities as the underlying driver of many food systems problems. My coverage has shifted accordingly.

I’m incorporating more guest voices after years of going solo, doing more explanatory writing instead of just reporting, and zooming out more often to connect the dots across issues instead of treating them in isolation.

I’ve also grown more confident in adding my own analysis, instead of just quoting excerpts from research and reports.

If you have any feedback on how to improve the content, I’m all ears.

5 things I learned about the newsletter business

Since 2021, people have reached out to ask how I started Thin Ink and what they should consider if they want to launch their own. Here’s a short version of what I usually tell them.

• Start small, but be consistent. Be realistic about the time and resources you can commit, and stick with it. Consistency builds a loyal reader base and keeps you accountable.

• Keeping it personal can resonate, but make sure it’s relevant. It’s about building connections with readers, not turning your newsletter into an autobiography.

• Good visuals matter. They really help liven up the issue. So start taking pictures if you aren’t doing it already.

• Round-ups and curated lists of interesting reports and articles add value. They help readers navigate information overload by pointing them to things worth their time or providing summaries of relevant new information.

• Be cautious with using AI. Call me naive, but large language models aren’t a substitute for writing that comes from years of practice and working a beat. They can help with editing and typos, but AI-generated prose is often obvious, repetitive, and flat. Be very careful.

Thin’s Pickings

1. My journey from foreign correspondent to Uber driver in Trump’s America - Steve Scherer

   A beautifully written and heartbreakingly poignant piece by former colleague Steve, a brilliant journalist who was in the Rome bureau around the same time as me. If you or someone you know have a journalism-related job, you can’t go wrong with Steve.
   

2. Celebrated soil scientist and food security activist Pedro Sánchez dies - Devex

   A portrait of the former World Food Prize winner whose work focused “on turning tropical soils into lush and fertile lands and creating species resistant to threats”, by Rebecca L. Root.
   

3. To Eat Healthier, Our Critic Went to the Source: His Kitchen - NYT Cooking

   Pete Wells’ second piece since returning to writing. It’s warm, funny, and informative.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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Also, my better half pointed out after the issue went out that I missed a golden opportunity to call it “I’m Bringing Foodie Back.” Those who remember (or were around) in the noughties will get the pun.

This week, I’m returning to one of my go-to topics: competition policy, with a specific focus on what’s happening in Africa, the continent with the youngest competition authorities and laws.

This is part of my ongoing attempt to demystify and humanise a topic that can sound technical and nebulous, but which should be a cornerstone of fairer, healthier, and greener food systems.

Competition policy often sounds technical, but in Africa’s food systems, it has real consequences for prices, livelihoods, and who gets to participate in the market. I spoke to Chilufya Sampa to better understand how anti-competitive behaviour plays out across the continent, why so much of it goes undetected, and what are the tangible outcomes of a lack of competition policy.

Chilufya is the former head of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission in Zambia and a special advisor to the Shamba Centre for Food and Climate, an organisation that is no stranger to Thin Ink (see here and here).

In his role with the latter, he is one of the authors of the Agrifood Anti-Monopoly Tracker that monitors mergers and cases of anti-competitive conduct across Africa’s agriculture and food markets. Launched in December 2024, it uses publicly available information from competition authorities, company disclosures, and media reports, to map where competition enforcement is taking place, and, crucially, where it is not.

The latest edition makes a strong case that anti-competitive conduct in Africa is both widespread and largely invisible.

For example, it finds that more than a third of competition matters reviewed by regulators in the agriculture sector have cross-border impacts, affecting at least 40 neighbouring countries that did not review those cases. As a result, anti-competitive conduct often continues undetected across the continent, disproportionately harming small producers and low-income consumers through higher prices, reduced choice, and restricted market access.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Maybe we can start off with the very generic question. There is relatively little public understanding of anti-competitive behaviour in Africa compared to the US and, to some extent, Europe or the UK. I know it’s really hard to sort of talk in very general terms about a whole continent but based on your experience leading Zambia’s competition authority for over a decade, can you explain the “lay of the land” — how competition regulation works across Africa and what makes it distinct?

A: Sure. Africa was following a kind of a command economy. Compare that to the USA which has been enforcing competition for over 130 years and in Europe, over 60 years, with probably 70 years where a free market economy is in their DNA.

Under the international competition network (ICN), most African competition authorities are actually called young authorities because our competition laws are about 30 years old. I think the oldest is probably 25, 26 years. So we’re still in the process of having this new way of thinking, so to speak, in most African countries.

Now if you looked at our tracker, we say that close to or over 50% of African countries either don’t have a competition policy, a competition law or an institution that will enforce that competition policy, so half of the continent effectively does not have all the ingredients, so to speak, to actually enforce competition law. Either they are missing an authority, a policy, or the law.

There have been great strides made with some competition authorities like the South African, the Kenyan, the Egyptian, and the Zambian authorities, but generally, when you talk about the continent as a whole, the picture is bleak.

When you go to West Africa, Nigeria has a big economy but has a competition law that is less than 10 years old. The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission only came into force, if I’m not mistaken, maybe six to seven years ago. In other parts of West Africa, there are competition provisions or laws at a regional level. But when you go to the individual countries, very few countries have competition laws or policies.

Kenya had a competition law, but it was not the model law with adequate provisions on cartels, abuse of a dominance position of market power and restrictive business practices and consumer protection, the way we know competition to be. The model law was only passed in 2010.

The other thing is that Africa is divided into regional blocks. You have the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), which covers the southern, eastern and northern parts of Africa; the East African Community, which covers eight countries in East Africa; the Southern African Development Community (SADC) which covers most of southern Africa and a few of the island states; and Economic Community Organisation for West Africa States (ECOWAS) in West Africa. Then you have the northern African economic bloc the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), and there’s one for the Francophone countries, The West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU).

These regional blocs want to become a common market, like the EU, but apart from COMESA, they have not made strides forward. Most are still dealing with, for example, tariffs and haven’t come to common market positions.

So even when you’re dealing with competition laws, it’s being enforced mostly at the national level rather than a regional level. Recently, last November, the East African Community Competition Authority started enforcing at the regional level but they are still finding their feet.

Q: You mentioned some of the countries that are a bit more active than others in terms of having competition policies and authorities. What are some of the biggest constraints they face when it comes to trying to determine, detect, and address anti-competitive behaviour?

A: Based on my experience as well as what we have seen from the tracker, the first and the biggest challenge has been data on markets. Most African countries do not have reliable, efficient data on the markets where they are based: market information on the players and market intelligence and the strategies of the players in the market. Even at a national level that information is lacking.

The Center for Competition, Regulation and Economic Development (CCRED) at the University of Johannesburg, together with the Shamba Centre, has been trying to bridge this gap: trying to come up with the data for competition authorities to use to make informed decisions. When we review some mergers after they have been approved, we’ve seen that decisions were made because regulators didn’t have adequate information on a particular transaction.

The second challenge is resources. Regulators don’t have adequate tools. We’re going digital, yet a lot of authorities do not have the software or the hardware to actually decipher what is going on and use these digital tools that would help them come to a position that would lead to an informed decision.

Lastly, there’s a lack of the competition culture generally by stakeholders. This sort of links to the first question where I was saying that these are new principles. And because of that lack of competition culture, you don’t have stakeholders who will inform the authorities of what is going on. Or even if you do ask them to say, “Hey, there’s this major merger. How is it likely to affect you?”, they do not have appropriate responses because they’re not thinking in terms of the harms such a merger may occasion.

You have NGOs, civil society, and politicians who don’t really know what competition is and what the lack of it would mean to the economy. It’s very, very difficult for an authority to operate in an economy or environment like that.

Q: Just to follow up on that last point, where you talked about this lack of understanding of what competition is, or what is anti-competitive behaviour. When anti-competitive behaviour goes undetected or unpunished, what are the implications? Because while it sounds like a very sort of technical issue, there are real world impacts for both consumers and small business owners, right?

A: Yes, and that’s the unfortunate part. Because if it goes undetected, or unpunished, people will think this is business as usual.

If concentration occurs, and that concentration engages in exclusive deals and arrangements or exploits customers, people will think that is normal. That this is how businesses should operate. If cartels form and engage in price fixing and there is no punishment or enforcement, people will think that (behaviour) is normal.

In fact, I remember that earlier on (in Zambia), when we started investigating the first cartel - it wasn’t in the food market but in the petroleum market - the cartel participants actually admitted and said, “Yes, we’ve set the price.” That shows you the lack of understanding, that this behaviour disadvantages the consumer and anyone else who might want to enter that market, and only advantages you.

There is no way that a new entrant would come in a cartelised market, or a market dominated by a few or a single company. All these things have an impact, because you’re losing investment, the small businesses that you have may end up exiting the market, and they will not even know they’ve been forced out because of anti-competitive conduct. And consumers, when they see their prices go up, they’ll think, “Ah, maybe it’s inflation”, without realising that this is nothing to do with inflation but actually an anti-competitive conduct resulting in the exploitation of consumers.

That affects poverty reduction. We can see this as a chain reaction, because if SMEs leave the market, it means the people lose jobs, and therefore poverty increases. If the prices of the goods are too high, it means less money in people’s pockets, so poverty increases. And, remember, in African cities, food prices are on average more than 30% higher compared with low- and middle-income countries in other parts of the world. So those are the real life implications of anti-competitive behaviour.

Q: That’s really helpful. Thank you. What would you say are the sectors that are most affected by anti-competitive behaviour overall in Africa, and to how significant is this issue within food systems? Does it make up a big chunk of anti-competitive conduct, or is it just one of the many sectors where this happens?

A: Let’s go back again to the first question you asked. We spoke about the fact that most African countries were command economies. They have become a bit more liberalised, and brought in the private sector. But what has happened is that if there was one company in the sugar sector, you still have one company in the sugar sector. Only that this time, it is privately owned. So markets are still highly concentrated generally across the board, and there are very few players in most African countries, with a few exceptions.

Most of those players basically took over what government used to run, and now they’re in private hands.

In the food sector, we have identified that the sub-sectors that have been affected the most are the groceries, followed by beverages, dairy, fruit and vegetables, and then poultry and animal feed. These are the sectors where we’ve seen a lot of either anti-competitive conduct occurring or a lot of concentration happening. We have also observed such conduct in the fertiliser and the vegetable oils sub-sectors as well, but there are not as many concerns as the ones I just mentioned.

Q: I think that’s a good segue to the anti-monopoly tracker that you’ve been working on for a while now. Can you tell us a bit more about it, the analysis that you’ve been doing, what you’re trying to achieve, and what have been the key findings?

A: So we really wanted to track the cases that competition authorities have investigated or reviewed and finalised, and we use open source data. Basically, what’s on competition authorities’ websites or in newspapers. The idea is to highlight cases that authorities recently investigated or reviewed and concluded, and sharing that information with other authorities to see whether they also have similar cases in their jurisdiction.

For example, if we speak about mergers, you may have the same companies that are operating in two countries, but when they decide to merge, they may notify one authority and not the other. So the question is why?

We also wanted to highlight to those countries that do not have authorities or laws that this is what’s happening: this merger was notified in this country and they found it to be anti-competitive. So it’s more likely than not that the same thing is going to happen in your country, but because you do not have an authority, it means you’ve missed the opportunity to stop that conduct, and most likely they are going to engage in that conduct.

Or in a situation where a cartel has been identified as operating in one country, and the same companies are operating in another country. The likelihood of a cartel also occurring in the other country is very, very high.

It’s a question of saying, “Have you seen that the other country has busted a cartel? What are you doing about it?”

In our latest tracker, you will see that COMESA Competition Commission (CCC) actually had a settlement with Heineken because of their anti-competitive conduct: exclusive dealing arrangements, territorial restrictions, and all those things. Heineken is operating in other African countries, outside the COMESA region. So the likelihood of the company engaging in that exact practice is very, very high.

Another cartel was busted by the Competition Commission of South Africa on vegetable oils and one of the companies was the Willowton Group. This company has subsidiaries or influence in other countries like Zambia and Zimbabwe. Yet the Zambian and Zimbabwean Authorities did not take any action.

This means Zambian and Zimbabwean consumers are probably paying higher prices, while in South Africa, the enforcement resulted in a settlement where close to USD 10 million will now be used in public interest initiatives, provision of food products to non-profit groups and procurement from SMEs. So competition enforcement makes a big difference.

Q: Thank you for giving that Heineken example as well, because I was going to ask you for one or two concrete examples. The tracker also suggested that a third of competition matters could have cross border impacts but are not tackled, affecting at least 40 neighbouring countries that did not review the cases. So again, what are the impacts of this gap in the oversight? Are consumers having to pay more? Are companies getting away with whatever they want to do?

A: A merger can lead to a major change in market structure. If you have 10 companies and three of them merge, (the competition) is reduced to seven companies, right? And that gives the remaining companies more market power, or the market becomes highly concentrated. Because of that, the likelihood of anti-competitive conduct increases.

So missing a merger means we are missing an opportunity to actually have a say in the way the market is structured, and especially if you have a remedy, you miss that opportunity to actually influence how the market can operate and make it more competitive. It also gives (the companies) an opportunity to exploit consumers. Your small scale producers may end up exiting the market too, and that is not what you want because most African economies rely on them.

Not reviewing a merge also provides the merged firm or the companies that are remaining an opportunity to entrench themselves. Once they entrench themselves, they can engage in anti-competitive conduct which would ensure that no other company will enter that market. In the recent African Development Poultry Limited with HMH Kuku merger, COMESA was trying, to say, “You shall not engage in exclusive dealings and arrangements.” They were forewarning them from doing such a thing so that it allows other competitors to enter into the poultry market.

Enforcing an abuse of dominance after it has occurred is more strenuous than doing it beforehand.

Q: Speaking of mergers, one of the things the analysis noted in that there is a rise in terms of mergers in the grocery retail sector. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen news about greedflation and price fixing in the United States, where the grocery sector is extremely concentrated. Can you explain what is happening in Africa in terms of this sector? What’s driving this trend?

A: The analysis spoke more of what is happening in South Africa, but the same supermarket chain stores are elsewhere as well. These stores have become an important market for consumers to get their food, groceries, and everything else. The setup or the strategy of a chain store is that they are able to negotiate very low prices with the suppliers and then pass that down on to consumers because of their bulk purchases.

However, if they stop competing because of mergers, they will still negotiate very good prices with the manufacturers, but will they pass on those benefits to the consumers, especially if they have become a very important outlet for consumers to purchase their everyday food?

Over the years, these stores have gained importance in their role as a transit place from the farm up to the table. They are now basically controlling the entire value chain and because of this, there is a possibility of them engaging in anti-competitive conduct with the manufacturers, and at the same time disadvantaging the consumers by giving them anti-competitive pricing. So we are saying competition authorities should watch out for that.

We may have a situation where you have highly concentrated markets and consumers or farmers have nowhere to go. In Kenya, as a result of supermarket chains not paying small scale enterprises, they had to actually pass a law on buyer power. The Competition Authority of Kenya is currently enforcing this law.

Q: That’s really interesting because a lot of the time when competition authorities look at mergers or anti-competitive behaviour, the focus is on consumer welfare and there’s less scrutiny of upstream impacts. I just have one more question. Based on your experience and the findings from the anti-monopoly tracker, what would make the biggest difference in terms of closing this oversight gap?

A: The African Union, under the African Continental Free Trade Area, has set up a secretariat and there is a competition protocol. Essentially the idea is to have a continental competition authority because they recognise the fact that not all member states are keen to pass competition law, or even have a policy. So they passed this competition protocol which recognises regional laws and authorities as building blocks for the continental body.

First and foremost, advocacy is very, very important. You need to let all stakeholders know that it is important to have competition law. It’s not just about governments, it’s also about civil society, NGOs, and consumers understanding it.

Secondly, we need a policy and legal framework with an institution that is going to enforce it at national level. Not every conduct can be captured at the regional level so you need a national enforcement body.

The strength of the regional body depends on the ability of the national body, since it will always go back to the national authority to get feedback or data.

So you can see that the building blocks really need to start from the national level, then it goes to the regional, and then to the continental. However, I’m also aware that sometimes it is good to have a push from the regional or the continental level.

Thin’s Pickings

1. Good analyses on/in response to America’s new Dietary Guidelines

   Believe me when I say I’m as tired as the next person that the global news cycle and coverage revolve around what’s happening in the U.S. of A. Unfortunately the new guidelines are a big deal and the impacts of an American diet won’t be limited to within its borders. So here goes:

• Marion Nestle’s Food Politics should be your first port of call. She has been providing short and sharp insights on the guidelines, expanding from the initial verdict (“Cheerful, Muddled, Contradictory, Ideological, Retro”) to how they are about personal responsibility and not public health, the committee members’ blatant conflicts of interest, the misguided emphasis on meat, the lack of clarity over alcohol consumption, and some final thoughts.

• Helena Bottemiller Evich’s Food Fix is another good source. Some articles are behind a paywall but there are enough free articles.

• This handy explainer from Raychel Santo at World Resources Institute on how not all proteins are created equal and which have the lightest footprint.

• Emily Atkin’s observant take - as usual - asks an important question: If a nation’s diet requires ecological destruction to sustain it, can it really be called healthy?
  

2. The World Is in the Midst of an ‘Extreme’ Temperature Spike - Bloomberg

   “Last year was the third hottest on record, according to an analysis of temperature data released Wednesday by three independent agencies,” behind 2024 and 2023, Eric Roston reports. “What makes this result extraordinary, scientists say, is that 2025 saw a cooling phase in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, or La Niña, that suppresses global temperatures.”

3. Ten humanitarian trends to keep an eye on in 2026 - The New Humanitarian

   “From resurgent HIV to the global gender backlash, from deal-making replacing peacemaking to migration in a time of far-right populism, here are some of the key trends our editors are forecasting to shape humanitarian needs in 2026.”

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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If newsletters at the end of the year are full of reflections and top 10 lists, the first issue of the new year often looks ahead, forecasting key trends and issues.

Given what has already transpired just in the first 9 days of 2026 though, I’m not going to attempt at predicting anything. I’m not big on New Year resolutions either.

What I do hope to do is to set a tone for the year(s) ahead, personally as well as for Thin Ink, on how we can be active participants, not just passive recipients, amid the ever-increasing din of rancour, individualism, misogyny and xenophobia.

My name is Thin and I’m a foodie.

There. I said it.

I love everything that has to do with food: buying it, making it, eating it, watching it, planning for it, talking, reading and writing about it, investigating it. It gives me an enormous amount of joy.

My love language, in fact, is food: feeding others and taking pleasure in being fed. In many instances, a good meal has been a salve for a bruised soul.

Over the past few years, though, ambivalence crept in as the climate impacts of our diets became clearer, and the term “foodie” itself became a cringeworthy label associated with globe-trotting food porn, chasing an experience at the next best restaurant/bar/food stall, and documenting it all online.

I felt guilty for not becoming a vegetarian. I felt guilty for enjoying crisps instead of following the EAT-Lancet diet. I felt guilty for planning my holidays around meals.

I felt guilty despite knowing full well that we live within deeply unequal food systems, where my supposed “freedom” to choose what I buy or eat is, to a large extent, an illusion. I felt guilty despite constantly pointing out how a small number of powerful actors manipulate the system. I felt guilty despite warning other journalists to be wary of consumer-shaming and consumer-blaming narratives.

Then two encounters at the tail end of 2025 made me stop and REALLY reflect on all this.

The Sparks

The first was a heated argument that started with - what else? - U.S. politics.

The other party had lived there for a long time. They thought what was happening there wasn’t “that bad”, believed people shouldn’t be judged as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ because we are all shades of grey, and insisted dialogue was the solution. Fair enough. The latter two, in fact, are positions I usually admire.

But they also saw performing a Hitler salute in public, and aligning politically with groups sympathetic to Nazi values, as just another shade of grey. They argued that dismantling USAID was justifiable because it reflected the will of voters, and that American citizens are not responsible for solving the world’s problems. They were uninterested when I explained how many USAID policies benefited Americans themselves, diplomatically and financially.

When I got upset, I was told they were “just asking questions”, that I was being too emotional, and that by judging some people’s actions and rhetoric as racist, misogynistic, or climate-denying, I was simply trying to prove I was a better human.

I don’t usually engage in political arguments, especially if it’s online, because I rarely see the point. But I couldn’t let this go, particularly when they suggested there was little real-world harm in how the current occupant of the White House and its acolytes were behaving. Obviously, this was before Venezuela, though I doubt it would have changed their view.

We ultimately parted on good-ish terms but it really left a bitter aftertaste. It also gave me a sobering insight into why things are the way they are.

As Carolyn Hax once put it, “Misogyny and racism are not “political disagreements,” they’re crap values”. I genuinely don’t know how to explain to people who see these as valid political positions that they are not.

The second spark was an Instagram video I came across a couple of days later. The first 40 seconds made me laugh out loud, and then wince in recognition, because I’ve seen versions of this argument over and over again.

It was a video by Scottish comedian Daniel Sloss, poking fun at how parts of left-wing and progressive spaces undermine themselves by insisting on moral and consumer purism. This is a dynamic that’s unfortunately very familiar to anyone engaged in debates about consumption, food, and climate.

I realised that this, in some ways, was exactly what I had been accused of in that earlier argument. But I see these two things very differently.

To me, refusing to tolerate racism, authoritarianism, or climate denial is not the same as demanding moral perfection from individuals navigating broken systems.

The former is about drawing non-negotiable lines around harm and power, the latter is about recognising that most of us are doing the best we can with limited choices, imperfect information, and unequal constraints.

These are two very different phenomena that should not be conflated. Unfortunately, they often get conflated and the resulting confusion, I’ve come to believe, is making us harder on one another at precisely the moment we need more grace and more collective courage.

Welcome to the real Big Tent

So yes, I’m a foodie, and I am still a long way away from where I would ideally like to be.

I love white rice, duck, bacon, comté, and chicken wings, usually in that order. I also love octopus, despite knowing it is supposed to be one of the smartest animals on earth.

I don’t eat nearly enough pulses. I need to get better at reading labels, like the time I proudly bought asparagus at a farmer’s market, only to realise later it had travelled halfway around the world. This is not always a problem (see here) but shouldn’t be the norm.

But I am trying. For much of the past year, I’ve made sure there’s a vegetarian dish whenever and wherever we eat, whether as a side or a main. I eat more seasonal and more fruit. I already love nuts, and I’m lucky enough to be able to afford them.

I last ate a burger four weeks ago and steak eight weeks ago. I think summer was the last time I ate lamb. I used to feel intense guilt about eating ruminants; now I’ve made peace with both the frequency of my consumption and the fact that I may never become a vegetarian.

I do 80% of my grocery shopping at the farmers’ market (I’m lucky enough to live in a place where having one within walking distance is perfectly normal), stock up a lot of dried foods at the store that doesn’t use plastic packaging, and support local, artisanal brands whenever I can.

And yes, I fly quite a bit for work. In 2025, that meant four intercontinental flights plus multiple regional ones. So I try to reduce the impact where possible. Do I really need to be there? Can I take the train instead, even if it’s slower or more expensive? When at home, we almost always walk or rely on public transport. When we do drive, we go electric.

I’m not saying any of this to shame you. That is the furthest thing from my mind. This is simply me being honest about where I am, and where I want to be. Go at your own pace.

The key point is this: rejecting purism does not mean rejecting responsibility.

Yes, the systems are skewed and inequality is stark, but we can still do our part, to the fullest extent that we can, whenever we can. Not everyone has the same resources, choices, or room to manoeuvre.

Take Sacramento, the state capital of California.

I was there three summers ago with 10 other folks working in the climate and conservation space. Our hotel didn’t offer breakfast and since we were staying a few days, some of them decided to buy fruit they could eat each morning. I stayed behind to meet deadlines.

When they returned nearly three hours later, they explained why it took so long. Shop after shop they visited had full shelves but almost exclusively of ultra-processed foods and ready-made meals. It took nearly 90 minutes of walking to find a supermarket large enough to sell fresh produce.

This is what people mean by food deserts (where fresh food is hard to find) and food swamps (where unhealthy food options overwhelmingly outnumber healthy ones).

I’m reminded, too, of a conversation I once had with a public health expert in Myanmar. She explained how a key driver of maternal mortality is the lack of a nutritious diet, particularly in rural areas. Poverty and tradition often leave families relying almost entirely on rice and a handful of vegetables, with too few dark leafy greens or protein sources.

So what we need is the real Big Tent.

A tent where anyone who wants to see fairer, greener, and healthier food systems are welcome, even if they eat meat, fly, drive, enjoy shopping, or haven’t figured it all out yet. It’s about inclusion but there’s integrity too.

It should not be confused with the “Big Tent” of mutistakeholderism, which treats corporate actors with deep pockets and immense political power as equivalent to civil society groups, marginalised communities, and smallscale food producers who are poor, hungry, or both.

Collective Grace & Collective Courage

At the same time, those of us with voices, platforms, and access must push for change at a higher level, because staying safe and healthy is not merely an individual responsibility. It is a political one too.

This is why I remain committed to amplifying the work of journalists, activists, farmers, academics, public officials who are fighting for better food systems, often against overwhelming odds.

As Sofia DeMartino wrote in this blistering piece on food policies in the United States:

“In a most nonsensical exploration of how far we can take the concept of “personal responsibility”, we tell people to meditate, hydrate, read labels, log steps, manage stress, overhaul their diets - meanwhile the policies shaping their actual health outcomes are being quietly dismantled or blocked in Congress.”

So yes, I’m reclaiming the foodie label.

And I’ll leave you with this quote from a wonderful recent essay by Alicia Kennedy that I came across while writing this. It perfectly encapsulates how I feel, what I want to be, and where we can go.

“There’s a fundamental tension at the heart of foodie culture: everyone must eat, making food more universal than music or theater - yet class inequities shape how we do it, turning appetite into a marker of status. This is precisely why the term matters. Unlike other cultural identities, the foodie sits at the intersection of necessity and privilege, with the potential to bridge this divide - or to further entrench it.”

Thin’s Pickings - Bumper Edition

1. Who Was the Foodie? What it would mean to take taste seriously again - The Yale Review

   Recommending this piece again here in addition to the mention above because I love it and you really should read it.

   Thank you Alicia Kennedy for articulating about this so eloquently, and for introducing me to two more books I must read this year.
   

2. One nation ultra-processed - The Gazette

   Another one I’m re-recommending here. There’s so much good stuff in this short piece that I just want to quote it all the time.
   

3. Things are falling apart: where to look for leadership? - System Change

   Ann Petitfor’s most personal and inspirational piece so far.
   

4. Our Former Restaurant Critic Changed His Eating Habits. You Can, Too. - The New York Times

   Great to see Pete Wells writing again and looking forward to reading more.
   

5. Venezuela: The Precedents - Thinking about…

   Timothy Snyder, the OG on tyranny, gives us an important history lesson about four precedents that prceded the capture and extraction of Nicolás Maduro.
   

6. Indian law enforcement targets climate activists accused of opposing fossil fuels - Climate Home News

   A chilling read by Joe Lo on the arrest of veteran climate advocate Harjeet Singh and the targeting of environmentalists by the Indian government.
   

7. Ban on TV junk food advertising before 9pm comes into force in UK - The Guardian

   The UK is finally ushering in long overdue rules on junk food advertisements, although the extensive list of exceptions - like allowing brand ads as long as a product is not shown - is infuriating health advocates. In a separate editorial, The Guardian wrote that shaping children’s taste is “a job for government”.
   

8. EU out in the cold

   The continent is in the grip of a cold snap but life is warm and cosy for the industry which won multiple battles on food and pharmaceuticals (Politico) and deforestation (The Guardian) in late 2025.
   

9. How do you solve a problem like… the United States?

   There was the withdrawal from 66 international bodies.
   And the new dietary guidelines at first glance seem contrary to sustainability goals and is a mixed bag even for health outcomes. See diverging views here and here, and as usual, both Marion Nestle and Alan Matthews have great insights.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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2025 feels like both the longest and shortest I’ve experienced so far, for reasons personal, professional, and related to the general state of the world.

As usual, Thin Ink will be taking a two-week break over the year-end holidays, which makes this the final issue of 2025.

Ever since I’ve started this little newsletter, the last - or second to last - issue has tended to take on a more personal hue: how cooking the food of my childhood sustained me during COVID lockdowns, how Myanmar’s involuntary exiles bond through food and memory, my family’s story of fleeing from war and rebuilding, and the heroes from Myanmar who chose to make food instead of war.

This one is in a similar vein, but also comes with suggestions of things to read and watch during the break, if you feel like it.

Here’s to a fairer, greener, and healthier 2026!

Many moons ago, I vividly remember standing in front of a Singaporean immigration officer who was taking longer than usual to scrutinise my Burmese passport.

I had already become inured to long waits at immigration desks around the world, to the point where I never travelled without a thick stack of documents: flight and hotel bookings, bank statements, and anything else that might prove I was entering a country legitimately and could be trusted to leave again. I made sure to look presentable, smile often, respond politely, and regularly turn around to mouth “sorry” to the growing line of travellers behind me.

Even by those standards, this officer was taking a long time.

Eventually, he looked up, pointed to the air bubbles forming under the plastic covering of my personal information page, and said something along the lines of, “You know, some people would suspect that this was a counterfeit passport”.

Admittedly, the flimsy booklet looked like it had been printed in someone’s garage, with the vital details scrawled in handwriting. I also suspect the plastic was glued on manually. Myanmar passports didn’t become machine-readable until 2010.

My response, accompanied by a rueful smile, was:

“Who would fake a Burmese passport?”

He paused, laughed, stamped an empty page, and waved me through. I remain grateful to this day that he had both a sense of humour and a logical mind.

The Crimson Passport

Over the course of my life and career as a globe-trotting journalist, I experienced many more encounters like this.

There was the time at Niamey airport in Niger when check-in staff were suspicious that Myanmar was even a country, let alone one whose citizens could travel visa-free to Rwanda. It took the intervention of another journalist (European and male) to resolve the situation.

Or Bogotá, Colombia, where I was the last person on my flight to clear immigration, despite having a valid visa. The officers didn’t ask me any questions, they simply conferred among themselves for nearly half an hour, bringing in more people as they leafed through my passport again and again, front to back.

Out of 199 countries, the Myanmar passport is currently ranked 177th, between Congo and Liberia, according to the Passport Index. I’m sure it ranked even lower when I began working as a journalist, before the visa-free framework within the bloc of Southeast Asian nations (ASEAN) was fully in place.

Still, I stubbornly held on to my crimson passport, despite the hassle, stress, and anxiety it induced before every trip. It was part of my identity and my family’s identity too. It also came in handy when foreign journalists couldn’t enter or travel freely within Myanmar. I could just rock up to the airport and fly home, hyperventilating most of the way.

In fact, I wore it almost as armour, and as a point of pride: I had no other passport, yet I made it work as an international correspondent.

So it was terribly bittersweet when I realised I had to give it up and seek the protection of another country.

I had heard one too many stories of friends - journalists and human rights activists - who were unable to renew their passports. Some were never given a reason. Since applicants must surrender their old passports, they were left with no travel documents at all. Others were told outright that they would not be issued new ones.

In my case, I also had the “wrong type” of passport and changing it would have required returning to Myanmar.

Given the military junta’s well-documented hostility for both independent journalism and Myanmar Now, the news agency I helped set up a decade ago, combined with my own writing and outspokenness before and after the coup, returning was out of the question.

My passport was also nearing expiry. If I wanted to continue living and working legally anywhere, I had to act.

On the Other Side of the Queue

What followed were nine months of relentless paperwork and uncertainty, with no guarantee of success. I was incredibly fortunate to have unconditional support from loved ones, and to be considered by a country that is outward-looking and whose politics are still grounded in a strong social-democratic tradition.

There were tears of joy and relief as well as sadness when we found out Icelandic lawmakers granted me citizenship.

Last month, I travelled to Southeast Asia with my shiny new blue passport. It’s a journey I’ve made many times since moving to Europe nearly a decade ago, but for perhaps the first time in my life, no one questioned why I was visiting. I didn’t have to produce extra documents to justify my stay. In fact, I was granted more days than I needed.

Towards the end of my trip, I met with exiled Myanmar newsrooms I’d been supporting, as I always do whenever I’m in the region. Alongside story ideas and worries about the impending funding collapse, the dominant topic was visa renewals and the labyrinth of uncertainty that comes with them.

Listening to them discuss, worry, and strategise for Plans A, B, C, D, and beyond was discombobulating.

I’d been there. For many years. And now, suddenly, I wasn’t.

I don’t think I fully appreciated the mental load of carrying a passport that invites scrutiny; that requires advanced visas for most destinations; that turns routine immigration appointments into nerve-wrecking ordeals. Or of being a citizen of a country where your government actively wants to harm you.

I only truly noticed the weight of it once it was gone.

I’ve always been conscious of how an accident of birth has given me a head start in life: being born into an affluent family in a desperately poor country, being raised by people who believed in education and woman’s rights, and being exposed early to the diversity of the world.

Now, I hope that the mental space once consumed by worries over passports and residency can be redirected to more useful efforts, whether exposing wrongdoing and structural failures in food systems, or supporting journalists and newsrooms working under extraordinary pressure.

Hopefully both.

Wish me luck!

Thin’s Pickings

1. World Food and Agriculture (Statistical Yearbook 2025) - FAO

   This is the report for anyone wanting to nerd out on food and agricultural data.

   It presents statistics in four thematic chapters: the economic dimensions of agriculture; inputs, outputs, and trade; food security and nutrition; and sustainability and environment aspects.

   The digital version presents key data in a way that’s eye-catching, interactive, and easy to understand (see below).

   

2. Spotlight on Grocery Shopping in the U.S.

   Robert Reich zeroed in on what he calls the deceptive pricing strategy of Kroger, America’s second largest grocer, in a zippy 4-minute video that is chock-full of information.

   More Perfect Union and Consumer Reports teamed up to investigate how Instacart is using algorithmic pricing to charge customers different prices for the same items in this eye-opening 18-minute documentary.
   Errol Schweizer’s last issue of 2025 also focused on this topic, specifically on how Pepsico and Walmart Rigged Grocery Prices based on newly unsealed court documents.

3. The Kanabi Killings - Lighthouse Reports

   This investigation by colleagues at LHR and CNN focused on the violence carried out by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) against the Kanabi, a farming community in al Jazira state made up largely of non-Arab, Black Sudanese descent. They uncovered extensive evidence of ethnic violence, mass killings, and dumping of bodies into mass graves and canals.

   Both warring parties - the SAF and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) - have ravaged the country, parts of which are currently suffering from famine. RSF’s atrocities are well-documented, to the point where it has been accused of war crimes and genocide. The SAF’s conduct has received less scrutiny.

   Advance warning that this is both hard to watch and read, but is also a critical piece of journalism for providing crucial evidence of wrongdoing by the SAF.

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Much of the focus has been on the US’s National Security Strategy saying the quiet part out loud about where it wants Europe to be: racist, weak, and, appeasing to dictators and warmongers.

Everyone from European politicians, think-tanks, news outlets and commentators have weighed in with varying levels of outrage and reflection.

A very public rupture in a long running alliance is of course, a major geopolitical moment.

Still, the EU institutions have been digging their own graves when it comes to policies that would ensure its ability not just to survive but thrive in the long run. Their new stance on food, climate, and environmental policy runs directly counter to what’s needed.

So this week, I’m focusing on three interesting reports that came out in November that looks at three important and overlapping aspects of food systems in the EU: how our consumption on the continent affects biodiversity elsewhere, where we are with agricultural emissions and what needs to be done, and why we should reconsider competition rules.

In the past two weeks, the EU has postponed a landmark legislation to curb deforestation, is considering loosening rules on pesticide approvals, weakened environmental protection, and relaxed regulations around gene-edited crops.

Just to be clear: I’m not against new technology that will improve crop resilience under increasing climate pressures, but I think foods produced using those methods should be clearly labelled, something that will not happen under the latest agreement. The other big issue I have is with the way intellectual property rights are weaponised around these “new, improved” seeds.

In pretty much all of the instances mentioned above, the centre-right European People’s Party, the largest bloc in the parliament, teamed up with far-right political parties, to get its way, environment and food systems be damned. This has been a recurring pattern all year.

I’ve written ad nauseam in this newsletter about the very real environmental and food systems challenges that Europe, the fastest-warming continent on earth, is facing. But short-term political myopia continues to trump long-term survival.

In these situations, it’s easy and normal to feel that providing more information and data is futile. But then again, I am nothing if not stubborn and steadfastly hold on to my motto: “If we give up, they win”. Besides, I like to think conscientious consumers do want to know.

So here goes another issue.

Can we consume better?

“Towards nature-friendly consumption: Biodiversity impacts and policy options for shrimp, soy, and palm oil” is a report by Germany’s Federal Agency for Nature Conservation. At nearly 100 pages of text, it is fairly long, but the 7-page executive summary is well worth a read.

It touched on three key commodities imported by the EU, two of which fall under the deforestation law, known as the EUDR. The law itself came about because of increasing awareness that consumption in the EU significantly contributes to the destruction of forests that are critical to both carbon storage and ecosystems in far-flung nations.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, according to the report.

“Biodiversity loss is not an inevitable consequence of consumption but rather a result of political and economic decisions. This study demonstrates that with coordinated, equity-focused policies, the EU can meaningfully reduce its global biodiversity footprint and contribute to fairer, more sustainable lifestyles.”

This study is focused on how EU demand for shrimp, soy, and palm oil leads to biodiversity loss elsewhere.

Shrimp

The EU’s third most-consumed seafood. Imports have risen by 60% over the past decade given we can’t produce much of it here. Nearly half of the imports come from Ecuador, followed by Vietnam, Venezuela, and India.

Around half of EU shrimp imports are farmed, and the expansion of shrimp ponds – especially in the tropics – have replaced mangrove forests, which are biodiversity hotspots that also double up natural storm barriers.

Ecuador has made significant efforts to address this over the past decades but “aquaculture-linked deforestation remains widespread in Southeast Asia, which supplies about 32% of the EU shrimp market”. In addition, outcomes of mangrove restoration have been mixed.

Further concerns of aquaculture’s impact on biodiversity include waste management, antibiotic use, and the production of feed inputs such as soy and fishmeal.

The land footprint of European shrimp consumption in 2018 alone is estimated to be nearly twice the size of Luxembourg, and the authors suggested three key policies.

1. Reduce demand.

2. Improve the sustainability of farmed shrimp, perhaps through eco-labels and certifications, which, despite potential, are not widespread, expensive, and vary in credibility.

3. Reinforce sustainability through trade policy, including by improving biodiversity-related clauses in EU Free Trade Agreements which currently remain vague and unenforceable.

Soy

Invisible to most consumers but central to livestock production. Domestic soybean production is small - less than 1% of global output - so again, the EU is reliant on imports, primarily from Brazil (67%) and Argentina (28%).

“Most EU-imported soy is processed into soybean meal for animal feed, accounting for roughly 29% of EU animal feed protein.”

For the year 2023, more than a third of the soy imported came from the Cerrado, followed by the Atlantic Forest (24%), the Amazon (16%), the Pampas (12%), and the Chaco (10%).

The Brazilian Cerrado is the second-largest ecosystem in South America, after the Amazon rainforest and the most species-rich savanna in the world.

“Soy is mostly cultivated in monocultures with intensive input of agrochemicals – particularly glyphosate-based herbicides linked to genetically modified soy, which comprises over 90% of EU imports.”

Yes, glyphosate, the controversial and widely-used herbicide produced by Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) that kills most plants to which it is applied and which the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Also, in case you missed, a key paper that was used to vouch for the chemical’s safety was retracted last week - 25 years after it was published - because it turned out that Monsanto ghostwrote it.

“In 2022, EU soy imports triggered the estimated conversion of 125,000 hectares of land in Brazil alone, nearly half the size of Luxembourg.”

Reducing these impacts means the EU “needs to confront its own structural drivers, especially high levels of livestock production and meat consumption”. For context, in 2022, per capita meat consumption in the EU stood at 78kg, compared to the global average of 44 kg.

The report made three other policy recommendations.

1. Reform the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), which currently allocates around 80% of its subsidies directly or indirectly to livestock farming.

2. Introduce fiscal policy tools. A well-designed reform of value-added tax (VAT), in particular, could reduce environmental impacts by ~6% and save €5.3 billion in climate costs in Germany alone.

3. Promote behavioural change by improving the public’s understanding of the link between soy, meat, and biodiversity loss.

Palm Oil

Its role in deforestation is well-documented. It also happens to be the most widely used vegetable oil in the world, appearing in everything from chocolate bars and ready-made meals to cosmetics and cleaning products. It can also be used as a biofuel or as a base for paints, plastics, and coatIngs.

Palm oil imports to the EU are predominantly from Indonesia (43%) and Malaysia (24%). With the phase-out of palm-oil biofuels under the Renewable Energy Directive II (RED II), food is probably the most significant use of palm oil within the EU nowadays.

Also, new threats are emerging, like the draining of peatlands to grow monoculture palm oil plantations that support only a fraction of the species found in intact tropical forests.

“These areas – home to endemic species like orangutans and hosting rich assemblages of birds, fish, and mammals – are being destroyed at an alarming rate.

“Peatland emissions are particularly severe: despite accounting for only 14% of plantations, they contribute 92% of greenhouse gas emissions from Indonesia’s palm oil sector, the equivalent of one-fifth of the country’s total emissions.”

The report recommends four policies.

1. Recognise that substituting palm oil with lower-yielding crops such as coconut or soybeans can be counterproductive by increasing land conversions.

2. Continue and further strengthen regulatory instruments such as the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive (RED).

3. Improve the credibility of certification schemes and leverage public procurement to drive change.

4. Enhance consumer awareness with more targeted and nuanced communication.

“A coherent EU policy mix is required to align consumption with biodiversity objectives, integrating voluntary, market-based, fiscal, regulatory, and trade instruments,” the report said. In fact, it is the second line in the executive summary.

“The rollback of sustainability policies and the fragmentation of governance underline the urgent need for coherent and ambitious action on biodiversity,” it added in later pages.

The fact that EU lawmakers and politicians decided to postpone and weaken the EUDR weeks after this study came out suggests this key ingredient continues to be missing.

Agricultural emissions *can* be slashed

Reading “Residual emissions in EU agriculture” from the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) reminded me of recent comments by a livestock veteran that left me gobsmacked.

Referring to the greenhouse gas emissions heating up our planet and food and farming’s role in exacerbating its build up in the atmosphere, he said something along the lines of:

“We must remember that our role is to feed people, not to reduce emissions.”

Will there even be that many mouths to feed if the planet becomes that much harder to live on because of climate-related weather catastrophes?

I’ve noticed this is a position of many people in the food and agriculture sector: elevating the production of food to such a moral high ground that it trumps pretty much everything else.

Already, agriculture is the largest source of global emissions of methane (CH₄) - 56% - and nitrous oxide (N₂O) - 74%. These two greenhouse gases have significantly higher warming potential than CO₂.

In the EU, non-CO₂ emissions from agriculture currently account for 12% of the EU’s total net emissions, including 56% of all CH₄ and 74% of all N₂O in the bloc.

“We will never be able to eradicate emissions from agriculture” is a frequent refrain, pointing to this concept of “residual emissions” which are considered difficult or impossible to eliminate. While not totally wrong, it is also not entirely right. It’s used as an excuse to do little to slash agriculture-related emissions.

This report, however, found otherwise: EU agriculture can slash emissions by 25% - 59% by 2050 and also deliver climate, environmental, and health benefits.

It focused on some of the largest emission sources including livestock enteric fermentation, manure management, and nitrous oxide emissions from agricultural soils.

“Although agriculture is not currently the largest sectoral contributor to the EU’s total GHG emissions, it is projected to become the dominant source by 2040, as other sectors decarbonise more rapidly.”

The authors looked at four different scenarios and models that have been developed to envision where EU agriculture will be in mid-century. They used different analytical approaches and adopted different assumptions, and results in varying levels of emission reduction.

Unsurprisingly, a reduction in animal protein together with the deployment of mitigation technologies result in the most ambitious levels of emission reduction. It also identified technology such as nitrification inhibitors in synthetic fertiliser and feed additives as a key enabler, despite questions over trade-offs and scale.

The report is really quite wonky so if you don’t have the energy to wade through technical language, this blog by Mathieu Mal from the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) provides a good overview.

We need to stronger and stricter merger controls

“Agriculture is benefiting less and less from rising food prices,” Germany’s Monopolies Commission concluded in a special report on “Competition in the Food Supply Chain” which noted four key trends:

1. Significant increase in market concentration over the last two decades.

2. Increasing average profit margins of retailers and manufacturers.

3. Higher consumers food prices, especially compared to other EU countries.

4. Farmers often earning the same or less despite high retail prices.

It is recommending halting the ongoing concentration in the retail sector, putting in place stricter merger controls, and scrutinising future mergers more closely to assess their impact on the entire supply chain, pointing to how mergers over the past few years have resulted in around 85% of the food retail sector being controlled by just four groups: Edeka, Rewe, Schwarz, and Aldi.

“The power of food retailers and, in some cases, manufacturers has increased significantly at the expense of consumers, while agriculture is often exposed to global market risks,” said Tomaso Duso, Chairman of the Commission, an independent advisory body to the German federal government.

The analysis focused on three supply chains that account for a large part of the value added of agricultural products: milk, meat and cereals. In all three levels, increasing concentration is affecting them.

Milk: International price quotations for raw milk usually determine what dairy farmers can get, but they have to pay for key inputs like feed and energy at prices determined at the national level. This has led to a growing decoupling between costs and producer prices.
In addition, retail prices for dairy products have risen significantly faster than producer prices in recent years. Even when producer prices fell, the prices of dairy products in supermarkets did not follow suit.

Pork and Beef: Because producer organisations for livestock and meat play a big role in how much farmers get, they have been able to maintain their negotiating position vis-à-vis the downstream market stages to a certain extent.
However, market concentration at these stages has recently increased significantly too, reaching a level “that raises competition concerns, particularly in slaughtering and processing”.
With retail companies now operating their own production facilities and strengthening their bargaining power in price negotiations, there is an increasing shift in profit margins from the producer level to the downstream levels.

Cereals: Producer prices for cereals are largely determined by developments on the world markets. Overall, competition appears to be more intense at the downstream stages than in the other supply chains considered, but there are signs of increasing market concentration in some stages.

“The high level of concentration in many areas is concerning from a competition perspective. The remaining competition in supply chains must therefore be protected as a matter of urgency – particularly in food retail, where further market concentration should be avoided, as well as in some areas of food manufacturing and, last but not least, in the increasingly integrated, vertical relationships between these two stages.”

“Merger control should take the entire supply chain into account. In the opinion of the Monopolies Commission, the approach taken to date focuses too narrowly on effects at individual stages. Mergers that have damaged competition across the entire supply chain have not been sufficiently prevented to date.”

“The process of concentration in the food retail sector should not continue at the manufacturer level. Otherwise, there is a risk that margins at these two levels will increase at the expense of agriculture and consumers.”

The full report is in German but there is an English-language 6-page executive summary.

Thin’s Pickings

1. Glyphosate

   AgFunder’s Jennifer Marston wrote about the retraction of “a widely cited “hallmark” paper on the safety of glyphosate-based chemical herbicides” and the interesting story of how it came about.
   Marion Nestle has a good round-up with links to many other stories and historical context.

2. Why are famous chefs fighting PFAS bans? - Heated
   Emily Atkin and Miranda Green dig into the perplexing positions of celebrity chefs like Rachael Ray, David Chang, Thomas Keller, and Marcus Samuelsson, all of whom fought against a bill aiming to phase out the sale of nonstick pans made with a type of PFAS “forever chemical”.
   It’s the age-old story of profits before anything else, I’m afraid.

3. How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails - New York Times

   Not related to food systems but thought-provoking read from Anand Giridharadas, author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World”.
   ”At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.”

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If you know early-career professionals with less than five years of experience who are interested in investigative journalism, we have two fellowship opportunities: one for OSINT and one for general reporting.

These are paid, part-time, six-month positions to apply by January 2. Please use the links above rather than contacting me directly; everything I know is already in the listings.

However, if you have specific questions, we’re organising two webinars:

• Tuesday 9 Dec at 10am CET, sign up here

• Thursday 11 Dec at 3pm CET, sign up here

In “Famines as Failures of Exchange Entitlements”, published August 1976 in the journal Economic and Political Weekly, the great Amatya Sen made a novel argument: famines can arise from causes other than not having enough food to go around, or “food availability decline”.

Sen referred to the then-dominant explanation for why mass starvation occurred as “FAD”.

He pointed to how the 1943 Bengal Famine occurred even though food availability per capita “was not substantially different” from previous years. The disaster was not caused by a shortage of food, he said, but by a collapse in what he called people’s “exchange entitlements” - their ability to access food through wages, prices, and social rights.

Despite the wonky title, this short paper fundamentally changed how we understand famine: from an event that happens due to a natural or production failure to a failure of political economy, inequality, and governance.

Sen expanded these arguments in later work, especially his 1981 book Poverty and Famines. In a Mar 1977 piece for the Cambridge Journal of Economics, he wrote:

“In an exchange economy, whether a family will starve or not will depend on what it has to sell, whether it can sell them, and at what prices, and also on the price of food.

“An economy in a state of comparative tranquillity may develop a famine if there is a sudden shake-up of the system of rewards for exchange of labour, commodities and other possessions, even without a ‘sudden, sharp reduction in the food supply.”

Half a century later, it seems we must reiterate his arguments yet again.

This week’s issue grows out of a presentation I gave at GIJC two weeks ago, where I tried to puncture persistent myths about hunger and malnutrition. The four below are the most stubborn.

Myth 1: ⬆️ Agricultural Productivity = ⬆️ Food Security

Why more food doesn’t mean less hunger

The biggest myth is that hunger persists because we aren’t producing enough food—and that increasing yields will automatically increase food security.

But decades of data tell a different story.

Take the charts below from Our World in Data on global production of staple crops and meat over the last 50 years: output climbs steadily, year after year.

Now, compare them to these charts below, which I produced using numbers from FAOSTAT.

Despite enormous increases in agricultural productivity (and major technological advances), the global share of people going hungry today is roughly the same as a decade ago. Severe food insecurity - people regularly going without food - has actually worsened.

Also important to note: global averages can mask chronic shortages in specific areas.

The point is simple: agricultural productivity isn’t a good indicator of hunger. Availability is only one of four pillars of food insecurity yet we continue to fixate on it.

FYI, FAOSTAT is a data portal from the UN food and agriculture agency FAO. It has a list of indicators on food insecurity, overweight, obesity, dependency on food imports, at global, regional, and country levels going back to the year 2000.

Myth 2: We need to produce as much food as possible to avoid hunger.

I call this “hunger washing”.

In the GIJN guide to investigating food insecurity, I warned journalists to be wary “when politicians and profiteers seize on the fear of food shortages and the specter of hunger to push for certain policies that often oversimplify or misrepresent the causes of food insecurity”.

“For example, proponents often call for the expansion of industrial agriculture, boost the use of controversial technologies such as genetic modification and scrap environmental regulations and policies as ways to “feed the world.”

“They ignore deeper issues such as poverty, inequality, conflict, or poor governance that actually drive hunger. Similarly, political leaders may use hunger narratives to deflect responsibility or to garner support for trade deals, subsidies, or interventions that primarily serve powerful interests.”

There are two simple things we can look into when someone says, “We must grow more food to avert hunger”.

Where does it actually go?

1. As food for humans, feed for animals, fuel for industrial usage, or for processing?

2. Is it for domestic consumption or as high-value export?

Myth 3: ⬆️ Economic Growth = ⬇️ Hunger & Malnutrition

Development does not guarantee better nutrition.

Let’s look at the trajectory of four countries at very different stages of development - Cambodia, Kenya, Germany, and the United States. These charts again used FAOSTAT data.

Hunger is very low and stable in the US and Germany (less than 2.5%). Cambodia has reduced hunger dramatically. Kenya is moving in the opposite direction.

Yet all four countries struggle with multiple forms of malnutrition, including obesity, overweight children, and anaemia. In fact, the only country that hasn’t seen a rise is anaemia is Cambodia where nearly 1 in 2 women were already suffering from it.

So regardless of hunger levels, countries of varying economic development are dealing with multiple forms of malnutrition.

Myth 4: Malnutrition = Not Eating Enough

Quantity ≠ quality.

The technical term “undernutrition” is used to describe chronic hunger. So many people think that eating too much and gaining weight means a person is “overnourished”.

In reality, malnutrition includes undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies (a lack of key vitamins and minerals needed for our bodies to function properly and be healthy), overweight and obesity.

Poor diets - often high in cheap, ultra-processed foods and lacking nutrients - are a key driver of malnutrition. See Thin Ink two issues back.

Countries are now struggling with “multiple burdens of malnutrition” where the different facets coexist in the same households, communities, and national populations.

Thin’s Pickings

1. Seeds: celebrations in Kenya, unease in Europe

   Kenya’s High Court ruled on Nov 28 that part of a law banning the the traditional practice of sharing local seeds was unconstitutional, according to Reuters.

   Small-scale farmers celebrated the verdict, which stemmed from a court challenge against the 2012 “Seed and Plant Varieties Act”. Under the law, anyone who saved uncertified seeds from their crops, then sold or shared them, could face fines or jail.

   The law in Kenya is part of a global trend where the intellectual property claims over seeds often take precedence over farmers’ rights. Read more about this in a previous issue.

   A similar debate is playing out in Europe, where lawmakers have been locked in intense negotiations for months on loosening rules on the use of new genetic technologies in plant breeding.

   Patents are proving to be a major political fault line, and ARC’s Natasha Foote gives a great overview of what’s at stake.

2. American Journalism: Scandals and Standards

   Writing about the messy entanglement between Olivia Nuzzi, Ryan Lizza and Robert F Kennedy Jr, Marina Hyde quipped that “nothing on this earth takes itself as seriously as American journalism” and perhaps they should just learn to enjoy a good scandal.

   But I find myself agreeing more with two other columnists who called out this gossipy sex scandal for what it is: a case of serious journalistic malpractice.

   Margaret Sullivan placed her brief criticism of Nuzzi’s behaviour within a broader pattern of troubling newsroom conduct.

   Michelle Goldberg delivered a longer, sharper analysis of Nuzzi’s “grave professional betrayal”.

   If you don’t recognise these names, you’re lucky. I also don’t mean to claim journalism is nobler than any other profession. But the misconduct - and lack of consequences - is so blatant that it is breathtaking, though not in a good way.

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The journo meet-up in Kuala Lumpur was defiant, inspiring, and exhilarating. From breakfast to supper, over 16-hour days, we exchanged ideas on how to hold power to account under increasingly challenging political and financial landscapes. Climate and fossil fuels were key themes. Food systems weren’t as present as I’d like, but hey, this is the story of my life.

Just as the GIJC was wrapping up, I received a flurry of emails informing me that the discussions to save humanity were bought back from the brink at the last minute.

So I wanted to reflect on these two parallel events before going on a short but much-needed break. Wish me luck.

P.S. - This issue and next week’s will arrive in your inboxes earlier because I’m still in SE Asia.

Food: Plenty Yet Invisible

“There’s so much food. They keep feeding us.”

Usually said in awed tones, this was a common refrain I heard from foreign journalists again and again over the course of the conference.

Southeast Asian journalists, including yours truly, took the comments with grins and chests swelled with pride.

“This is how we do it. We can’t let our guests go hungry.”

There were morning sessions that provided breakfasts of beautifully prepared quiches, bite-sized sandwiches, curry puffs, and an assortment of drinks.

There were multiple tea and coffee breaks with trays of vegetarian and non-vegetarian snacks, sweets, and more substantial eats. One break featured Japanese-style fried rice (with mushroom or chicken), vegetarian samosas with a tomato relish, deep-fried meat balls, and jewelled-toned local sweets called kueh made with glutinous rice, tubers, flour, coconut milk, and palm sugar.

Then there were lunches - the obligatory long buffet table laden with at least half a dozen dishes of meat, fish, vegetables, and rice, plus individual stations serving bowls of hot noodle soups or one-dish meals, as well as fruits and desserts.

So yes, the foreign journalists were right. There WAS a lot of food.

On the other hand, I also had people come up to me and say something along the lines of, “The work you’re doing is so interesting. It’s also quite niche, isn’t it?”

I find it fascinating that despite the critical role food plays in our daily existence - all of us have to eat every day, even multiple times a day - we take it completely for granted to the point where investigating the forces that shape our food systems is considered ‘niche’.

Perhaps that also explains why there were only two panels during the main conference days that touched on aspects of food systems: global health under siege (the only session under “health & medicine” category) and investigating world hunger (under “human rights” category and where I was a speaker).

On the other side of the world, the food in Belém sounded delicious, healthy, and planet-friendly.

There were acai berry dishes and regional juices prepared from cupuaçu, cacao and acerola, with nearly a third sourced from family farmers, indigenous producers, and agroecological cooperatives. This is a far cry from the previous COPs in Glasgow and Sharm El-Sheikh that were criticised for emissions-heavy menus.

Still, in the cover text for COP30’s Global Mutirão decision, none of these words were mentioned: food, food systems, hunger, agriculture, or farming. Mutirão means “collective efforts”.

Food is all around us, but it seems we don’t see or look beyond what’s on our plate.

Climate: Hot, Cold, & Wet

“Why is it so cold in here?”

There was another common refrain, this time uttered incredulously.

The temperatures outside were balmy - low 30s°C or high 20s°C - and often, it was raining cats and dogs, but there was permanent winter inside the conference centre. There didn’t seem to be any thermostat we could adjust, and the friendly and normally helpful staff couldn’t do much either.

Some rooms were colder than the others - I needed a sweater, a scarf, multiple rounds of hot tea, and moving around to stop myself shivering while delivering my presentation.

It wasn’t just the conference venue either. All the shiny malls and fancy hotels I went to were just as bad. In my own room, the temperature was 24°C, so I got a shock being blasted with chilly air when I went down to breakfast, and was again jolted when I stepped outside for a short walk to the event.

I’m convinced this large disparity in outdoor and indoor temperatures is really bad for our bodies, not to mention terrible for the climate. I wondered how much emissions could be cut if only overzealous building managers in Southeast Asia could be persuaded to lay off the air-conditioning a bit.

It’s not like Malaysia is immune to climate change. A 2025 report by the IFRC said floods, already the country’s most damaging natural hazard, are likely to worsen, and that rising temperatures will alter regional precipitation patterns and intensify drought and flood cycles.

Already, floods in December 2024 caused vegetable prices to skyrocket while a heatwave in early 2024 affected both human and marine life.

The whole Southeast Asia region is struggling with the wet and dry cycles this year, starting with an extreme heatwave that arrived early and ending with deadly floods and landslides.

In fact, climate change and more extreme weather events were identified as the region’s top challenge for the first time in an annual survey by the ASEAN Studies Centre at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, beating out concerns over geopolitics, economics, and unemployment.

Where They Meet (1)

From droughts and floods to pests and marine heatwaves, disasters have caused an estimated $3.26 trillion in agricultural losses worldwide over the past 33 years or about 4% of global agricultural GDP, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in its most comprehensive global assessment to date.

The heaviest losses were suffered by cereals (4.6 billion tonnes), followed by fruits and vegetables (2.8 billion tonnes) and meat and dairy (900 million tonnes), wiping out 320 kilocalories that would otherwise be available daily to each individual around the world. This is equivalent to about 13% to 16% of average energy needs, the agency said.

Even if it wasn’t spelled out explicitly, the finger prints of climate change are everywhere in the report, from the increasing frequency and severity of large-scale marine heatwaves to the outbreak of Rift Valley fever (“an acute, climate-sensitive, vector-borne viral zoonotic disease”).

We also know that any shifts in precipitation patterns and temperatures can throw farming and fisheries out of whack (“unhappy marriage” ad nauseam).

So it is particularly disappointing that neither the Global Mutirão or the draft decision on the Global Goal on Adaptation mentioned “food systems” or acknowledge that they’re responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The latter document at least mentioned “food” 10 times, but of the five indicators to achieve “climate-resilient food and agricultural production and supply and distribution of food” (see Page 7, Point 4), I don’t see a single one to measure if the practices are sustainable, whether smallholders will receive support, nor any suggestion to shift to renewables.

These outcomes heighten “climate and hunger risks”, warned IPES-Food in a press release, where Raj Patel, IPES-Food panel expert and professor at the University of Texas did not mince his words:

“Food systems, which governments claimed were central to climate action, have been erased from these negotiations. Not by accident. Industrial agriculture holds extraordinary power over this process, and it shows.

Two years ago, 160 countries signed a Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture with great ceremony. Today they cannot bring themselves to mention the word ‘food’ in the Muritão decision.

This is not failure. This is capture. And until we name it for what it is—until governments choose people over corporate interests—these negotiations will continue to betray the very communities they claim to serve.”

Where They Meet (2)

Adaptation became a central issue at this year’s COP because we have failed so profoundly on mitigation. After years of chasing techno-fixes and tinkering at the margins, we’ve reached a point where the world no longer has the luxury of choice.

That’s why the Global Goal on Adaptation and its indicators matter: they help shape action plans and track progress. The reverse is also true: if there isn’t an indicator, there won’t be any measurable targets and harder to keep governments accountable.

At least the Gates Foundation’s announcement in Belém cheered groups fighting for smallholders: $1.4 billion over the next four years to help these farmers across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia adapt to extreme weather.

The money will go towards expanding digital advisory services, work on crops and livestock “that withstand drought, heat, and emerging pests while improving yields and nutrition”, and work on improving soil health.

Unfortunately, such news were few and far between (please feel free to correct me, I’d love to be wrong here). Instead, we got:

• A methane summit that didn’t seem to touch on agriculture or livestock, two of the biggest sources.

The former accounts for 40% of methane emissions from human activity. For context, fossil fuels account for 35% of methane emissions and waste 20%. Livestock itself is responsible for 80% of agricultural methane.

So what is the point of governments pulling “the Climate Emergency Brake” when the the largest human source of methane emissions isn’t mentioned?

The absence is particularly conspicuous because the 2025 Global Methane Status Report, published during COP30, said this of agricultural emissions:

“Without additional mitigation, emissions are expected to rise by 8% by 2030 and 17% by 2050, compared to 2020 levels, mainly due to increases in livestock populations in Africa and Latin America.”

Perhaps this is inevitable when the climate discussions are held in a country with a massive population of livestock.

• Talks under the Sharm el-Sheikh joint work on implementation of climate action on agriculture and food security yet again came to an abrupt halt without any specific agreements.

Countries agreed to continue discussions on a draft text in Bonn next year, according to Carbon Brief.

Context: This is the only formal process through which food and agriculture are included in the UN climate discussions and it has yet to have its moment since inception. See my previous coverage below.

• Greenwashing and lobbyist galore from Big Ag, attempts to sell biofuels as a sustainable, and a number of great-sounding pledges and declarations but whose ultimate impacts on food systems transformation are unclear.

Like the Belém declaration on hunger, poverty and human-centered climate action which said all the right things but gave me pause because of the presence of countries like Sudan, North Korea, and Myanmar.

With each year, COP increasingly feels like waiting for an unrequited love to change their mind.

Surely we’re going to have to move on at some point?

Thin’s Pickings

1. Guide to Investigating Food Insecurity - Global Investigative Journalism Network

   I co-wrote this guide with Deborah Nelson, Pulitzer-winning journalist and professor of investigative journalism at the University of Maryland, for folks who want to dive into why we are hungry, where to find the statistics, and what the bigger picture is.

   Please share this far and wide if you know anyone for whom this might be useful. Feedback also very much welcome.
   

2. More COP30 coverage

   • “At least 195 influencers - from models and news anchors to doctors and right-wing activists - posted Instagram content sponsored by 10 of the world’s biggest livestock, fertiliser, and food companies in the 12 months leading up (to COP30),” according to an investigation by DeSmog (in English) and Agência Pública (in Portuguese).

   • Meanwhile, the latest issue of Devex Dish will take you on a whistle-stop tour of COP30’s AgriZone for fascinating glimpses of Big Ag talking points and how they were positioning themselves at the talks.

   • Then there’s this great wrap-up from The Guardian on how early-morning diplomacy prevented the complete collapse of the talks and resulted in an “oblique commitment in the legally agreed text of the deal” that kept alive - just about - the global commitment to transition away from fossil fuels made two years ago in Dubai.

   • If you want a detailed breakdown of key outcomes for food, forest, and nature, you cannot go wrong poring over Carbon Brief’s detailed summary.
     

3. ‘Climate smart’ beef? After a lawsuit, Tyson agrees to drop the label. - Grist

   Tyson, which produces 20% of beef, chicken, and pork in the United States, backed down - while denying any wrongdoing- on its marketing claims of “climate smart” beef, wrote Frida Garza.

   “According to the settlement provided by Earthjustice, over the next five years Tyson cannot repeat previous claims that the company has a plan to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 or make new ones unless they are verified by a third-party. Similarly, Tyson also cannot market or sell any beef products labeled as “climate smart” or “climate friendly” in the United States.”
   

4. Larry Summers and the Hunger Games - System Change

   For those among us who only know about Summers following his post-Treasury secretary roles or from the Epstein Files, Ann Petitfor teaches us a history lesson about his role in the 2005-2008 global food price crisis when speculation in financial markets pushed food prices up by 83%.

   “Higher prices pushed an additional 40 million people into hunger in 2008, raising the overall number of under-nourished people in the world to 963 million, compared to 923 million in 2007”.
   One of the most striking things is that 2008 was a record year for food production.

   We investigated similar shenanigans during the most recent crisis. More here.

5. Gut Check: The Foods We Eat - ABC News

   This is 24 minutes of looking at UPFs through a distinctly U.S.-centric lens, using France as a cautious foil to USA’s anything-goes approach when it comes to regulating food ingredients. Still an interesting watch though.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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Of course, the one place I can’t go to is home. News from there continues to be bleak, as the military ramps up its terror and PR campaign in the run-up to the sham elections.

Still, I’m hoping for energising and inspiring discussions in the coming days about how to continue covering what’s happening there as well as on food systems with fellow muckrakers at the GIJC. Do drop me a line if you’re attending too.

There’s no Thin’s Pickings this week because I’m rushing between places and meetings.

Also, I’m publishing this early because time zones…

We are eating more and more ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) which are linked to chronic health conditions including obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, often displacing whole, traditional foods that could nourish us, according to a sweeping scientific study published in The Lancet this week.

Reining in this global health challenge requires “urgent, coordinated public policies and collective actions” such as regulating food environments and corporate practices and ensuring that fresh, healthy food is available, affordable, and easy to prepare, said The Lancet Series on Ultra-Processed Foods and Human Health.

“The continuing rise of UPFs in human diets is not inevitable; rather, this rise can be disrupted and reversed through sustained social mobilisation and collective action”, it added.

The 43 global experts behind the papers pointed to successes in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, where efforts are underway to regulate UPF production, marketing, and consumption despite strong industry resistance. These “offer crucial lessons for scaling action globally”.

They also argued that while additional studies on the impact of UPFs are welcome, they should not be used to delay immediate public-health action to reduce UPF consumption and improve diets globally.

Still, a shift toward minimally processed foods must not come at the expense of equity, the experts emphasised. Since UPF consumption tends to be higher in poorer households, changes must not deepen gender inequities in cooking or exacerbate food insecurity.

This paragraph below from the Lancet Editorial that accompanied the papers succinctly sums up the multi-layered challenges posed by UPFs.

“At the core of the UPF industry is the large-scale processing of cheap commodities, such as maize, wheat, soy, and palm oil, into a wide array of food-derived substances and additives, controlled by a small number of transnational corporations. UPFs are aggressively marketed and engineered to be hyperpalatable, driving repeated consumption and often displacing traditional, nutrient-rich foods. In many high-income countries, UPFs comprise about 50% of household food intake, and consumption is rising quickly in low-income and middleincome countries. The harms extend to planetary health. Industrial production, processing, and transport of agricommodities are fossil-fuel intensive systems, and plastic packaging is ubiquitous in UPFs.”

What is Nova?

Before we dig into the papers, which received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, a note on the Nova classification which the authors used to define what is UPF.

Nova a system developed by Carlos Monteiro, a Brazilian nutritional epidemiologist, and his colleagues at the University of São Paulo, in 2009. It sorts food into four broad categories and is currently used by UN agencies including the FAO and the WHO. Below is a good summary by The New York Times.

The key thing here is that Nova is not just about the processing.

“As recognised by the Nova food classification system, processing is integral to the production of many artisanal and industrial foods, used in diverse dishes and cuisines, combining whole and minimally processed foods with culinary ingredients, and moderate amounts of processed foods. By contrast, many of the industrial ingredients and processes used in ultra-processed food (UPF) manufacturing are, from an evolutionary perspective, entirely new exposures in human diets.”

If you’re unfamiliar with what these ingredients and processes are, I suggest reading Chris van Tulleken’s book.

The Nova system has come under repeated criticism - often from industry-linked groups - that its categories are too broad, imprecise, or not grounded in “hard” nutrient science. Some groups have pushed for revisions that would narrow the definition of ultra-processing or exclude certain commercial products. I’ve written about one in an earlier issue.

There have also been valid criticisms too.

For example, under the current NOVA definition, products like infant formula and plant-based meat alternatives fall into the UPF category despite serving important nutritional or environmental roles: infant formula is essential for mothers who cannot breastfeed, and plant-based burgers are part of efforts to reduce high-income countries’ meat consumption.

Critics argue that treating these products as inherently “unhealthy” could create unintended public-health and climate-policy consequences..

The Lancet papers acknowledged these concerns but emphasised that limited exceptions do not undermine the broader pattern observed across global evidence: ultra-processed versions of foods are consistently inferior to minimally processed alternatives, both nutritionally and in terms of health outcomes. They concluded that exceptions “do not invalidate the general rule that ultra-processed versions of foods are inferior to their non-ultra-processed counterparts.”

Paper 1: Establishing the harms of UPF

This is the first of three papers under this series, and it examines the evidence for three key hypotheses around the UPF: (1) that it is displacing traditional diets that are centred on whole foods, (2) that it leads to worsened diet quality, especially in relation to chronic disease prevention, and (3) that this pattern increases the risk of multiple diet-related chronic diseases.

The authors used a combination of narrative and systematic reviews as well as original analyses and meta-analyses to argue their case. Here are a few eye-popping numbers on UPF consumption trends they cited.

• The dietary share of UPFs as a percentage of total energy intake remains below 25% in high-income countries of southern Europe (Italy, Cyprus, Greece, and Portugal) and Asia (Taiwan and South Korea), but exceeds 40% (Australia and Canada) or 50% (UK and USA) in others.

• The general trend is of increasing consumption. The dietary share of UPFs to total household food purchases approximately tripled in Spain, China, and South Korea over three decades, and more than doubled in Mexico and Brazil over four decades.

• From 2007 to 2022, annual per capita sales of UPFs increased by 60% in Uganda, the only low-income country assessed by Euromonitor; by 40% in lower-middle-income countries; and by nearly 20% in upper-middle-income countries.

• Euromonitor’s data also showed that during that period, the sales of all 10 UPF subgroups, which include sweetened carbonated drinks, baked goods, sweet snacks, ready meals, and reconstituted meat products, increased in almost all regions except North America, Australasia, and western Europe, where sales were already higher than elsewhere.

• There is an inverse relationship between the share of UPF in our energy intake and the foods that are good for us, like fruits, vegetables, and legumes. Essentially, the more UPFs we eat, the less nutritious foods we consume.

• Diets with an increased share of UPFs are liable to contain more classes or mixtures of additives that are harmful to health, such as emulsifiers, flavour enhancers, non-sugar sweeteners, and colourings.

“The totality of the evidence supports the thesis that displacement of long-established dietary patterns by ultra-processed foods is a key driver of the escalating global burden of multiple diet-related chronic diseases.”

“Although more research is clearly warranted, the need for further evidence should not delay public health action. Policies that promote and protect dietary patterns based on a variety of whole foods and their preparation as dishes and meals, and that discourage the production and consumption of UPFs, cannot be postponed.”

Paper 2: Tackling the rise in UPF production, marketing, and consumption

The authors are clear about the need for government intervention to halt this runaway train, but they also want stronger and broader policies.

This second paper identifies four policy domains where this can happen: UPF products, UPF food environments, UPF manufacturers, fast-food corporations, and supermarket corporations retailers, and food supply chains.

While policy actions will depend on issues unique to the country and its level of UPF consumption, there are a core set of actions and criteria governments can turn to to improve diets.

• These include front of pack labelling (especially warning labels), marketing and advertising restrictions that target brands rather than specific products and put greater limits on digital marketing, taxes and fiscal polices, and food procurement programs that restrict UPFs in schools, public hospitals and health-care settings, child-care settings, the military, and other public institutions.

• Product reformulation can help but it is not enough. In fact, it can be counterproductive when manufacturers substitute one harmful ingredient for another (e.g., sugar for non-nutritive sweeteners, or fat for modified starches and emulsifiers)..

• One solution is to set mandatory nutrition standards that define maximum and minimum levels of specific nutrients or ingredients in UPFs.

• Policies to increase the availability and affordability of healthy, minimally processed foods, including ready-to-consume or ready-to-heat options for time-pressed households are key.

• So is support for small and medium food enterprises and informal vendors, which often provide culturally relevant and affordable options but struggle to compete with low-cost UPFs.

• Key influential bodies like the Codex Alimentarius Commission, responsible for establishing global food standards, must be independent. Right now, industry representatives often participate in national delegations, which raises questions about conflicts of interest.

• On the other hand, regulating transnational food corporations should include the entire operational scope of UPF corporations including their brand portfolios, marketing strategies, and sales structures.

• Rules for direct foreign investment, anti-trust regulations, restrictions on mergers and acquisitions, and interventions to control corporate monopolisation, can help to restrict corporate market share and prevent horizontal, vertical, and global integration

• Agricultural and trade policy reform to reduce incentives for monocultures that supply cheap UPF ingredients (maize, soy, sugar, palm oil) and to support diverse, locally oriented food systems.

In short, the paper emphasises that voluntary industry actions are insufficient: policy must be government-led, national where appropriate, and mandatory where necessary to protect public health.

“Food policies should recognise that the responsibility for the rise in UPF-dominated dietary patterns lies less with consumers and more with food corporations, who should be held accountable for their role.”

Paper 3: Responding to corporate power with unified global action

The third and final paper focuses on the political dimension of UPFs, how corporate actors shape our food systems, and what we can do to mobilise the public.

“The rise of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in human diets is being driven by the growing economic and political power of the UPF industry in food systems nearly everywhere - not by any lack of individual willpower or responsibility.”

• Scale. UPFs are a highly profitable sector: global sales rose to $1.9 trillion in 2023 from $1.5 trillion in 2009. UPF manufacturers alone account for over half of $2.9 trillion in shareholder payouts by all publicly listed food companies since 1962.

• Concentration In 2021, the eight largest transnational UPF manufacturers accounted for 42% of the sector’s $1.5 trillion in total assets. They are Nestlé (Switzerland), PepsiCo (the USA), Unilever (the UK), Coca-Cola (the USA), Danone (France), Fomento Económico Mexicano (Mexico), Mondelez (the USA), and Kraft Heinz (the USA).

• Corporate influence. All this allows UPF companies to channel vast resources into advertising, lobbying, political donations and litigation. In 2024, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Mondelez spent a combined $13.2 billion on advertising - nearly four times WHO’s annual operating budget - and coordinated hundreds of interest groups to influence policy and public debate.

• Enabling ecosystem. “The UPF industry” is a broader network of co-dependent actors beyond manufacturers - ingredient suppliers, plastic producers, grocery retailers, fast-food chains, advertising firms, lobbyists, industry front groups, and research partners - that collectively drive the production, marketing, and consumption of UPFs.

• Scientific capture. The paper identified nearly 3,800 studies published between 2008 and 2023, that disclosed funding or interests naming UPF manufacturers. Of these, a third focused on energy balance or physical activity, a known corporate scientific strategy intended to shift blame away from products and corporate practices.

• Policy barriers. Governments have also fuelled the UPF industry’s growth and profitability. The United States, EU, and other large agrifood-producing nations often intervene on the industry’s behalf in the World Trade Organization (WTO), and bilaterally through trade diplomats, to oppose UPF-related regulations of other governments.

• Roadblocks.Like the tobacco, alcohol, and fossil fuel industries, the UPF industry’s corporate political activity is the most important barrier to the implementation of effective public policies to reduce UPF-related harms.

• Roadmap. Reducing their power involves strongly disincentivising UPF production, reducing the power of marketing, and redistributing resources to other types of food producers. It also involves excluding the UPF industry from food governance, ending reliance on voluntary corporate actions, and reforming policy, health professional, and scientific practice to minimise corporate interference.

  There is a long list of policy recommendations for governments, international agencies, and professional associations that includes conflicts of interest (COI) safeguards, transparency registers, and ending UPF industry sponsorship and funding.

• Learning from the energy transition. Going against such deep pockets and power is an uphill task, but the authors compared this to the clean energy transition which “requires an alternative economic vision that confronts entrenched corporate power structures, redistributes opportunity and resources, and prioritises governance reform.”
  Similarly, the transition to low-UPF diets should be just. There should be special consideration for consumers, workers in the UPF industry, and small businesses reliant on UPF production and retail.

“Countering UPFs demands international cooperation. Isolated, country-level actions are insufficient to overcome the industry’s globally organised political, economic, and legal power.”

“A global UPF action network could build on existing advocacy and policy responses - especially those in Latin America and Africa - and bring together civil society organisations and movements, experts, UN agencies, government leaders, and donors, to pool resources, advocate for policy change, and stand up to corporate power.”

Further Reading

• Ultra-processed foods: time to put health before profit (Lancet Editorial)

• Ultra-processed foods and human health: the main thesis and the evidence (Paper 1)

• Policies to halt and reverse the rise in ultra-processed food production, marketing, and consumption (Paper 2)

• Towards unified global action on ultra-processed foods: understanding commercial determinants, countering corporate power, and mobilising a public health response (Paper 3)

• Protecting children from ultra-processed foods (Comments)

• Global action on ultra-processed foods: a health, equity, and sustainability imperative (Comments)

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.

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