Then came the cyberattack on French supermarkets’ refrigeration systems.

I was shocked on many levels: that it hadn’t happened sooner, it is happening now (in the midst of a super El Niño), and it is probably going to result in copycats.

Of course, modern food systems’ heavy reliance on cold chains makes us so vulnerable, and if must require a particularly nihilistic mindset to intentionally attack sources of food.

Then I remembered how long food has been used as a weapon, how it is still being used in places like Gaza, Sudan, my own country, and even in the U.S., and how we have become numb to that news.

Maybe we will finally start treating what’s happening in these faraway places with the horror and urgency they deserve, once we start realising it can happen to us too? One can always hope.

On a not-unrelated note, I moderated a webinar for journalists on Thursday (Oct 15) that sought to answer the question of the day: Why is food so expensive? If you’re a reporter and missed it, but want to know what went down, drop me a line.

For this issue, which coincidentally falls on World Food Day, I’m doing a long-overdue roundup of some of the newest and/or most interesting reports that have come across my desk. If you squint hard enough, you’ll also see there’s a bit of a theme running through them.

It begins with a report that shows us how we can make our food systems fairer, greener, and healthier. Then we go on to look at the many reports that show why we really need to make those changes, and what the implications are if we don’t.

There are many more reports I want to cover than I have time and space for, but if you think I’ve missed some obvious contenders, again, do give me a shout.

Africa’s Case for Agroecology

We know our current food systems are doing little to combat some of the biggest challenges of our time, but these challenges are magnified in Africa.

They include growing levels of hunger and malnutrition (including overweight and obesity), rapidly deteriorating ecosystems and public health caused by the use of pesticides, and the unsustainable costs borne by African governments to support industrial agriculture.

ActionAid’s “Adapt to Thrive” report argues that investing in agroecology is the answer, and it has receipts from 10 countries: Ethiopia, the Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

There is an official description of agroecology and its principles, but I like to describe it as farming with three core elements: it cares for the soil, animals, and biodiversity; promotes food sovereignty; and aims to redress gender, social, and economic inequalities.

Core findings:

• After a 1-3-year transition period, agroecology can increase farm profitability, with studies in Kenya indicating an average 37.8% rise in profits.

• Yields drop initially - 10% to 35% depending on the state of soils - but bounce back within 3-5 years, and the initial reduction in productivity is somewhat offset by lower input costs.

• When yields recover, they are significant: a 41% increase in cereals in Ghana, tripling of pigeon pea and sorghum production in Tanzania and a 100% increase in maize in Zambia.

• Agroecological production is 2-4 times more energy efficient, leads to visible improvements in soil health and ecosystems, and provides more diversified incomes and diets.

So what’s the problem?

“Current policy, market and financing structures often favour industrial agriculture, creating barriers to adoption,” the report said.

Our continued - and narrow - focus on yield as a single determinant of food security instead of “multi-dimensional aspects such as nutrition, health and livelihoods” is one big barrier. So are ongoing programmes that subsidise conventional farming. And agroecological production often requires more time and labour, at least initially.

But all these can be addressed, the report says, by tweaking policy and regulatory frameworks, helping agroecological farmers to better access markets while educating consumers about such products, and supporting the development of biological inputs.

There is also a need to build institutional technical and research knowledge on agroecology and boost financing for farmers who want to switch.

“Agroecology is not a niche alternative. It is a practical, scalable and cost-effective pathway to deliver food security, climate resilience, ecological restoration and inclusive economic development across Africa.”

The report adds to a growing body of literature that seeks to debunk the usual argument against agroecology: that there is insufficient research and evidence on its benefits, or that it is not scalable.

Our Toxic Addictions

The need to transition is urgent, because our inability to wean ourselves off synthetic pesticides and fertilisers is costing us trillions of dollars every year in environmental, health, and social damages, said “Toxic Dependency: How Agrochemicals Lock In Food System Vulnerability”.

The report is from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, which brings together philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems.

This is likely to be a conservative estimate, because while some costs are quantifiable (like an estimated $1.45 trillion in nitrogen pollution costs, another $1.26 trillion from greenhouse gas emissions across the entire food value chain, or $816 billion in toxic exposure, alongside links to cancer, neurological disease, and reproductive harm) many others are not, such as loss of sovereignty and deskilling of farmers.

At the same time, our food systems are also far less resilient to geopolitics and climate shocks, and far more polluting as a result of a system designed to encourage the continued use and abuse of these agrochemicals. This creates a vicious cycle, the report says.

“Degraded soils demand more inputs; health harms are managed downstream through healthcare rather than prevented; and economic pressures narrow farmers’ abilities to exit chemical-intensive pathways.”

Many of us are now fairly fluent in how fossil fuels drove the climate crisis we’re in, but we are less proficient in understanding how far their tentacles go and how embedded they are in our food systems.

This report traces the intertwined - and structural - connections between fossil fuels and food systems through the fertilisers and pesticides, which are derived from the former and used in the latter. I’ve written about is before.

Over the past six decades, our use of agrochemicals has skyrocketed

This was driven in part by our narrow focus on yield, which in turn forces us to prioritise growing a very small set of standardised crops.

“More than half of the world’s nitrogen and 35 percent of the world’s pesticide is used on three primary cereal crops (corn, wheat, and rice).”

Also: “More than half the world’s industrial-scale monocultures dependent on agrochemicals are grown for animal feed or biofuels, not human consumption.”

The report also exposes Europe’s hypocrisy: pesticides deemed too harmful to use in the EU are exported elsewhere. This is something we’ve documented extensively at Lighthouse Reports (here and here), but the latest data from the report still jolts me - almost 122,000 tonnes of pesticides banned in the EU were approved for export by member states in 2024.

Of course, our addiction did not come about accidentally.

It was maintained by trillions of dollars in fossil fuel and agricultural subsidies and the outsized power of agrochemical companies in shaping the policy environment, so the report is calling for systemic shifts across policy, funding, and narrative, including repurposing subsidies and phasing out synthetic fertilisers and pesticides.

“We publish this at a moment of acute urgency. A historic fertiliser crisis, driven by the US–Israel war in Iran and the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, has placed fossil fuel dependence in food systems under an unprecedented spotlight. The vulnerabilities this compendium describes are not abstract or future risks; they are unfolding in real time, now.”

This report is best read alongside three related recent pieces:

• A report by the Corporate Europe Observatory sounding the alarm that the EU’s Food & Feed Omnibus will dismantle EU pesticide regulations by, among other things, allowing unlimited approvals (meaning a perpetual, open-ended authorisation that does not expire). This was something both farm lobbies and agrochemical giant Bayer had called for.

• A letter by five human rights experts warning that these proposed changes to the Food & Feed Omnibus could harm both human and planetary health, and that the legislative process itself went ahead without properly conducted impact assessments or the participation of affected communities.

• A fairly technical but very interesting paper that uses social network analysis to map the ownership and leadership networks behind agrochemical conglomerates BASF, Bayer, Corteva, Dow, DuPont, FMC, COFCO, ChemChina and UPL.

The World’s Most Abusive Employer

Our reliance on toxic products, our lack of care for ecosystems, and our willingness to look away when things become inconvenient all show up in the people who are on the frontlines of our food systems: workers.

This is a large, broad group, encompassing farmworkers, fishers, slaughterhouse staff, as well as delivery drivers, restaurant and supermarket employees, and domestic workers.

“Food systems employ nearly 1.4 billion people – two out of every five workers – making food the largest employer and most abusive sector on the planet,” IPES-Food says in its latest report “Food Work”.

If you think “most abusive sector” is an exaggeration, think again. The exploitation runs the gamut: low pay, wage theft, forced and child labour, informal employment, discrimination, human trafficking, sexual violence, dangerous working conditions, and exclusion from basic labour protections.

A few shocking global stats:

• 30% of food system workers – or 416 million people – earn below a living wage and women earn 50% less than men.

• Of all workers, farm workers are the most likely to live in poverty and without social safety nets.

• Farming and fishing consistently rank among the world’s most dangerous jobs, with agriculture accounting for one-third of all global workplace deaths.

• Over one in four fishing workers globally has suffered serious harm on the job in the past two years.

• Yet 80% of agricultural workers have never received any workplace safety training, the worst rate of any sector.

• In app-based food delivery, riders suffer an estimated 1,000 accidents every day, with the vast majority denied basic workplace injury compensation.

• Around 90% of farm employment and 60% to 80% of off-farm jobs worldwide are informal. They often earn less and work outside standard hours.

• Migrants make up an estimated quarter of farm workers globally, with significantly higher shares in many countries: over 86% in the United States, 58% in Brunei, and 50% in Italy.

• Food and agriculture are also among the sectors with the highest risk of modern slavery (an estimated 2.1 million forced labourers) and the most child labour (83 million).

“Governments directly enable this abuse through legal carve-outs that explicitly exempt food and farm workers from basic protections on wages, workplace safety, and union rights,” adding that discrimination against migrant workers is institutionalised in many places despite the critical role they play, the report says.

We saw this happen in real time during COVID-19.

I live in a country where anti-immigrant rhetoric is mainstream politics, yet when pandemic lockdowns threatened to leave no one to harvest the great Mediterranean bounty, the political will for a solution appeared overnight.. Suddenly delivery drivers, slaughterhouse workers, and farm labourers became “essential” in countries all over the world.

The report also identifies three growing forces that are making things worse for the workers.

1. Climate breakdown: exposing workers to extreme heat, severe weather, toxic wildfire smoke, and growing pesticide use.

2. Corporate concentration: driving a race to the bottom by suppressing wages, undermining collective bargaining, and shifting risks onto workers.

3. Digital technologies: creating new frontiers of exploitation through gig-based platform work, automation, algorithmic management, and workplace surveillance.

They are compounding the structural problems of gender, class, and race-based discrimination, restrictive migration policies, and a failure to protect workers’ rights.

“The people who feed the world deserve safe, fairly paid, and dignified work.”

What’s Killing Us?

We know what’s going wrong with our food production and how it’s treating the people who feed us. What about on the consumer side?

Well, this isn’t a neat throughline but I do think some of the problems with our food systems are showing up in the statistics around the causes of our deaths.

As per the WHO, the top 10 leading causes of death in 2023 accounted for 33 million deaths, or 54% of the total 61 million deaths worldwide.

What’s alarming to me is the breakdown.

Regardless of how you choose to slice and dice it, noncommunicable diseases like stroke, heart disease, diabetes, and cancers are the leading cause of death in all income groups except for the low-income countries.

Even in low-income countries, stroke and ischaemic (coronary) heart disease are the second and third leading causes of death and are rising, while communicable diseases like malaria, diarrhoeal diseases, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis have all been going down over the past two decades.

Globally, 8 of the 10 leading causes of death in 2023 were noncommunicable diseases, accounting for 47% of all deaths, or 88% of the top 10 causes.

I am a broken record, but this bears repeating. A lot of these noncommunicable diseases are linked to our diets as well as our built and food environments.

10 Issues Shaping Food Systems

The latest version of the “Critical, emerging and enduring issues for food security and nutrition”, updated every four years by the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) on Food Security and Nutrition, came out in August but works well as a last entry and a way to group and focus our attention.

HLPE is part of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the world’s most inclusive multistakeholder platform on food, hunger, and nutrition issues that is hosted in Rome at the FAO, the UN food and agriculture agency.

The report identified 10 interconnected issues based on “the scale and severity of their effects on food security and nutrition, their potential to intensify or generate systemic risks, their disproportionate impacts on vulnerable populations, and the scope for coordinated action through CFS”.

Here they are. They’re not in order of priority, and I’ve rewritten them slightly to make them easier to understand.

1. How to achieve the SDGs after their official deadline - the so-called “post-2030 development agenda” - through food systems transformation that can simultaneously address hunger, malnutrition, inequity, and environmental degradation

2. How to achieve food security and nutrition in climate crises

3. How to link food security and nutrition, and the three Rio Conventions: Biodiversity, Desertification and Climate Change

4. How to predict and prevent hunger and malnutrition at a time of geopolitical uncertainty and polycrises

5. How to ensure benefits and costs of international trade are distributed fairly, and that trade supports the right to adequate food, health, livelihoods, cultural practices, and environmental sustainability

6. How corporate concentration in food systems, which has become extreme in some markets, often undermines food security and nutrition

7. How to tackle concerns and opportunities arising from digital innovations and artificial intelligence

8. How to adopt a more integrated view of human, animal, plant and environmental health, known as “One Health”, across the UN system

9. How to ensure the affordability of healthy diets, which are currently out of reach for nearly 1 in 3 people

10. How to ensure people have true agency to make choices about what they eat, how that food is produced, processed and distributed, and to engage in policy processes that shape food systems

Thin’s Pickings

1. Informed Climate Journalism Network

   This is a new free and online programme from Informed Earth, by the same team that previously ran the hugely successful Oxford Climate Journalism Network. They’re now calling for reporters and editors across the world who are interested in climate reporting to apply for its inaugural, six-month training course which starts in January 2027.

   The deadline is November 1, 2026. More information and link to application here.
   

2. Fighting our toxic food environment: what can I do? - Food Fight Files

   A cracking joint post by Stuart Gillespie, author of Food Fight who appeared in Thin Ink earlier this year, and Julia Belluz, co-author of Food Intelligence whom I’m hoping to have on Thin Ink soon.

   “If junk food inundates people everywhere, even the best nutrition advice is going to be impossible to follow. If healthy food is the most expensive and laborious to prepare, eating well becomes a privilege few can afford.”

   They provide six tangible and actionable steps people can take, and I’m grateful they mentioned our Big Food vs. The People investigation.
   

3. UN experts call on FAO to uphold human rights and protect staff

   19 UN special rapporteurs and other rights experts - independent specialists appointed by the UN Human Rights Council - released a statement expressing “dismay” at recent remarks by the head of the FAO “that appear to downplay the role of human rights in the organisation’s work”.

   The statement also said the experts are concerned “about the treatment of FAO staff who have engaged on violations of the right to food and of international humanitarian law in the Gaza strip”.

   If you want the background to this, read my piece in The New Humanitarian or the Thin Ink issue from two weeks ago.

   

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

   Subscribe now

The first is the food producers who nourish us, both physically and mentally, through their commitment to fresh, clean, and fair food, the ethos of the Slow Food movement.

The second is the executives who have incredible power on the policies and environments that govern our food systems.

Both have important things to say, and I hope we’re listening.

Lastly, solidarity with friends and colleagues in Brazil who must be incredibly concerned about the human rights and food systems implications of the next round of elections.

A political gathering disguised as a food festival

There’s a lot that’s wrong in this world (see last week’s issue). There’s also a lot that’s right.

One of them is Terra Madre, the biennial gathering of Slow Food members, food sovereignty activists, thought leaders, academics, and writers. The other is Inside Track, a young but ambitious non-profit that brings together senior executives who want their industries to play a more positive role in society.

The former is a highlight of my calendar, and this edition ran on Sep 24-27, under the theme “Biodiversity, Be Diversity”.

It is also open to the public. Over four days, tens of thousands of visitors throng the stalls and workshops to taste the best porchetta from Lazio, the finest olive oil from Abruzzo, the artisanal soy sauce from Japan, or the dried fish from the Nordics.

Only a fraction of them may turn up at the conferences and discussions about food, power, and justice, but I still take it as a win.

I must admit this year’s event was particularly special for a few reasons.

For one, Alice Waters came to the panel discussion I moderated, stayed the whole 90 minutes, and graciously let me take a picture with her (!!!).

For another, I had wonderful conversations over meals with people whose work I’d long admired, and these included new friends like Jessica Duncan, Eric Schlosser, and Tom Philpott, and old friends like Raj Patel.

It was also the first Terra Madre without Carlo Petrini, the larger-than-life founder of Slow Food who passed away in late May, and it’s always a bit of a toss-up on whether a movement can sustain its momentum after losing its charismatic leader. But the success of this year’s event, which took over many parts of central Turin, bodes well for its future.

“Us” versus the System

Edward “Edie” Mukiibi, Carlo’s successor as president of Slow Food International since July 2022, was trained as an agronomist in the agricultural department of Kampala, where he learnt of Green Revolution-style farming practices that encouraged the use of chemical inputs.

One day, he was tasked with convincing local farmers to adopt a new maize variety. It came with a long list of fertiliser and chemical inputs required for the best yield, and it worked best as a monoculture rather than the mix of species they were used to.

“And then in 2007, after convincing a lot of farmers in Western Uganda… to take up the new hybrid maize seed and also giving out fertilisers on credit, the drought hit, and it failed. They had given a lot of resources to acquire the seed, to acquire the fertilisers, but also allocated land to this trial. Then many farmers told me, “Yeah, if still had our beans and cassava, and some other crops, we would survive the next season”,” he recalled.

“This is a system that many of us went through as trained agronomists. This is a system that is creating fragility. This is a system that is pushing communities and farmers to be dependent on this system.”

So he decided to go against it, went back to the communities, and started working with them to return to the traditional systems, which he found were diversified and a boon for biodiversity.

“I felt alone going against the definition of agricultural progress for Africa, which is rooted in Green Revolution. And when I came to “Terra Madre” (in 2008) I found a lot of people. I met Carlo for the first time. I told him about this issue, and he told me, “Come, let’s launch resistance. Let’s support you to go against this system.””

Nearly two decades on, the system Edie set out to resist has found subtler ways to capture the narrative. One of them is the discussion around personal and consumer choice.

“It’s not about choice because there is no other choices in some places. The system has been so rigged that there is only one choice, and that choice is not favourable to the people.”

This includes how food is being marketed to children on television, often through cartoons. Edie witnesses this whenever he visits farming families in Africa and Asia and watches TV with them.

“They are creating a new generation of eaters whose choice has already been rigged since when they are young.”

The rigging also happens in the rooms where decisions about our food systems are made.

Jessica Duncan, associate professor of rural sociology at Wageningen University, spoke of how agrifood firms have been pushing into food governance at every level through the creation of many different groups, coalitions, and networks.

“They are creating a lot of tables. We are getting tables everywhere, and it’s becoming very, very hard to know who’s sitting at the table, who they represent, and what menu is being served. But that is increasingly being decided by powerful corporate actors.”

“This is really important because we see that participation might be increasing, and I would venture to guess that a lot of people in this room over the last year, have spent quite a lot of time participating in food policy processes, only to find out that the agenda was already set, the report already written, the declaration already drafted before they participated, and that has huge implications for democratic practice.”

Yet, “the most affected are not at the table, or they are not at the right table”. Worse, it’s getting increasingly hard to hold bad actors to account, “and that is by design,” Jessica said.

(These comments - like others attributed to Edie, Jessica, and Raj - come from the Food Justice and The Taste for Power panel discussion I moderated on Sep 25.)

Edie’s three steps to rebalance power

1. Confront power, using the knowledge and resources they have, including taking legal action. “But communities need to be empowered and supported to stand because they look like a small drop against a big mass of power.”

2. Resist. “The corporations, those with power, they want the whole world to lose biodiversity. If we preserve biodiversity, we are mounting emblems of resistance. If we support farms that are agroecological, that is emblem of resistance.” So is setting up more diverse farmers’ markets “which are not only serving the economic interests of the system, but also serving a civic and social and environmental interest.”

3. Dialogue: negotiating with decision-makers to make sure “the rights of the communities are observed”. “It needs a very good level of negotiation, but who negotiates for the communities? We need more and more empowerment for the communities.”

Resistance from the ground up

Between attending events and eating my weight in food, I spoke to people who are doing some version of this in their fields, forests, and kitchens.

The Slow Food Farmers

Beatrice Ndungu’s farm in a village in Kenya is just half an acre, yet she grows maize, beans, sweet potatoes, and bananas.

She also leads several farmer groups in her community to build resilience and improve soil fertility, including by building a seed bank, making compost, setting up kitchen gardens, and harvesting water.

Recurring droughts have been particular nuisance in her community, but simple things like digging trenches and laying logs inside them are proving effective, because they hold water when rain finally comes, she told me.

None of it needs machines. “We are trained to use local available resources… So if we want to do bokashi (fermented organic matter), we have animals, we have manure, we have dry grass, we have everything.”

“Now I can able to feed my family,” she said. And her neighbours are learning “that we can grow many many vegetables or foods without using chemicals.”

Beatrice is part of the growing Slow Food Farms network, which applies agroecological principles to farming and recently celebrated reaching 1,000 farms.

Francis Muia, Slow Food Farms Accelerator and Coordinator in Africa, said interest in joining the network is growing.

“Now we don’t have to look for the farmers… they’re coming to us,” he said.

Of course, it remains an uphill battle while governments continue to push and subsidise commercial agriculture that relies heavily on synthetic inputs.

But farmers are fighting back with street marches and court challenges, and in Kenya, they are also nurturing grassroots leaders ahead of next year’s elections, he said.

His message to farmers is to start small.

“Don’t buy fertiliser. Make your compost. Make your bokashi using the locally available resources. Get seeds from seed banks. You don’t have to pay.”

The money saved goes a long way. “They can take children to the schools. They can buy food.”

The Coffee Maker

When I first interviewed Ayu “Lee” Chuepa nine years ago, the founder of Akha Ama Coffee in Chiang Mai was about to open his third coffee shop and was working with 20 farmers.

Today, Akha Ama has three cafés in Chiang Mai, and three in Tokyo. Each year, he runs training workshops and other activities with some 200 to 300 families.

But Lee, a member of Chiang Rai’s Akha ethnic minority and the first person in his village to graduate from university, insists it was never just about selling coffee.

“We work on knowledge. We work on inspirations. We work on biodiversity… because coffee is related to everything,” he said. “It’s not only about how much I can sell.”

Fittingly for someone who first came to Terra Madre as a Slow Food Youth member, a big part of his work is bringing young people back to their territory, where they can become agricultural entrepreneurs.

He is also adamant that indigenous products shouldn’t be sold on sympathy, something he has insisted on since the start. He wants customers to come back again and again, and this only happens through quality, not just the origin story, he said.

The climate crisis is making all of this harder, though. The farmers he spoke to this year reported drought, too much rain, landslides and shifting seasons, as well as biodiversity loss.

“You cannot (be) just like, “Okay, I’m doing coffee and I have to protect the coffee”. I have to protect the whole ecosystem,” he said.

The Food Forester

Claire Mauquié, coordinator of Slow Food Pays Catalan, grows food in forests, and preferably public ones, “because… it’s accessible, visible, and it can inspire people to do the same at home”.

She started in Taiwan while working for an NGO. There, she found that edible forests solved a common problem with tree planting.

“When you plant edible forests, (people) are attracted to care for the trees, because there is a harvest after.”

Back in France, she teamed up with a man in Burgundy who had planted a food forest on two hectares of what in 2010 was “only a land with nothing, just grass”. A decade later, it held more than 1,000 edible species.

She contrasted this with the fact that most of our calories these days come from just rice, maize, wheat, and potatoes.

“The principle of edible forest is that you have more calories from coming from trees. So instead of eating stuff that are causing deforestation, (we’re) eating stuff that are doing reforestation.”

A food forest is multi-layered. Taller nut trees such as walnuts and pecans form the canopy, with fruit, berries, roots, flowers, leaves, and mushrooms below.

It works in temperate, tropical and subtropical climates, though it’s harder where rainfall is below 500mm a year.

At Terra Madre, she ran a tasting workshop on “reforestation cuisine” featuring acorns from oak trees.

“It’s edible, it’s amazing, and nobody knows. Everybody thinks it’s only for pigs.”

I tried her acorn gnocchi, made with potato, wheat flour, and dried tomatoes. Not bad at all.

The Indigenous Chef

Made Masak Dewa, a Balinese chef who studied food science instead of going to a chef school, shared the stage with Claire.

Coming from such a tourism hotspot, she is very keenly aware of how visitors’ dietary preferences can shape cuisines and how they push them further and further away from traditional ingredients.

For example, many restaurants in Bali says they are organic and customers will rave about “amazing” places serving plant-based and vegan food, she said. But, “they’d be eating a quinoa salad, imported from somewhere. That’s become a trend.”

So the born-and-bred city chef moved back to the village 10 years ago “to get to know what I should cook”. The irony isn’t lost on Made. “I growing up in the city… I go back to the village. And the people in the village they go to the city.”

The answer was in the food forest, “the piece of land behind of your home… It’s not a garden. It’s not a farm. It’s a forest.”

“I found that all the sustainability that people were talking about in the modern regenerative agroforestry, permaculture… was already in the ancient wisdom in Bali.”

Made has no restaurant, but built a community kitchen at a Slow Food farm in where monthly events invite village mothers to share “forgotten recipes”.

One of them uses the arenga palm bark, cooked like a curry with Balinese spices: ginger, galangal, turmeric, candlenut, lemongrass, bay leaves, etc. The dish is made for ceremonies and celebrations, because it takes a whole crew to get the bark, but one tree can feed a 1,000-guest wedding, Made told me.

“You will never find it in any restaurant,” Made said, because “not so many people want to cook it again”. Yet the dish is “all about connected to the culture, to the ecology… this is also like about togetherness.”

As a forager, Made “only cook[s] based on what I found”. A favourite is wild betel leaf, fried tempura-style in coconut oil and eaten with a sambal made of roasted candlenuts pounded with chilli and finished with lime juice.

Points to ponder

• Raj on naming the problem: “The power structure here is capitalism itself… its drive for profit and its tendency towards monopoly is what it is that is resulting not only in the externalisation of ecological costs and the exploitation of workers and the taking for grantedness of care work, of reproductive labour, of the work predominantly of women.”

• Jessica on language: “These examples (of local successes) exist… despite a system that is trying to make them fail… We are not just transforming. We are dismantling oppressive structures so that all of these initiatives can flourish.”

• Edie on depoliticised education: Slow Food gardens in Africa began as “emblems of resistance” to the new Green Revolution promoted by donor-funded groups and projects. “Everything shifted to school meals. Now everyone who is talking about school gardens, if you want to get funding, you go into school meals. You don’t talk about the political role of the school garden.”

• Raj on the myth of choice: “One of the hardest things to let go of is this idea of free choice, because it doesn’t exist… it’s a lie that is very useful in the food system to obfuscate where the real choices have already been made.”

• Jessica on feelings: “We are at a moment of collective anger, collective fear, and collective grief… part of the power that we have is to think carefully and to sit with these big feelings that are very real and very scary right now, and think about how we can do that in a way that doesn’t continue to prioritise and privilege those of us who have and maintain that privilege.”

• Made on organic food: “It’s not just for the customer. (It’s also) for ourselves. The farmer has the right to have that healthy food also.”

What we can do

• Edie: “First concrete action is to listen with an open mind to the voices of Terra Madre, to listen to the diverse, and also be open to food cultures, because if we do not embrace the different food cultures, we are already losing the fight. So the first concrete action is to embrace diversity, is to embrace food cultures, taste food, talk to people, and also encourage others.”

• Jessica: “The thing that occupies me right now is the importance of intergenerational alliances. We are dealing with climate change on different scales, and we are failing to communicate and collectivise across generations. Within these collaborations, we need to focus on care: a feminist politics of care, caring for each other, for ourselves, for the planet, for our animals. We need careful engagement, careful of the power and privilege that we bring, careful of the strategies that we implement, and maybe building on radical joy.”

• Raj: “If there’s only one thing that we can do tomorrow, dream as big as you can about the world that you want, and then organise around that. I mean we are going to lose one thing after another after another, and if we’re going to lose, let’s lose at least from the big dream that we actually want. Let us not compromise.”

• Claire: “Be active. Don’t be passive. Take action.”

• Made: “The first thing is change your mindset. Only you can change your mindset. Because with your mindset shifting, we can see things differently. Like, organic products doesn’t have to be certified. The one who need to certify is the one who put chemicals. Why we are okay with the one who’s using chemicals?”

• Lee: “Wherever you go, grow some trees. Maybe they die, maybe they survive, it doesn’t matter. Grow them.... And buy something tasty and ALSO sustainable.”

The view from the top

Terra Madre showed what resistance looks like from the ground up. But what happens when the warnings come from inside the very companies that hold the power?

Guess what? They are worried too! On Oct 1, Inside Track’s new memo dropped from senior food industry professionals at major UK food producers, manufacturers and retailers. It sounds the alarm that the industry is focusing on quick-fixes instead of long-term change at a time of climate change, biodiversity loss, and soil degradation.

In a nutshell, this is what they’re saying: “Unless climate impacts are reduced, we will not be able to adapt to the risks they pose.”

The illusion of resilience

Resilience was meant to be about long-term sustainability. Instead, they wrote, it has become “a by-word for the tactical switching of ingredients and sourcing regions”.

It also goes well beyond carbon.

“The issue of supply chain resilience is not just one of greenhouse gas emissions. It is critical for the livelihoods of farmers and sourcing communities, and for soil health and biodiversity. Our industry is not taking a strategic approach to any of these issues either in their own actions or in the way they work and engage with government.”

“We cannot sacrifice actual resilience for the illusion of resilience in the short-term, or we will undermine the overall financial sustainability of our sector.”

The memo admits regenerative methods could support resilience, but these remain small pilots that have been “commissioned and publicised for years”, yet the investment and corporate will to scale them up never arrive.

The authors aren’t against adaptation which is crucial given the summer we’ve just experienced. But tactical sidesteps are not long-term strategies and they expect “growing disruption” unless the industry:

• seriously reduces its environmental impacts

• makes sure farmers have long-term, reliable income

• takes much bigger adaptation steps itself, such as investing in indoor growing and finding alternatives to imported fertiliser.

(I bet Edie, Francis and Beatrice would have plenty to say about all this.)

It’s not the people. It’s the incentives.

According to the memo: “Our companies are optimised and incentivised towards short-term decision making, which will in turn undermine the long-term value investors rely on.”

It identifies three problems at the top.

1. Boards aren’t seeing the risk. They look at their own operations, not at “the overall health of the system they rely on” or at what people across their supply chains are going through. They also haven’t built a culture where suppliers feel they can be honest with them.

2. There’s a skills gap. Food company boards tend to attract “highly competent professionals”, but on climate risk, non-executive leaders lack the expertise. There isn’t enough independent advice, modelling, training or recruitment of experts.

3. The clock runs on short-termism. Boards are “hyper-focused” on unrealistic investor expectations for short-term growth. Executive pay and KPIs are tied to short-term financial targets that are disconnected from environmental ones.

   1. Sound familiar? It’s Jessica’s point about tables again, from the other side. The people at the table may well know what’s wrong, but the menu is being set by quarterly (or even weekly) targets.

What investors should scrutinise (and that includes “us”)

The memo calls for “a collective and coordinated effort from industry and government to reduce environmental risks and invest in sourcing communities and a supply chain that achieves long-term resilience”. It also asks investors to press companies on key issues.

If you think you aren’t part of that group, think again. Through pension funds and other vehicles, many of us are unwitting investors in these companies.

Here’s what the insiders say investors should scrutinise:

• The board: how companies staff their boards and bring in advisers so they have the skills and experience to model and manage risk.

• The balance: how boards ask their teams to weigh long-term impact reduction against short-term adaptation.

• The nitty-gritty: what companies are doing to prepare for different warming scenarios, invest in resilient agriculture, share risk across the supply chain and set long-term contracts, and whether any of that shows up in spending, costing, delivery and reporting.

• The track record: whether past scenario planning was accurate and mitigation targets were met, and what that means for future projections.

Helpfully, there’s a ready-made list of questions for investors in the appendix.

Thin’s Pickings

Still a Fast Food Nation

This was a very long issue so I’ll leave it with only one pick, but it’s a cracking one: a conversation between Eric Schlosser and Tom Philpott on the 25th anniversary of the former’s landmark book, Fast Food Nation, and on what has changed and what hasn’t. A must-listen for both journalists and food system nerds.

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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Then two things happened: two videos from the FAO fell into my lap, and my Lighthouse Reports colleagues published a blockbuster investigation into Israeli military checkpoints that have dominated everyday life in the West Bank for years.

So Terra Madre will appear next week instead, to lift the spirits from this week’s sobering issue.

Oh, and if you are interested in antitrust issues and corporate concentration, don’t miss this online workshop next week (Oct 8) with my awesome colleague Margot Gibbs.

This issue goes beyond food systems, but the more I cover why we eat what we eat and why we grow what we grow, the more I realise how intricately linked politics, food, and human rights are.

Many of us are fortunate not to have to worry about where our next meal is coming from, but that’s not the same for everyone: last year, 645 million people were chronically hungry and 266 million needed urgent help.

Political decisions play a key role in both of these numbers, but particularly the latter, whether it’s the deliberate use of food as a bargaining chip in conflict zones and disasters, or the choice to subsidise certain crops and farming practices and not others. Or, increasingly, who controls the data, movement, and narrative around who is fed and who isn’t.

Which is why I see threads between the situation in the West Bank (which isn’t talked about as often as Gaza these days), the early - and forced - departure of a senior official at the UN food and agriculture agency FAO, and the renewed partnership between the World Food Programme and Palantir.

It is all political, it raises serious questions about human rights, and it could have serious implications for the food security of vulnerable populations.

I know so many good and committed people at the Rome-based UN food agencies, and I truly support their mandates, which make it all the more challenging to witness what is happening there.

The Violence of Arbitrariness

Did you know that..

• There are 942 Israeli military checkpoints, gates, and barriers across the occupied West Bank today?

• Nearly a third of West Bank residents under 25 have never left their home district?

• A journey between neighbouring towns that should take 10 minutes can take an hour?

• Residents lose 30 years’ worth of collective time, every day (or 77 hours per person/year) as a result?

• Some cities in the West Bank have effectively been turned into open-air enclosures?

  • Take Sinjil. There are six access roads for a city of 7,000 but only one entry point was passable at any point since 2023, and even that is closed at times.

“Israel has never publicly listed the checkpoints it operates, their staffing hours, closure times or when roads will be blocked off. Satellite data is almost non-existent and popular navigation apps, like Google maps, do not list checkpoints and are essentially unusable for Palestinians,” my Lighthouse Reports colleagues wrote in Chokepoints: Suffocating The West Bank.

“To navigate this reality, Palestinians have created an ad-hoc system using Telegram and other messaging services to update each other on congestion and checkpoint status, and share checkpoint updates like weather reports on the radio.”

Which, of course, made the mapping and analysis needed to understand the impacts of these checkpoints on people’s lives challenging. But not impossible.

My colleagues, together with journalists from Palestine Reporting Lab, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), WIRED and Evident, built a novel dataset using UN OCHA maps, tens of thousands of Telegram messages, and 2.6 billion GPS pings of vehicles that travel across the West Bank. They also conducted polls of over 1000 people with the help of the Palestinian Institute for Social and Economic Progress.

“The result is the most comprehensive dataset to-date on the Israeli military’s system of movement restrictions, the first map with GPS coordinates of checkpoints and a set of findings that illuminate and quantify the violence of their unpredictability.” See more here on the methodology.

The WIRED piece, replete with maps and illustrations, is not to be missed, and these lines hit hard for me.

One illustrates vividly the physical impacts of these checkpoints on ordinary people.

“Ali Haj Ali has worked at Sama Pharmaceuticals, a medicine factory east of Nablus city, for over a decade; now, at 37, he supervises the maintenance of the company’s production lines. When he leaves at the end of his shift at 4:30 pm, he has stopped expecting to reach his home before 8:00 pm, even though it’s only 16 kilometers away.

“Some nights, he doesn’t get home at all. He sleeps at the factory, in an arrangement Sama built during Covid-19: Two offices hold a bed and a dozen mattresses for whoever can’t make the trip home.”

The other vividly illustrates the mental impact of the lack of official schedules, public maps, or functional navigation apps.

“Alexandra Rijke, a cultural geographer who spent years researching checkpoints in the West Bank, calls unpredictability one of the occupation’s core mechanisms. Not knowing whether you can go to work or school, or what will get you punished, has a huge impact on people’s lives. “Arbitrariness is incredibly violent,” she said.

Silencing from Within

A few days before the publication of Chokepoints, I stumbled upon a LinkedIn post from Vijay Prashad, Chief Editor at LeftWord Books - India.

It was a two-minute video clip of Benjamin Davis, a veteran FAO staffer who had been leading the agency’s Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division (ESP) since Aug 2020, speaking at a side event during a global FAO conference in Rome.

In the clip, Ben said he was retiring because his contract wasn’t extended. He added:

“I was told that I violated the standards of conduct of international civil service, specifically those paragraphs related to impartiality and leadership, and I was told this was due to my participation in the moments of silence and the technical work that has been carried out about the situation of starvation and famine in Gaza.

“I’m not embarrassed by telling you this. In fact… I’m incredibly proud of my commitment and that of many of my colleagues throughout the organisation to the values and principles of the United Nations and the FAO,” citing “fundamental human rights, social justice, the dignity and worth of the human person, and respect for the equal rights of men and women and of nations great and small” as the aforementioned values.

I had not met Ben until Thursday, Oct 1, his first day unemployed after 26 years at the FAO, but we spoke at length about what happened to him and why he is speaking out.

Essentially, what was supposed to be a routine contract renewal was truncated to six-month extensions, and when he enquired what was happening, he was accused of being an “activist” and causing the organisation to “lose legitimacy.”

Two specific examples were given, he said.

One was participating in weekly, staff-coordinated, security-approved, internal moments of silence that Ben said was to show “solidarity with the people who were literally being starved, and the famine that was evolving right at that time (in Gaza)”.

The other was a technical brief his division published on the hunger implications of Israel’s food blockade, which was taken down from the FAO website soon after but remains available on ReliefWeb.

You can read more in this Q&A I did for The New Humanitarian. This Devex piece also has a lot of details and context, many of which I have independently verified through multiple sources, like the confrontation with the Israeli diplomat during one of the silence vigils.

The silencing of people like Ben is not just about Gaza, either, sources familiar with the FAO told me.

His division’s work is broad and critical if we really care about transforming our food systems, because it covers youth, gender, land tenure, and the right to food. These issues are also where human-rights-focused technical work is essential.

“There’s a bigger picture issue beyond the (Human Resources) stuff around the future of Ben’s division,” said one source.

For example, the creation of a new Office of Youth and Women was a step in de-fanging ESP’s reach as a robust technical division looking at issues of gender, inclusion, social protection and rural poverty and as home of the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, I was told.

“Their budget has slowly decreased over the past two FAO cycles, and they haven’t been able to recruit for vacant positions.”

The Game of Human Rights

The second video turned up in my inbox on Tuesday. It was a speech by FAO’s director-general, Qu Dongyu, while welcoming delegates at a U.N. forestry conference, where he pivoted from thanking the attendees for their leadership to saying FAO does not allow its senior members to “play the game… of human rights”.

“Of course, human rights is very important, but we have this human rights agency in Geneva. If we want to, take care, go there. That’s why some senior members, they play the political game. I fire him.” (Around 5.20 minutes into the video)

The FAO has not responded to media requests, including mine, as of the publication of this newsletter/

Still, the speech, despite not mentioning Ben by name, brought into the open the tensions within the organisation.

Full disclosure: I flinch - both physically and mentally - whenever someone dismisses human rights as unimportant. It never fails to bring back memories of my meeting with Ko Ko Gyi, a former student leader and political prisoner in Burma/Myanmar whom I used to admire. Until one afternoon in March 2013.

My colleagues and I, including the bureau chief for Reuters in Thailand, had just driven back from Meikhtila, a town in central Myanmar. A few days earlier, a Buddhist mob had run amok in the town, burning down homes, killing Muslim residents and students, and leaving neighbourhoods charred and communities traumatised.

I had walked among some of those ruins and spoken to victims who not only became homeless overnight but now also feared for their lives.

Soon after we sat down, Ko Ko Gyi lobbed us a loaded question: “Which is more important: human rights or citizens’ rights?” The bureau chief responded, calmly, that human rights are inalienable so surely that settles it?

For the next 90 minutes or so, I sat, with increasing heaviness in my heart, as he lectured us on why citizens’ rights should trump human rights. Since then, I’ve had a slightly jaundiced view of anyone who dismisses human rights as separate from humanity.

I also agree with Ben, who challenged the management narrative that FAO is a purely “technical agency” detached from politics. He argued that technical work on food security cannot exist in a vacuum when starvation is actively used as a weapon of war.

Is There a Humanitarian-Surveillance Complex?

Let’s move on to another Rome-based food agency…. and from physical checkpoints in the West Bank to concerns about digital tracking and data harvesting of aid recipients in Gaza (and elsewhere).

In 2020, the World Food Programme (WFP) won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work combating hunger and the use of hunger as a weapon of war. Six years later, it is under fire for a renewed five-year partnership with Palantir, the data analytics firm and military contractor that has worked with both the Israeli army and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Beyond what some call the technofascist leanings of Palantir’s leadership, civil society groups have real concerns about the “unholy marriage”, as one critic put it in a recent webinar, between a key humanitarian agency serving some of the world’s most vulnerable populations and a company that has openly collaborated with actors that are attempting to control and/or constrain civilians’ daily lives.

In an open letter, the groups working across data justice and food sovereignty, said “Palantir is a poor fit to hold the data backbone of the world’s largest humanitarian agency whose mandate is based on international human rights and humanitarian law frameworks”.

They called on WFP to withdraw from its contract, commission an independent, public review of the partnership and all its tech company partnerships, and set a “concrete, time-bound plan to transition away from Palantir”.

The WFP has defended the deal and said Palantir has no access to beneficiary data, but critics say the opaqueness and silence still raise questions.

“The WFP has treated transparency about this partnership as optional. Without access to the actual contract – disclosing what permissions the WFP has granted (or conceded to) Palantir – no entity outside the WFP can fully assess the risk or hold the organization to account,” the letter said.

When does humanitarian relief unwittingly cross over into military intelligence? When do digital systems intended to deliver aid inadvertently become surveillance infrastructure? What are the guardrails to prevent those? Are there any?

Currently, we don’t know. That’s precisely the issue.

Beyond the specificities of the WFP-Palantir deal though, there is a wider issue - an even more worrying trend - of the increased politicisation of technical data essential to save lives.

Example 1: The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET)

A critical system to monitor hunger crises for the past 40 years, FEWS NET has been battered by the political mood swings in the U.S..

It went dark in early 2025 when the Trump Administration wielded its axe on foreign assistance programmes, came back online later in the year, decided in August to stop monitoring Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen (“three of the world’s most hunger-stricken nations”, according to Devex) before reversing less than two weeks later.

It is now on the verge of shutting down due to a lack of funding, Devex again reported. There is a campaign underway to halt this.

Example 2: The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)

IPC is “widely recognised as the main global system for measuring the severity of hunger crises”, according to Reuters.

Its work and findings have come under repeated attacks by both Israel and Sudan, two countries party to two of the worst conflicts raging currently.

Could We, Should We… be Neutral?

What does it mean to be neutral and objective at a time like this?

As I pondered this question, I was reminded of the first issue I wrote for 2026, when I rejected purism but called for - and accepted - responsibility.

It also brings to mind a recurring argument I’ve run into since my days as a journalism student until now: that journalists should be neutral, impartial, and objective. But what does it mean to be objective when we know - with absolute certainty - the causes of climate change, our worsening health outcomes, ecosystem destruction, and the civil war in my country?

I’m not talking about binary choices or leaving no room for nuance. I’m talking about equating “neutrality” with pretending both sides are equal and deserve equal attention, or when “impartiality” becomes being complicit with the aggressors.

I reject both, in the same way I reject purism.

I started this issue meaning to write about hope at Terra Madre. I’ll get there next week, but I want to end today’s piece with a quote from Ben.

“Any step, any activity, anything, no matter how small, is important, just to feel as though you’re doing something to stand up for your beliefs and your principles.”

Thin’s Pickings

1. A senior FAO official on the price he paid for speaking out on Gaza - The New Humanitarian

   My Q&A with Benjamin Davis on the first day of his forced departure from the FAO. Do pair it with Colum Lynch’s piece in Devex which has a lot of details.
   

2. Investor Groups Backed by $8T in AUM Press Food & Bev Companies to Halt Litigation Delaying Public Health Laws - The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) and ShareAction

   Following the publication of our investigation, Big Food vs. The People, two responsible investment organizations coordinating large coalitions of investors, are calling on food and beverage corporations to end their litigious response to public health policies. Read the full statement here.
   

3. How (not) to write about health equity - PLOS Global Public Health

   Wonderfully sarcastic opinion piece. Thanks Stuart for drawing my attention to it.

   “Begin by declaring that we must “leave no one behind”. Do not specify who is doing the leaving, who benefits from it, or who has the power to stop it. Speak about health equity as though some groups living shorter, sicker lives than others is a tragedy without authors, a wound without weapons, a crisis without beneficiaries.”
   

4. Hunger on the Horizon: The New Black Sea Grain Crisis - Council on Foreign Relations

   Geoeconomic analyst Sam Henry Lazarus sounds the alarm bell on how a combination of super El Niño, escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war, and continuing instability in the Middle East could undo years of progress on reducing hunger levels.
   

5. Data Center Silence - Lighthouse Reports

   Another big investigation from colleagues in the tech and accountability team, who, having exhausted all lawful means to understand the scale and environmental impact of data centres in Europe, turned to the Aarhus Convention, a binding international treaty that safeguards the public’s ability to participate in decisions relating to environmental matters.

   You can read our full complaint here and the Politico article about it here.

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 are farmers, fisherfolk, food justice advocates, chefs, food and wine producers, academics, journalists, policymakers, and food aficionados.

It's just getting underway as I write this, so I can't do it justice this week but I hope to do more next week.

This year, it’s happening right in the city centre, and if you happen to be here, there’s amazing food as well as conversations, characters, and workshops happening. Find them here.

Ergo, my headless chicken state continues.

Normally, I dedicate a whole day each week to work on this newsletter. This time, I have less than half a day because of travel delays, a bit of jet lag, and… Terra Madre!

Which is to say, I didn’t have time to write a proper newsletter.

I did, however, make a conscious decision - after some vacillation - to start with a hard-hitting report that is likely to raise your blood pressure, and close with something more hopeful.

That's the overwhelming feeling I took away from NY Climate Week, notwithstanding the hectic schedule and some misgivings that we may be preaching mostly to the choir.

The Agribusiness Financial Complex

Did you know that…

• A hundred of the world’s largest companies by revenue across global food and agriculture collectively generated $4.5 trillion in revenue in 2022?

  • Context: That is more than the entire GDP of Germany ($4.2 trillion) that year, the world’s fourth-largest economy, and nearly double the combined GDP of all of Sub-Saharan Africa ($2.29 trillion).

• Three asset managers alone own 22% of the shares in these companies, while if you widen that to 20 asset managers and a sovereign wealth fund, the ownership rises to 41%?

• Just 20 grain, fertiliser, meat, and dairy companies paid shareholders $53.5 billion in 2021-2022.

  • Context 1: This is more than the UN-estimated $51.5 billion it would cost to feed the world's 230 million most vulnerable people in 2023.

  • Context 2: In 2021, nearly 193 million people were in need of urgent food assistance across 53 counties and territories, surpassing “all previous records”.

These are the findings of Food, Land & Money, a report by Friends of the Earth U.S., launched on Tuesday, Sep 22, during the NY Climate Week as part of A People’s Forum on Food, Land, Forests & Finance.

Developed with the support of a dozen other organisations, the report argues that the current system is fundamentally driven by profit and financial speculation.

“It’s not a food system; it’s an agribusiness financial complex... it’s almost incidental that it produces food,” Jeff Conant, Deputy Director, Food, Forests & Finance at FoE U.S. and co-author of the report, said during a fireside chat with me at the report’s launch.

“It produces obesity. It produces land grabs... it produces ecocide, and it produces wealth for the 1%... if we want to transform the food system, we need to recognise that finance is really at the heart of it.”

The financialisation of our food and agriculture gets far too little airtime, despite eye-popping findings like this one from the UN’s Trade and development report 2025:

“In global food markets, for example, over 75% of the income of major food trading companies now comes from financial operations like agricultural derivatives – not from moving wheat, coffee, cocoa or other agricultural products.”

This resonated with me deeply, because in May 2022, we published Hunger Profiteers, which found that excessive speculation by investors who have little to do with food production was driving food prices for ordinary people like us.

One enduring takeaway for me: most of us see the financial system and commodity markets as too complex and technical to understand, and those who benefit from the confusion would prefer we stay ignorant and leave it all to the ‘experts’.

The lack of transparency and data is shocking only until you realise it is a feature, not a bug.

“With the Trump regime we say the cruelty is the point, and one of the little headlines in here somewhere about this is the opacity is the point,” Jeff said.

I can’t do justice to the report in this short write-up, but I urge you to have a read. It’s a great primer on where our food systems are and how we got there. Particularly useful for those who are just dipping their toes into this issue.

• Dedicated website

• Executive Summary

• Full Report

Hopewashing

I also attended two other events during my whirlwind trip: the Food Solutions Summit and Food Day. At the latter, I was struck when a participant talked about the need for “Hopewashing”.

No, not the kind that allows corporations and powerful folks to peddle the idea that they’re improving the world, but the kind that’s more like the Hope-based Communication developed by Thomas Coombes and inspired by Anat Shenker-Osorio.

I met so many like-minded folks, including several I’ve only known over Zoom, LinkedIn, and email, heard from inspiring speakers, and had enough galvanising conversations to leave the city genuinely energised. Just to name a few:

• Monti Lawson on bringing together BIPOC, queer, and trans farmers through the Webatuck Valley Farm Collaborative in Hudson Valley, New York, and how they provided 1.45 million pounds of healthy, fresh food in the 2025 pilot year alone

• James Beard-winning chef Sean Sherman talked about his efforts to improve health in Native communities through Indigenous foods

• Iowa State Representative and physician Megan Srinivas spoke about how a group of determined Iowans mobilised communities to stop a bill that would have shielded agrochemical giant Bayer from lawsuits and how they are continuing this work

• Steven Chen on his role as Chief Medical Officer for Alameda County’s Recipe4Health programme which has linked 23 health centres with 45 local, organic, and/or regenerative/agroecological farms and has served nearly 12,000 people so far

• Michelle Hughes, executive director of National Young Farmers Coalition, on how 83% of respondents in a survey of 10,000 young farmers said they are in this profession for conservation or environmental stewardship

• Andrew Steer, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Professor at the London School of Economics, on the current twisted incentives for corporations and the need to rethink our financial system

• Emma Stewart of Climate Spring on how they are supporting screenwriters and filmmakers globally to see food and climate issues in a way that resonates with viewers who spend hours on their screens

• Multiple speakers highlighted the power imbalances in our food systems and called for the issue to be front and centre in any discussion on food and agriculture.

One of my favourite moments was the chance to meet Karen Washington, the founder of Rise and Root Farm and the doyenne of urban farming in New York.

I interviewed her six years ago in the depths of COVID for a feature story about food apartheid in the U.S., and the conversation profoundly shaped the way I view food access and power.

The resulting article remains one of my favourites to this day. So of course, I had to ask her for a selfie. If I look slightly unhinged in this photo, it’s because I was fangirling hard.

Thin’s Pickings

1. Beyond the Technical Fix: Why Managing Domestic Politics is the Key to Unlocking Health Taxes - LSE Blogs

   “Political economy analysis should no longer be treated as a useful add-on to health tax reform. It should sit at its centre,” argue Will Klemperer and Douglas Mushinge, two policy advisors with Kivu International, drawing their conclusions from an analysis they did with Cancer Research UK on what’s happening in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.
   

2. MAHA Moms Built a Movement. MAGA Bros Have Taken It Over - Food & Environment Reporting Network and Mother Jones

   Thought-provoking piece from Jill Filipovic, who wrote: “Much attention has been paid to the MAHA moms, and rightly so… But it’s the movement’s men who have ascended to the highest levels of power.”

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’ll be in New York early next week for Climate Week, participating in A People’s Forum on Food, Land, Forests & Finance on Sep 22 and Tilt Collective’s Food Day on Sep 23.

I’ll then rush back to Torino for Slow Food’s Terra Madre Salone del Gusto, where I’ll be moderating the session on Food Justice And The Taste For Power on Sep 25.

If you’re in any of these places, drop me a line!

I realise I’m overdue for another round-up of big reports, but this week I want to focus on two new papers whose findings reinforce each other.

A Conscious Decoupling: Shock & Resilience

Whether weather-related events, natural disasters, pandemics, wars, or economic troubles, conventional wisdom has it that the bigger the shock, the higher the chances of disruption to our lives, jobs, assets, and food supplies.

For example, recent food-system troubles, from rising food and fertiliser prices to stubbornly high levels of hunger and malnutrition notwithstanding gains in the last two global reports, have often been linked to shocks: COVID-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, and El Niño.

But a new study that came out this week - one of the first global empirical assessments of what underpins food system resilience - challenges this assumption. In fact, it shows that a large-scale shock does not need to lead to worsening hunger.

“Decoupling food insecurity from shocks: a global analysis of food system resilience” (thankfully not behind a paywall) is authored by a coalition of food systems experts spanning five continents and multiple disciplines.

Published in PNAS, it uses a large dataset from the Food Systems Countdown Initiative (FSCI) to conduct a multi-country, multi-year analysis - from 2011 to 2019 - across 87 countries.

Here are my four key takeaways from this paper.

A bigger shock doesn’t mean more hunger

The image below is based on a different analysis using a larger sample of countries (105 rather than the 87 countries in the main analysis) and plots the severity of shocks (increasing from left to right) against the average deviation from the mean food insecurity level between 2011 and 2019.

1. Countries that are exposed to more severe shocks (on the right-hand side of the graph) do not necessarily display higher levels of food insecurity than other countries.

2. Countries that are wealthier (indicated by darker bubbles) are not always more resilient. More on that in the next point.

“There’s a tendency for all of us to assume that a bigger disaster means a bigger food security impact. What the figure shows is that the reality is more complicated,” said Chris Béné, lead author and Senior Policy Advisor with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and Wageningen University & Research.

The authors were surprised by the findings, which showed that “shocks are only part of the story”, he told me in an interview.

“Shocks matter, but the consequence is not predetermined…. There’s no systematic relation between the severity of the shock and how the countries are doing in terms of food security,” he told me in an interview.

It’s resilience, stupid

“Instead, what is important, what matters, is how capable the country’s food system is in absorbing that shock, which is basically resilience,” Chris added.

“Resilience is what breaks or at least weakens the link between the shock and the consequence in terms of food insecurity.”

The paper defines resilience as “the ability of the actors of the food system to maintain, protect, or recover the system’s long-term outcomes (food security) in the face of adversity, through their capacities to cope, adapt or transform. As such, resilience builds on actors’ agency and system’s emergent properties.”

But measuring resilience is hard, because governments usually monitor the upstream part - the production - and the downstream part - the nutrition and food security - and almost nothing about how the system functions “in the middle”, said Chris.

“That’s why it’s been quite a challenge to identify indicators that could help us understand how it works. And very few of (the existing) indicators are really what you would dream of if you were to try to better understand resilience. They’re more of what we call proxy indicators. That’s why not many papers had managed to look at that issue because it’s a huge endeavour to put those data together.”

Wealth doesn’t necessarily determine resilience

In the image, GDP per capita is denoted by the colour of the dots: the higher the figure, the darker the dots.

Again, there isn’t a clear pattern on who is more resilient from shocks.

Sure, Japan is a rich country in a high-shock environment and also appears to be fairly resilient. But Pakistan and Indonesia are in the same quadrant. Meanwhile, Malaysia and South Africa, which have higher GDP per capita, are not.

“Being a rich country does not automatically make their food system resilient. What seems to matter is whether countries are strengthening the capacities that allow them to respond to shocks.”

While there does not seem to be a straightforward relationship between a country’s economic development and its ability to withstand shocks, richer countries tend to have more capacity to deal with disruptions at both individual and institutional levels.

We already know what to do

“Strengthening institutional effectiveness, enhancing redundancy, and investing in social capital emerge as critical pathways for building resilient food systems in an increasingly shock prone world,” the authors said.

This sounds eminently sensible. It is also not new. This is something both academics and civil society have been banging on about for many, many years.

What is new is the weight this empirical data, done at scale, brings to the argument, which elevates it from a ‘of course, it sounds like this is what we should do,’ to ‘the data shows that doing it will actually make a big difference’.

Still, the authors didn’t go in with pre-conceived notions about what they were going to find, according to Chris.

“We were not trying to demonstrate anything. We were really letting the data tell us whether there’s something to say.”

And the data showed the role these three factors play in buffering the impact of shocks.

Government effectiveness can translate into whether governments are active, transparent, and effective in what they’re doing, while redundancy refers to diversification in the food supply, whether countries have various ways to get food: national/local production, import, trade, etc.

“The good thing is that those two key factors (government effectiveness, food supply diversity) are something that government or donors or the international community can control,” said Chris.

“You cannot control the severity of the shock, but you can certainly help government get more effective. You can help with infrastructure to make sure there is not one single route for the food - some from importing, some from domestic supply. These can be influenced by government policy.”

Social capital is far subtler but serves as a long-term foundation for resilience, which governments should continue to invest in even if the results are not immediately visible.

“One of the key lessons from Hurricane Katrina was that the neighbourhoods that were characterised by a higher level of social capital were usually faster in bouncing back... It’s been empirically and even theoretically identified as a key factors for building resilience.”

Caveat: The analysis only runs to 2019, because some of the indicators were available only up to then, so the impact of some of the biggest shocks in our recent memory - the pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, the attack on Iran, et al - are not reflected.

For example, in the image above, Myanmar, my home country, doesn’t look bad at all. But we know that since the Feb 2021 coup, hunger levels have worsened significantly. So would more updated data provide a different picture?

Maybe. But Chris believes the latest data is likely to confirm rather than contradict these findings.

“For example, during COVID-19, African countries were heavily depending on the rice imported from India. So when India decided to cut their export, that had huge effect on a lot of African countries because they were depending on only one route for their rice.”

“So this illustrates in a negative way what I was talking about earlier, which is the importance of diversification. Same thing for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where countries that were heavily depending on the cereal imported from the region were affected more than the countries that could turn to other supply.”

I think the same logic can be applied to Myanmar, too, where worsened food insecurity is a result of conflict, economic disruption, and the military’s attacks on civilian populations.

The Power In The Middle

“Power, value capture and redistribution by multinational traders in agri-food value chains in East and Southern Africa” was published earlier - July 30 - in the journal Competition & Change, but I wanted to put these two studies side-by-side because the second reinforces the first, particularly on government effectiveness.

Written by experts at The Centre for Competition, Regulation and Economic Development (CCRED) at the University of Johannesburg, it touches on one of my obsession topics: antitrust or competition issues.

It focuses on the mid-stream value chains for maize and soybeans - two crops that are integral for human food and animal feed - and uses data on prices, production, consumption, and trade, alongside interviews in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

It also takes into consideration how things like government regulations, ad hoc trade restrictions, and efforts by governments and donors to address what they see as market failures end up reinforcing the unequal power dynamics.

The findings in a nutshell: large traders enjoy excessive margins while poor households and smaller players face volatile food prices.

Here are my five key takeaways.

Concentration means power, and power captures value

The paper explains how these dominant firms not only capture power but also value, using their collective market and bargaining power to shape prices to the detriment of consumers and other market participants.

Example 1: In 2020/2021, a combination of Brazil’s mega-drought and bad weather in Mexico and the U.S. pushed up international maize and soybean prices, and the situation worsened after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“The movements in prices in (East and Southern Africa) countries in absolute terms were, however, much greater than changes in international prices pointing to other factors at work in addition to global shocks,” the paper said.

In fact, “the price changes and the differentials between countries within ESA are orders of magnitude greater than shocks to prices in international markets” and “the price differentials within the region are far in excess of transport and related costs”.

Example 2: When international soybean prices increased to around US$600/Mt in 2021, prices in Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi increased to over US$1200/t towards the end of that year.

“Even more perplexing was that these prices occurred alongside bumper harvests in Malawi and Zambia meaning abundant supply, and sizeable net exports including to India and UAE.”

Example 3: The authors found large price swings between harvest time - when farmers, often needing quick cash, sell their produce - and later in the year, in both Zambia and Malawi. Traders who can afford to store grain capture the difference, meaning farmers get far less than the price consumers eventually pay.

Think “Regional”, not “National”

Tackling this requires a regional rather than a national response, especially because many countries are now reliant on each other to feed their population, Arthur Mahuma and Grace Nsomba, two of the paper’s authors, said in an interview.

For instance, Kenya grows high-value products like avocados but relies on Zambia or Tanzania for staples such as maize and soybeans.

“So they have to trade with each other. But because markets are so concentrated and controlled by very few players, it means they’re also at the mercy of whatever these incumbents decide to do and how they decide to price, and Kenya has seen prices far higher than its neighbours,” according to Grace.

Market liberalisation has also produced concentrated industries, with large players expanding across borders beyond the reach of national competition authorities.

“We are saying regional competition enforcement, like from the COMESA Competition Commission, is important because they’re in a position to address why it is that Kenya is facing such high food prices when countries such as Zambia and Tanzania have surplus production?”

Arthur agrees.

Traditional competition enforcement is very much focused on national jurisdiction, but “that’s not how supply chains work”, he said. “They go beyond national geographies, beyond competitive regulation boundaries.”

It’s not just about market failures. It’s about Market Power

Governments, donors, and regional bodies tend to focus on addressing what’s considered market failures - things like incomplete and asymmetric information and high transaction costs - by launching initiatives like commodities exchanges, digital tools for farmers, and market information networks.

Yet, they fail to address the market power of dominant companies, which means these initiatives have not only failed to address the underlying problem, but in some cases, reinforced the status quo.

“Rather than market failures, it is market and bargaining power which has underpinned differential access to market information and which has enabled control over trade flows, margins and value redistribution. This power includes the ways in which information is collected and controlled through various institutional arrangements,” the paper said.

Take exchanges such as ZAMACE in Zambia, ACE in Malawi, the Tanzania Mercantile Exchange and the Kenya Agriculture Commodity Exchange, for example.

They failed to gain traction, at least partly because “multinational traders have no incentive to support the exchanges given the margins they can earn from their insider status”.

At one point, multinational maize traders supplying Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were making estimated excess margins of around 40% to 80%, while excess margins for soybeans averaged 44%, according to the paper.

What about digital tools for farmers, touted as a key solution?

“If you look at Kenya… they’ve got an abundance of apps in terms of digitalisation. But I think the key question for farmers is always: when they produce these goods, who do they then sell to?” said Arthur.

“There’s bargaining power imbalances because the traders are large and in the contexts we’re looking at, most of the farmers are smallholder farmers, where the key issue is how much can we get for a particular point in time? They don’t have storage facilities. They’re not able to export to different markets.”

“All of these initiatives are trying to create more information for the farmers, but that’s not the key problem. The key problem is when they need to negotiate for the pricing, that bargaining power level is distorted, and this is where competition policy comes to play.”

The paper singled out one initiative in particular: the Regional Agricultural Trade Intelligence Network (RATIN), set up by the East African Grains Council (EAGC) with donor support.

It published price data from 2006, but around 2021, access was restricted to a narrow subset of EAGC members.

“(EAGC) is basically an association of the large traders. So if you’re going to give resources to the large traders in terms of trying to alleviate problems in the market, it’s kind of like counterintuitive and actually reinforcing the power that they already hold,” said Grace.

Super El Niño is adding urgency to tackle this issue

While the paper doesn’t discuss the weather phenomenon, I couldn’t help but think about its implications for the region while reading it.

“What we have seen from the previous research is that when there is a drought in the southern part of the continent, there will be abundant rain in the eastern part of the continent. So if trade was working well in terms of price, then the [region] wouldn’t suffer because on balance, it will be food secure,” said Arthur.

But given the dysfunctional market dynamics, there is a risk of traders exploiting supply shocks, he added.

“(Super El Nino is) definitely a very big concern,” said Grace. “I think that actually reinforces, 1, the need for regional market surveillance, and 2, the need for transparency in markets.”

She said they are calling for an expansion of the African Market Observatory, an initiative providing data on prices, trade and production that could help producers, consumers and competition authorities across the region make better decisions and curb possible “opportunistic behaviour by some large incumbents… using the super [El Niño as an excuse to price gouge or raise prices and costs across the region”

We already know what to do

Remember the three key factors for resilience I mentioned above? One of them is government effectiveness, and to me, the consequences of its absence are glaring in this paper.

Africa now has the largest number of hungry people in the world. If we don’t want this situation to deteriorate, we need to make sure both farmers and consumers are not shortchanged. And that requires governments - including competition authorities - to be active, transparent, and effective.

“Our findings on maize and soybean markets indicate issues of market and bargaining power are central, not peripheral, to sustainability concerns in food value chains. Interventions to address skewed power imbalances are essential to complement other initiatives such as improved water management and sustainable farming practices.”

“The concentration and power relations point to a research agenda including regional market surveillance by competition authorities as part of a broader policy push to analyse the ways in which large companies shape food systems. If governments step-aside then this risks the further expansion of private regulation by lead firms, as we have found here, to control food systems transformation, continue to capture the majority of value created and undermine the ability of smaller market participants to adapt to extreme weather.”

Thin’s Pickings

1. Food & Farming Storytelling Fund for journalists - Sentient
   Sentient, whose reporting focuses on exposing the problems with factory farming, has announced a $360,000-fund to provide direct grants to storytellers covering food and agriculture over the next two years.
   

2. The Critical Minerals Linking Myanmar’s Civil War to the World - International Crisis Group
   A visually arresting, satellite-imagery-driven investigation into how jade, tin, gold, and heavy rare earths tie Myanmar's civil war to global supply chains for EVs, electronics, defence and luxury goods.
   There’s also this FT article (paywalled) about how Norwegian telecoms giant Telenor have been “charged with aiding crimes against humanity in Myanmar”, over allegations it handed customer data to Myanmar's military junta and later transferred sanctioned surveillance equipment when it sold its Myanmar business.
   It echoes our own investigation in 2022 on how Western technology ended up in the junta's hands.
   

3. What will Luke Lindberg mean for WFP and humanitarians? — The New Humanitarian
   An unflinching look on how a Trump-aligned, “America First” USDA official will lead the world’s largest humanitarian agency.

   Devex broke the story of Lindberg’s nomination back in April and its latest newsletter provides good context and background.

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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All this - plus the latest confirmation that August 2026 was the world’s joint hottest month on record, while ocean warming reached a new high - has made me ruminate, more than usual, about how fragile all of this is.

This issue was planned way before all that, but I’m glad there’s a little bit of serendipity in giving the space to a colleague who fought his way back to life and did a massive public service by taking us along on that journey.

Last week, I gave you a compelling guest post from Thalita Pires, editor of O Joio e O Trigo, laying out the food system governance implications of the upcoming Brazil elections.

This week, we’re staying the course in Brazil, but in a different format: a Q&A with Ed Wanderley, Brasília-based editor for Agência Pública, another great, independent, investigative news agency we partnered with for Big Food vs. The People.

I first met Ed over a blurry computer screen - as many of us do these days - to discuss the investigation. I was instantly struck by two things: his warmth, which exudes from every pore, and his knowledge of the subject matter.

When I met him in person a couple of months later, it was like we were old friends. He was juggling two big projects - ours and a podcast tracing his journey from a near-death experience to getting fitter - on top of his daily responsibilities.

Both are now successfully completed, and I thought his personal journey and its professional aftermath deserved a piece of its own. Besides, I wanted to point my Portuguese-speaking readers to his narrative podcast, A Última Bolacha (translated as “The Last Cookie”).

Ed tells me the name is a popular saying in Brazil with two meanings: it can mean saving the best for last, or it can be a snarky way of describing someone who thinks a little too highly of themselves.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

THIN: Let’s start with how Paul McCartney almost killed you.

ED: I was at a Paul McCartney concert back in November 2023. He’s on the bucket list of artists I want to see and I’d already lost the opportunity to see him live twice before. So I didn’t want to miss it. He was 81!

It was great. But then I started feeling down. I thought it was dehydration because it was really hot and there were a lot of people. I had to go before the encore was over to the medical station, and they checked my blood pressure and it was really high. They gave me a pill, then another pill, but it wouldn’t come down. So they said I had to go to the hospital.

There, some markers in my blood showed there was something going on with my heart, and (the doctors) diagnosed it as a heart attack. Later they described it as myocarditis. My heart’s ejection fraction was at 36%, and they said it couldn’t go any lower than 30, because with my weight and my age, it could be fatal.

(Note from Thin: the UK’s NHS say an ejection fraction of 50% or higher is considered normal)

I spent 15 days in the ICU, and saw a lot of people die next to me. It was really traumatising in some ways. Up until then I hadn’t even broken an arm: I was obese, but I hadn’t had any kind of disease in my life.

I was really reckless - we write about how men don’t take care of their health the way women do, but you don’t really realise that until it happens to you. So I had to change my whole way of life - not just around food, but exercise, sun exposure, regular checkups. It was a whole transformation.

So the bucket list was fulfilled, but one thing that really stood out is that he was 81 and he was in better shape and in better health than I was.

He played for two and a half hours and he was jumping and I was feeling sick!

THIN: When did you start feeling sick?

ED: I started feeling bad about an hour into the show, but I was there with a friend who’d come from out of town just to see McCartney - he’s a really big fan - and I didn’t want to disrupt his experience, so I stayed as long as I could.

It was a huge show, over 40 songs, and when they hit the nine-song encore I said, “I have to go to the medical station”. I didn’t have any classic heart-attack pain - I only discovered what was actually happening once I had the tests done at the hospital.

THIN: What was your weight at the time?

ED: I was 36 years old, weighed 310 pounds, about 153 kilos, and I’m 1.73 metres tall.

THIN: You said you had to change your whole way of life. Tell me about it.

ED: So I spent 15 days in the hospital, and the food isn’t so easy back here, so when I left, I’d already lost like 20 pounds. So that was a jump start to the whole thing.

I immediately went to doctors and nutritionists and we came up with a plan I could follow. I started at the gym and changed my whole diet.

There are two landmark timestamps here.

The first two years I was an A student, doing everything right. In one year or so, I lost 120 pounds. I went back to playing volleyball and hitting the gym every single day. Almost a year without drinking and without any added sugar in my body.

Then November last year - it’s always November. I’m really scared about November (laughs) - I broke my ankle in two places. And I spent two months in a wheelchair, and I had to spend another six months doing physical therapy.

I wasn’t really able to do a lot of stuff. And when you break your routine, everything comes crumbling down. I have a stress eating habit. I lost track of dieting and exercising and everything, and I regained a lot of weight.

That really has been stressful ‘cause I’m trying to get back on track and it’s really hard. 2026 has been a struggle.

THIN: Oh Ed, I hope you don’t beat yourself up too much! I can only imagine how difficult it must be. And I remember when you broke your ankle!

ED: Yeah, it’s one of those things that you know the right way to do it, but you really can’t do it right.

Even with the podcast, I had to record the whole narration with a broken ankle and while gaining weight. It was a bittersweet experience.

But people seemed to really enjoy the podcast. They supported the whole conversation around obesity, because a lot of people struggle with it, and it’s different for each person. Not all bodies respond the same way.

THIN: So let’s talk about the podcast. When was it that you thought your experience might make for a compelling investigation into food, health, and power?

ED: To tell you the truth, I didn’t come up with it myself. It was my boss, Natália. She approached me and said I had to tell my story, that we’d keep investigating the food industry and lobbying in Brasília, but that I had a story of my own too.

When you go through something like (the heart attack), you go a little crazy reading labels and making choices, so I’d already started doing my own investigation for myself. She said I had to share it with others.

I was really reluctant, because I’m on the side that believes reporters should never become the story. I’d always turned my nose up at people trying to be influencers and inserting themselves into the conversation.

THIN: Yeah, that was one of my questions. As journalists, we’re often told not to become the story. But audiences love stories they can relate to. How did you find the right balance between personal story and hard-hitting journalism?

ED: It wasn’t a comfortable place for me. But the argument that convinced me was that this was a true story, and that instead of telling it through someone else’s eyes, the way we normally do, I could tell it through my own.

So I decided to do it, but using myself as seasoning, you know. My story seasoned the whole conversation across five episodes. I shared things about myself, my family, and recordings I’d made - like the first time I was in an ambulance, when I recorded myself giggling and joking, even with a heart condition, because I always fight everything with humour.

I had a lot of material like that: the sounds of the ICU, voice notes with reflections I’d sent to people while I was in the hospital. All of that helped me tell the story and make people travel through it with me.

What I really had to tell was how ultra-processed industries work, how the history of sugar cane is tied to our culture, how it shapes our tastes and habits, and to address the shortcuts people take, like skinny jabs or bypass surgery.

THIN: For those of us who don’t speak Portuguese, explain the podcast and why you structured it the way you did.

ED: The podcast is only in Portuguese, and it has five episodes. The first is about the heart attack and ultra-processed foods, because that was the first thing I had to take out of my life.

The second is about sugar, which I’m genuinely addicted to. I come from Pernambuco, which has been the main sugar-cane region in Brazil since the 18th century, so everything there speaks to the colonial history and the sugar trade. Sugar farms became neighbourhoods and gave them their names.

People used to put sugar in babies’ milk, and if you were feeling nervous, people would offer you sugar water to calm you down. It’s really about culture, so we had to explore how the place I’m from shaped my habits.

The third is about bariatric bypass surgery, and why it hasn’t been my path. Almost 20 years ago, as a young reporter, I was assigned to follow the first patient to undergo a new kind of bypass surgery to Brazil’s public health system.

I met Orlando, a patient who weighed 600 pounds, and I followed him for months. I got really scared of how invasive the surgery was, and decided not to go through it myself. I knew that would be a question for listeners, so we built an episode around access to the surgery and how it’s evolved since my experience.

The fourth episode is about skinny jabs [weight-loss injections]. It was a real challenge because it’s become almost a religion right now - people are crazy about it. Even people who just want to lose three pounds are using it. I discovered a lot of things that hadn’t been reported in Brazil, particularly about Novo Nordisk.

There are 65 deaths under investigation here in Brazil linked to the use of skinny jabs, and nobody was really talking about it. Before the podcast came out, Folha de São Paulo, our main newspaper, ran a piece exposing six deaths linked to pancreatic issues. I found the real number was 65 - almost 11 times higher.

For comparison: there’s a dengue vaccine here that was linked to three deaths out of 20 million people vaccinated, and the health authorities stopped the vaccination programme to investigate. But with skinny jabs, there are 65 deaths being investigated over two years, and nothing has been stopped.

We also covered a lot of other risks people don’t talk about, like blindness.

The fifth and last episode is about mental health, and about how people’s relationship with food has changed. Now we don’t eat food, we eat “protein” and “carbs”.

We close the podcast with me reuniting with the doctor who looked after me in the ICU. I got to go back and thank him, and that made a lot of listeners emotional.

THIN: We also worked together on the Big Food vs. The People investigation. Did the investigations help shape each other? What are the similarities and differences?

ED: One thing that really helped is that I was in touch with a lot of sources at Anvisa [Brazil’s health regulator] across two completely different subjects, and they came together. So it made information flow more easily.

There are a lot of similarities when you look at health companies on the podcast and the food industry in the Big Food investigation, because they act the same way. They don’t put people first. They neglect to tell the whole story, they hide information, and they prioritise making their products cheaper for themselves, even when the real cost comes with people’s health.

With skinny jabs, they say the drug is only meant for a few patients, but they’re not really concerned about all the other people using it. And they make it more appealing: they make it seem like magic, and they even run sales promotions and loyalty programmes for it.

Food does the same thing, smoking does the same thing, medicine and drugs do the same thing - they all end up in people’s bodies and there are consequences. But money doesn’t really care about that.

THIN: What were some of the most shocking findings in your podcast?

ED: There was the death toll, and how under-communicated the risks are, like blindness and pancreatitis. Even doctors here in Brazil aren’t discussing these risks with their patients. That really stood out to me.

I also had to look into Novo Nordisk, the manufacturer that held the patent for semaglutide. There’s a lot about how they’ve behaved that hasn’t been discussed here in Brazil: they were banned for two years in the United Kingdom over ethical issues (THIN: read about the more recent transgressions here), and in the United States the FDA fined them for failing to disclose cancer risks on their label.

Here in Brazil, that information isn’t on the label either, because Anvisa, our health agency, doesn’t require it. When I asked them how that could be, given they know the risks, their answer was that it’s a regulatory issue.

The company was already making a lot of money, but they wanted more, and they wanted to protect their patent, which expired in Brazil back in March. They tried to influence the Supreme Court and the health agency to get an extension. Nobody was talking about the company side of this - doctors only ever call it a revolution, a miracle - but there are a lot of ethical issues that needed to be addressed.

THIN: Take us back to your childhood and the kind of food and diets you grew up with.

ED: It was always unhealthy. I was really thin until I was about two, and my mum gave me drugs to increase my appetite. I think she regrets it now. By the age of seven and a half, I was already fat.

Back then, poverty was a lot more widespread here in Brazil, and my parents were middle class. One of the things that showed middle-class families had “made it” was food. My dad was really proud to bring home cookies and snacks every month, so there were always a lot of processed, sugary things in the house alongside beans and rice, plus homemade desserts.

Having a diverse spread of food in the house was their way of telling themselves they’d made it - it was a status symbol, and so was hosting people at home, right down to the drinks.

In Pernambuco, where I lived, it mattered whether you had whiskey at home to serve guests, because not everyone could afford it. I was really drawn into all of that because my parents were part of it - it’s psychological, it’s cultural, it’s a lot of things.

One thing they never did was worry about health, because for them, feeding us generously was a kind of tenderness, a way of showing how much they cared through what they provided, and (those products weren’t) cheap back in the 1990s.

I had lunch every day - beans, rice, meat - but every afternoon we had snacks, and by night, ice cream. On weekends it was always pizza or hamburgers.

THIN: How and when did that change? And how widespread was the change?

ED: On the second episode we talk about exactly this - sugar was an elite thing here in Brazil, and really in the whole world, and only rich people could get it. Years later, rich people were the first to distance themselves from it, to cut it out of their diets.

It’s the same with ultra-processed food today: people assume it’s still something only rich people have access to, but the rich people with genuinely healthy diets are the first to abandon it.

It’s a cycle, because history shows that the wealthy get access to things first, and then step away once they realise it isn’t healthy, while everyone below them doesn’t see that. They just want access to it. That’s the sugar and ultra-processed cycle here in Brazil, and I think it’s still going.

THIN: You have high-stakes elections coming up. As a citizen who has suffered a health crisis and navigated food systems challenges, and also as a journalist who has investigated power and accountability issues, what are your concerns?

ED: Candidates really aren’t worried about food or health. I recently wrote a piece showing that across the publications and programmes of the 14 candidates here in Brazil, only 2% of the mentions relate to childhood or child health.

Politicians frequently associate these issues with “protecting childhood” specifically, without going further. It’s really not a priority; here we mostly talk about security and violence. On health, people mostly think about our public health system - the queues, the specialities - so food itself ends up far from what people imagine as a priority.

One candidate, the current president, does address things that are already the default now, like school meals coming from local farms rather than industry and being free of ultra-processed food. But even he doesn’t want to push that agenda forward, because subsidiaries of companies like Coca-Cola have been among the major campaign supporters here for the past 20 years.

I think the food industry here works like the police: you don’t mess with them because you need their support.

I’m not particularly hopeful about the incoming Congress, because the one we’re getting rid of was one of the worst in our history. I don’t want to get my hopes up, though I’d like to be proven wrong.

THIN: Anything else you’d like to add?

ED: I just wish people didn’t have to go through what I did, and that they could make changes in their lives without having to get scared into it.

And if you are a journalist, I hope you actually live what you write, because for years I wrote about these issues before they became a reality for me.

Thin’s Pickings

1. (Un)intended consequences of mass-prescribing GLP-1s - Science
   Timely warning from Luc L. Hagenaars and Laura A. Schmidt that “the Ozempic era could recalibrate power and profit across the food, pharmaceutical, and wellness industries in ways that suppress access to both GLP-1s and healthier food environments”.
   

2. I read the new UN climate report so you don’t have to. - What If We Get It Right?

   If, like me, you haven’t had the time to read the latest UNEP report on how we’re overshooting the 1.5°C target of temperature increase, then this summary by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a must-read. I appreciate her giving space to agriculture too.
   

3. Wendell Berry, Writer Who Extolled America’s Agrarian Past, Dies at 92 - The New York Times

   A fine portrait of the man who, for decades, fought for agrarian justice and warned of the consolidation of farmland and power, and who helped launch the modern movement for sustainable farming.
   It’s also a good time to re-read this beautiful piece from Dec, 2023, by Landon Frye about finally meeting his hero.

4. Vanishing forests: Why is the Philippines failing at reforestation? - Al Jazeera English

   This 101 East Documentary uses findings from our Forest Fraud investigation to highlight problems with the country’s flagship reforestation programme, and features some truly inspiring locals who continue to protect the forests despite the danger to their lives.
   

5. Malbouffe: quand l’agroalimentaire attaque les États en justice - RTS
   A thoughtful 9-minute radio piece about Big Food’s lawsuits featuring interviews, including with yours truly. In French.
   

6. Coca-Cola Sued Mexico - Macakiux

   A 10-minute YouTube video from Mexican content creator Miguel Hernández about our investigation and findings. A good option if you've got Spanish-speaking family who'd rather watch than read.

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 week, I’m sharing a guest post that vividly illustrates the potential impacts of Brazil’s elections next month on both hunger and nutritional outcomes.

It’s written by Thalita of O Joio e O Trigo (meaning “The Chaff and The Wheat”), an independent news outlet focused on food systems. They do great work and they were one of our two Brazilian media partners for the Big Food vs. The People investigation.

Given their expertise, I wanted their insights on what the upcoming elections mean for food systems governance. They also have a great English language newsletter which is worth subscribing to.

She argued that while Brazil’s exit from the Hunger Map is worth celebrating, it masks harder questions about power, policies, and democratic values.

Thalita Pires is the editor at O Joio e O Trigo.

Brazil’s 2026 presidential campaign officially began only a few weeks ago, but the fight over food has been under way for much longer. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is seeking a fourth term with one of his third administration’s clearest achievements at the centre of his campaign: Brazil’s removal from the United Nations Hunger Map.

On the other side, far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro — a senator and son of former president Jair Bolsonaro — has turned supermarket prices into a recurring argument against the government.

In August, Flávio shared a viral video in which a woman claimed to have spent 626 reais — around US$115 — on basic groceries without buying any meat. The receipt told a different story: the bill included more than six kilograms of meat.

The video was misleading, but the anxiety it exploited is real. Even as Brazil’s hunger indicators have improved sharply, many families still experience the cost of food as daily evidence that the economy is failing them.

Hunger, food prices and access to a healthy diet are closely connected, but they are not measured in the same way — and they cannot be addressed by the same set of policies. A country can reduce chronic undernourishment while millions of families still struggle with grocery bills or rely increasingly on cheap ultra-processed products. This is precisely the tension now shaping Brazil’s election.

At O Joio e O Trigo, we have spent the past decade investigating the forces that shape what Brazil produces and eats — from public policies against hunger to the corporate interests behind the country’s food system. If you would like to follow this story beyond the election, you can subscribe to our English-language newsletter.

Brazil offers a particularly stark case. It is one of the world’s largest agricultural producers and exporters. It has also built one of the most internationally recognised systems of public policy against hunger.

How Brazil Beat Hunger, Part I

Over the past two decades, the country has shown how quickly government action can improve access to food, and how quickly those gains can be reversed when the institutions behind them are weakened or dismantled. What it has not done is substantially redistribute power within the food system that determines what the country produces, exports, sells and eats.

Brazil’s first removal from the Hunger Map, in 2014, was not the result of a single flagship programme. It came from an architecture built over more than a decade.

• Cash transfers through the Bolsa Família programme for low-income families increased the purchasing power of the poorest households.

• Real increases in the minimum wage and rising employment expanded incomes.

• Public procurement programmes bought food directly from family farmers and supplied schools, community kitchens and social assistance networks.

• The national school meals programme reached millions of children and required part of its budget to be spent on produce from family farming.

Just as important was the institutional framework connecting these policies.

The National Council for Food and Nutrition Security, known as Consea, brought civil society into government decision-making. Ministries that would otherwise have treated income, agriculture, health and education as separate issues were required to work around a shared objective. In 2010, the right to food was written into Brazil’s Constitution.

None of these measures was revolutionary on its own. Together, however, they rejected a persistent fiction: that hunger in an agricultural powerhouse was caused by a shortage of food. Brazil produces more than enough. The central problem has always been whether people have the income, public services and political power required to access it.

The same experience also showed that progress against hunger is easier to reverse than the indicators suggest.

After 2014, Brazil entered a period of economic recession, political crisis, and fiscal austerity. Funding for food procurement and other social programmes fell, while unemployment and poverty rose. The public architecture remained on paper, but many of its parts were gradually deprived of money and political priority.

The Bolsonaro Years

Jair Bolsonaro accelerated that dismantling. On his first day in office in 2019, he abolished Consea, removing one of the main channels through which civil society had influenced national food policy. Programmes supporting family farming and public food procurement were weakened.

Cash transfers, however, were not abolished. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress raised the proposed emergency payment from 200 to 600 reais. The benefit reached tens of millions of people and prevented an even deeper social crisis. Bolsonaro later replaced Bolsa Família with Auxílio Brasil and increased its value.

Yet hunger continued to rise.

The pandemic destroyed jobs and livelihoods, while food inflation eroded the value of the benefits families received. School closures interrupted access to meals, and the weakening of food procurement, family farming policies, and mechanisms for coordination reduced the government’s capacity to respond.

By 2022, Brazil was back on the UN Hunger Map. The lesson was not that cash transfers had failed. It was that income support alone could not replace an entire food security system.

How Brazil Beat Hunger, Part II

When Lula returned to office in 2023, his government did not have to invent a new model. It restored much of the one that had been dismantled.

Consea was reinstated. Bolsa Família and the Food Acquisition Programme were relaunched. The government created the Brazil Without Hunger plan, increased the minimum wage above inflation and benefited from falling unemployment.

Food insecurity declined rapidly. In 2025, the FAO confirmed that the prevalence of undernourishment had again fallen below 2.5% of the population, the threshold used for the Hunger Map. The improvement was sustained in the following year.

The contrast is difficult to dismiss.

Brazil did not return to the Hunger Map because it had stopped producing enough food, nor did it leave again because agricultural output suddenly expanded. In both directions, political choices mattered: whether income was redistributed, whether public institutions functioned and whether hunger was treated as a government priority.

But restoration is not the same as transformation. Lula rebuilt important protections against hunger without substantially changing the system that makes access to food so unequal and vulnerable in the first place.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Leaving the Hunger Map does not mean that hunger has disappeared.

The FAO indicator estimates the share of the population whose habitual food consumption does not provide enough dietary energy. Falling below 2.5% is a significant achievement, but the measure does not capture every family skipping meals, compromising food quality, or struggling to afford groceries.

It is also calculated as a three-year average, which makes it useful for identifying trends but less sensitive to sudden changes.

Other indicators offer a less celebratory, though not contradictory, picture. In 2024, 24.2% of Brazilian households still experienced some degree of food insecurity, according to the national statistics agency. In 3.2%, the situation was severe: adults and children were cutting back on how much they eat.

These figures were substantially better than the previous year, but they show the distance between leaving an international map and guaranteeing the right to food for everyone.

There is another gap between having enough calories and being able to maintain a healthy diet. Families respond to rising prices by changing what they buy long before they begin skipping meals: reduce the variety of fresh food, replace products, choose cheaper sources of calories and devote a growing share of their income to eating.

Ultra-processed products, produced at enormous scale and favoured by parts of Brazil’s tax system, often compete on price with fresh and minimally processed food. Hunger can fall while poor diets and diet-related diseases continue to spread.

To be fair, the policies rebuilt by Lula address parts of this problem.

School meals, public procurement and support for family farming can connect access to food with the production of healthier diets. But their budgets remain vulnerable.

The Food Acquisition Programme, for example, was relaunched, reached record levels and then began to shrink again as funding tightened. Meanwhile, the agricultural policies commanding the largest volumes of public credit and infrastructure continue to prioritise commodity chains geared towards exports.

Climate change adds another layer of instability. Droughts, floods and extreme heat affect the production and price of staples, fruit and vegetables, while the farmers who supply domestic markets often have fewer resources to adapt. Income support can protect families from part of the shock, but it cannot by itself decide what is planted, how food reaches cities or which producers survive the next harvest.

This is the limit of Lula’s strongest electoral claim. Leaving the Hunger Map proves that public policy works. It does not prove that Brazil has built a food system capable of making those gains permanent.

Food, Democracy, and Corporate Power

The 2026 election is therefore not simply a contest between two approaches to food policy. It is taking place in the aftermath of an attempted coup and under pressure from a foreign government that has openly aligned itself with the Bolsonaro family.

In 2025, Donald Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods and sanctioned Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, explicitly linking the measures to what he called the political persecution of Jair Bolsonaro. The former president was later sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting to overturn the result of the 2022 election.

His son Eduardo Bolsonaro moved to the United States to lobby the Trump administration on his father’s behalf; in June 2026, Brazil’s Supreme Court convicted him of seeking US interference.

Flávio Bolsonaro has tried to present himself as a more institutionally acceptable version of his father. But he remains a Trump ally and the candidate of a political movement that refused to accept its electoral defeat. Trump met Flávio and Eduardo in Washington as Brazil prepared for the new election, prompting Lula to tell the US president to “stay out” of Brazilian politics.

This places Lula at the centre of a much broader democratic coalition than his own party or the Brazilian left. The choice is not between two governments that made different technical decisions about social programmes.

It is also between a government that accepts elections, public participation and constitutional institutions, and a political project still connected to attempts to overturn an election, now with support from the White House.

Democracy is not a detour from the question of hunger.

Brazil’s food security system depends on institutions through which civil society can influence the government, monitor public spending, and treat food as a right rather than charity. Bolsonaro’s decision to abolish Consea the council was a decision both on food policy and about who should be allowed to participate in government.

Lessons From Brazil

Yet defending democracy does not settle every conflict over food.

The coalition around Lula includes social movements, trade unions and organisations fighting hunger, but it also accommodates one of the world’s most powerful agribusiness sectors.

His government restored policies that help poor families and family farmers while preserving an agricultural model built around concentrated land ownership, commodity exports and large corporations with extraordinary access to the state.

Few companies illustrate this better than JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker. Its controlling family has access not only to the Brazilian government but also to Trump, with a US subsidiary donating US$5 million to Trump’s 2025 inauguration, the largest single disclosed contribution. In 2026, JBS co-owner Joesley Batista helped broker a meeting between Lula and Trump.

What this reveals is not an improper exchange, but a more structural problem: a private businessman can move between presidents, governments, and countries with an influence unavailable to organisations representing family farmers, workers or consumers.

While the fiercest electoral arguments concern who can make food cheaper or protect families from hunger, much less is said about who has acquired the power to decide what Brazil produces, exports, and eats.

Brazil’s recent history leaves us with two lessons.

• The first is hopeful: coordinated public policy can reduce hunger remarkably quickly, even in a deeply unequal country.

• The second is less comfortable: those gains can be reversed when institutions are dismantled, and rebuilding them does not automatically redistribute power within the food system.

We cannot hold up Brazil as either a simple success story or a cautionary tale about government failure.

What it really shows is that not only is hunger a political choice, but also that preventing its return requires more than rescuing people after the system has already failed them. It requires a democracy capable of governing the food system itself.

Thin’s Pickings

1. The three regulatory fixes that could turn Europe’s food labels into a One Health instrument - CAP Reform
   Interesting guest post from Pablo Palencia Garrido-Lestache, Spanish veterinarian, consultant, and former Regional Minister, on turning Europe’s system of protected food names to align with public health as well as economic and environmental sustainability.
   

2. F*ck the Food Pyramid, Meet The RING Diet model by The Sioux Chef. - The Sioux Chef by Sean Sherman
   The RING (Regional Indigenous Nutritional Guide) Diet is Sean’s response to the USDA’s new upside down food pyramid, which he says “should really have NASCAR style sponsorship logos to show who is spending money to control what you eat”.
   

3. Political Economy - Richard Murphy

   This LinkedIn post provides a digestible illustration of what political economy is and why it matters. For those too busy to read my earlier post.
   

4. The Anti-Aesthetics of Tinto de Verano - Everyday Drinking
   Guest poster Noah Chichester waxes lyrical about unpretentious Spanish food and drinks, in particular the quintessential summer drink Tinto de Verano. As a fellow fan myself - it’s my tipple of choice in the summer months, including the past few weeks - I couldn’t agree more with this piece.
   

5. FSSAI to introduce red warning labels on chips, sugary drinks and packaged foods - The Indian Express
   In late July, when The Wire published our joint investigation into India’s decade-long process to enact a front-of-pack labelling scheme, it wrote about how the country’s top food regulator has yet to respond to the Supreme Court’s direction months earlier that it proposes warning labels.
   It seems this has finally happened, although there are possible loopholes and no details on the timeline and suggestions of loopholes.

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 were two heatwaves during the three weeks I was away. There were also hailstorms in at least one town we stayed in.

We were fortunate - and again privileged - to stay cool and sheltered during them, but I was very conscious that a vast majority of people won’t have those options. The shocking excess death figures in Europe (at least 35,000) are a testament to that.

Yet, policymakers and powerful actors in Europe seem consumed by their own political careers instead. Their silence is deafening and incredibly frustrating. But that’s why having a break was so useful. I’m refreshed and ready for the next battle.

For the past 18 months or more working on the Big Food vs. The People investigation, I spent a large chunk of time tracking down legal documents, reading voraciously about public health policy, and speaking to food system experts, academics, civil society groups, and journalists around the world.

In the process, I learned a few things that I wanted to share, even if some - or all - seem obvious.

Getting a law passed isn’t the end of the battle

Many of us ordinary folks tend to heave a sigh of relief and celebrate when the causes we support win: getting an important law passed, electing an official with progressive policies on food and climate, winning a referendum.

But if this investigation taught me anything, it’s that the passing of an effective public health policy may have ended an often long-running battle over its justification and design, but it also marks the beginning of a new one.

The industry will find ways to delay implementation, challenge provisions, roll back requirements, and repeal the law. We saw this in every country and region we looked at: Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, the U.S., UK, and Europe.

Sometimes they succeed, like the 16-year delay in Brazil and the repeal of sugar taxes in Norway (2021), Finland (2016), and Denmark (2014). See this 2022 paper on how corporations battle soda taxes in Europe and this Marion Nestle post from 2023 on how the industry funds research to play down UPF risks.

Lawsuits are just the most visible and tangible form of the pushback.

The takeaway? The work doesn’t end when the law passes. It’s a constant, shifting battle to ensure it’s implemented effectively, its mandate is protected, and there’s no room for regression.

Political shifts can threaten public health policies

The gains are fragile. Even if the industry loses the lawsuits, they can still win when political winds change.

See: Colombia, whose new administration, led by the right-leaning MAGA-adjacent populist Abelardo de la Espriella as president, has signalled it will repeal the health tax.

See also: Brazil, whose upcoming elections on Oct 4 will determine whether its push to rein in ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) and Lula’s broader progress on reducing hunger, continues, because neither is likely to survive under Bolsonaro junior’s far-right politics.

Delaying is a win in itself for the industry

Whether it’s the multiple rounds of expert panels and consultations that have dragged on in India since 2014 over front-of-pack labelling, or the lawsuits against Brazil’s advertising regulation that has run since 2010 (here and here), any delay in implementing a public health policy is a chance to continue selling highly profitable but nutrient-poor products.

In both countries, the delay has allowed a new generation to grow up addicted to products that harm our health.

In Daily Maverick, Lillian Roberts used our investigation to dig into what’s happening in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent. I was struck by what she wrote about Draft regulation 3337 on front-of-pack warning labels.

“One of the first hurdles… with the draft regulation 3337 was the “delaying tactics” of industry, through 5,000 public comments, outlined Rebone Ntsie, Chief Director for Nutrition, Health Promotion and Oral Health at the Department of Health, speaking at the second leg of the South African Human Rights Commission’s hearings into hunger, on 9 July. It took the national Department of Health more than a year to consider each comment – one of which was over 500 pages, she said.”

The fight over NOVA is a red herring

Almost every day, I see LinkedIn posts trashing NOVA, the classification system for UPFs developed by a team of Brazilian scientists led by Carlos Monteiro. The criticism ranges from “too broad” to “ignores nutrient density”.

But these “endless technical debates over ultra-processed foods are a big distraction, a red herring if you like,” Phillip Baker, associate professor at the University of Sydney who has studied food systems and UPFs extensively, told me.

“The most important question is why so much of our food environment is dominated by cheap, heavily marketed, highly profitable products that displace healthier and less processed foods,” he said.

“Focusing endlessly on whether individual products meet a particular definition risks obscuring the much bigger structural problem, which is a food system organised around corporate profitability and how this drives the production, promotion and consumption of unhealthy diets.”

“The scientific debate matters, but it should not become a distraction from addressing corporate power and the political and economic forces that shape what food is available, affordable and aggressively marketed to people.”

Full disclosure: Phil is the corresponding author on an upcoming academic paper looking at the lawsuits we helped identify in Latin America. I’m a co-author.

The “nanny state” charge is similarly disingenuous

Let’s be clear: in a democratic society, there must be room to challenge laws. None of the countries we looked at give governments carte blanche to enact any laws they want.

I should know: I was born and raised in a military dictatorship that brooked no dissent.

Providing useful information, making unhealthy foods more expensive, and ensuring children aren’t bombarded with sugary, salty, fat-laden foods isn’t “nanny state” behaviour. It’s caring for people, and being prudent about a country’s own development.

I also saw first hand how effective marketing and advertising can be, even under a military dictatorship. I’ve spoken to scores of people in my own country, both in urban and rural areas, whose diets became increasingly influenced by what they saw and heard on television, radio, and in newspapers, leading instant noodles, sugary drinks, and packaged snacks to replace traditional meals.

Besides, let’s not delude ourselves into thinking corporations and governments have the same resources at their disposal.

The incentive structure is broken, what do we do?

We live in a terrible economic and investment system that rewards increases in shareholder values instead of a healthier, fairer, or more sustainable society. In a system like this, companies focus on boosting their profits in any way they can, including by selling us unhealthy food.

Unfortunately, we’re stuck in this system, at least for now. There are discussions about how to transform it, but that’s beyond both my pay grade and intelligence level.

The question I have is how the majority of us who want fairer, healthier, and greener food systems can work together within the current one.

To quote Jose Luis Vivero Pol, I’m not against profit maximisation. I’m just against profit maximisation at all costs, especially when the costs are borne by the most vulnerable.

Thin’s Pickings

Big Food vs. The People Edition (II)

• The Guardian’s follow-up article, where WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus criticised the world’s biggest UPF companies following our investigation, is well worth a read. So is Felicity Lawrence’s op-ed on this topic.

• I love how The Daily Maverick added their expertise by including what’s happening in South Africa and across the continent. I would love to see outlets in other countries do the same.

• This NYT op-ed by Lindsey Smith Taillie on the U.S. federal government’s unexpected delay in publishing a definition of UPF mentioned our investigation, but also shed light on industry tactics.

• AgFunder wrote a piece on a webinar on strategic litigation organised by the Access to Nutrition Initiative (ATNi), where I shared our findings.

• Ken Cook, President and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), interviewed me about the investigation.

The Usual

• An ODI commentary made a compelling case on the need for a new food systems governance agenda to tackle hunger, identifying “five linked priorities: power, finance, accountability, alliances and political traction”.

• Another commentary, this time in the BMJ, focuses on the UK but its message is universal: surplus food redistribution is not a substitute for structural reforms needed to reduce poverty.

• I can’t end this week’s issue without this beautiful obituary from The New Yorker of Dolly Parton (“the outlaw Christian who loved Jesus and refused to hate anyone else”). Pair it with this AP piece, which used her own words. What a loss.

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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Unless, of course, you’re in parts of the world experiencing torrential downpours… in which case, I hope you’re staying warm and dry.

This week, I’m focusing on a key front we discovered in the Big Food vs. The People investigation: the fight over labelling, a policy that not only received the largest number of legal challenges, but is also triggering major battles.

To me, the lack of transparency about what we’re putting in our bodies is one reason many of us struggle to eat healthily.

And that struggle is linked to the latest SOFI report, the UN’s annual flagship food security and nutrition assessment. This year, it focuses on how expensive healthy diets have become. I cover this link below.

Also: I’m going on a much-needed break so this will be the last newsletter for a wee while. I’ll be back the week of August 24.

Do you ever feel like you need an advanced Maths degree to decipher the myriad of labels on your food? Well, I did a short video about this for our investigation.

Of the 239 lawsuits industry has filed against public health policies in six countries since 2010, nearly two-thirds target front-of-pack labelling mandates specifically.

This is partly because of the sheer number of lawsuits in Mexico (80% of total), of which 80% targets the country’s comprehensive labelling law.

But even if you look past that, the fight in Brazil, ostensibly about advertising and marketing, is on a regulation that requires products with low nutritional value to provide customers with more information. The U.S., where we found two lawsuits on labelling and transparency, is likely to see more as MAHA pushes states to adopt additional labelling rules.

In India, the 12-year battle to enact a front-of-pack labelling law sees no end in sight, while Brussels has given up on a bloc-wide effort following pressure from industry and Italy (see our Italian partners’ stories here and here).

So many systems, so little agreement

The kind of system you have very much depends on where you live. This image below, from the Global Food Research Program at UNC-Chapel Hill, provides the best at-a-glance picture.

If you happen to walk into a supermarket in Chile or Mexico, you’ll encounter black octagonal signs on the front of packaged products saying “High in Sugar”, “High in Salt”, “High in Fat”. In France, Germany, or the UK, you’re likely to see colour coded labels, although in the former you’ll also see a grading from A to E.

In Sweden, it’s a small, green keyhole. In New Zealand and Australia, a row of stars. In parts of Asia, there’ll be a tick sign but with different background and foreground colours.

There are four broad front-of-pack labelling systems:

• Warning labels allow customers to easily identify products that exceed set limits on sugar, sodium, saturated fat or calories. This was pioneered by Chile and now used in Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Canada, and Israel.

• Summary score systems that provide an overall score, like the ones in France, Spain, and Germany (Nutri-Score) or New Zealand and Australia (Health Star).

• Traffic light labels use the colours we know so well to indicate whether a product has low, moderate, or high levels of nutrients of concern but without the overall grade. Used in the UK, Sri Lanka, and Ecuador.

• Endorsement logos, like the Nordic Keyhole or the tick marks in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, and Brunei that highlight healthier products. The idea is that a carrot approach (promoting good products) is better than a stick (shaming the bad). I remain unconvinced of this argument.

Then there is the dreaded Guidelines for Daily Allowance labels which the industry seems to love but is impossible to make head or tail of for ordinary consumers.

Case in point: this video from Consejo Latinoamericano de Información Alimentaria (Clia) or the Latin American Nutritional Information Council.

Interestingly, when I tried to find out more about Clia, the first hit was a listing on The Union of International Associations (UIA) that said it has a relationship with the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), created by a top executive from Coca-Cola and which The New York Times has called “A Shadowy Industry Group” for its efforts to shape food policy.

The curious case of Latin America

As you can see from above, there are varying levels of strictness and interpretability with the labels. Guess which ones get the most push back?

You’re right - warning labels.

There’s another important element to consider: whether the labels are mandatory (or) voluntary. Research shows the latter is much less effective than the former.

For example, a review of Australia’s Health Star Rating found that a decade after its introduction, only 37% of eligible products carried the label at all, because uptake was never mandatory.

These two factors explain why we’re seeing such intense industry push back in Latin America, which has some of the world’s strictest labelling laws, and - as Stuart Gillespie said in his newsletter covering the investigation (thank you!) - “the continent that was hit hardest and fastest by the ultra-processed tsunami”.

We’d welcome other reporters or researchers digging into whether similar suits were filed in other countries outside our dataset (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, US, UK, India) because Latin America’s labelling fights likely run wider than what we were able to track.

It was Chile who paved the way, with a landmark food law in 2016 that mandates comprehensive labelling of foods that are high in sugar, salt, saturated fats and calories, does not allow the use of toys or cartoon characters in sugary cereals, and prohibits the sale of junk food in schools. This NYT article provides a great overview.

I met the architect of the Chilean law, senator and doctor Guido Girardi, in October 2018 in Madrid, at the first global parliamentary summit against hunger and malnutrition.

“Education is not enough. We need to use laws,” he told me.

There is now substantial evidence that the policy worked.

A study tracking 2,383 urban Chilean households from 2015 to 2017 found that purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages fell by 24% after the law took effect. This was a bigger drop than standalone soda taxes had achieved elsewhere in Latin America, and one that held up consistently across income groups.

Another study comparing more than 3,000 packaged products before and after the law’s first phase found manufacturers had reformulated fast: sugar content dropped significantly in breakfast cereals, dairy, and sweet and savoury spreads, while sodium fell in processed meats, cheeses, soups and ready meals. This was done within less than a year of the labels appearing on shelves.

That’s precisely why the industry has fought so hard against them elsewhere in the region.

Take Mexico. In court documents, companies argued that the country’s labelling law violated their constitutional rights and consumer rights, and demonised” their products. Here are just two of the arguments we found:

“Front-of-package labelling violates our right to privacy and family life, and represents state interference in the decisions parents make about their children. These decisions cannot be restricted by the government unless there is a duly justified reason.”

“The regulation requires us to adapt our packaging and conduct assessments of the nutritional values ​​of our pre-packaged products, which represents an economic loss.”

Broadcaster Televisión Azteca also argued that requiring food and beverage advertisers with front-of-pack labels to get a permit would ultimately affect its ad revenue. An executive at Nestlé Mexico said the problem was not the information on the label but the consumer, who simply lacks the discipline to change their behaviour.

India: 14,000 comments, yet we don’t know what most of them say

India’s story is, “same, same, but different”.

There, the national regulator, called the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), has been deliberating a front-of-pack labelling rule since 2014. In 2022 it proposed the Indian Nutrition Rating, modelled on Australia’s Health Star system, following a study with more than 20,000 consumers.

That proposal drew more than 14,000 public comments from consumer groups, health experts, lawyers and industry associations. The FSSAI has never released them, and denied our Right to Information requests for access.

What we do know, from the regulator’s own affidavit to India’s Supreme Court, is that the comments split sharply: nearly 3,000 came from food businesses arguing for a voluntary scheme, while more than 3,500 came from citizens and public health groups demanding it be mandatory.

In February 2026, the FSSAI told the Supreme Court it intended to withdraw the star-rating proposal altogether, citing a lack of consensus.

The Court pushed back, saying pre-packaged food must carry front-of-pack warning labels and ordering the FSSAI to report on how it will implement that within a month. As of the publication of The Wire article last week, the FSSAI hasn’t reported back.

The tension inside FSSAI’s own consultations has, at times, turned openly hostile. At an August 2025 meeting, consumer groups pushed for tougher rules while industry representatives warned that warning labels would hurt sales and argued current standards were sufficient.

When Dr. Arun Gupta, a nutrition advocate and convener of Nutrition Advocacy in Public Interest, said businesses should be upfront about the salt, fat, and sugar in their products, one industry member suggested he simply tell people to exercise more. When Dr. Gupta pushed back that the fix was policy, not blame, another accused his organisation of being foreign-funded, an accusation that has become incredibly common in today’s India.

The fight in Europe

Europe’s version of this fight has been on one specific label: Nutri-Score, the A-to-E colour grade adopted voluntarily by France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland.

In 2020, the European Commission promised to deliver a mandatory, EU-wide front-of-pack label as part of its Farm to Fork (F2F) Strategy. Then, the proposal quietly disappeared from the Commission’s agenda following food industry lobbying, according to consumer group foodwatch, which obtained documents suggesting the mandatory rollout of Nutri-Score was dead.

The decision was made despite the European Court of Auditors’ verdict that a “maze” of different national labelling schemes have confused consumers.

Since then, foodwatch, together with Access Info Europe, has sued the Commission over its refusal to release the documents explaining why the plan vanished.

Public health advocates we spoke to say the demise of the labelling policy is just one symptom of the broader roll back - and sidelining - of public health promises.

Out of a total of six health-related actions under F2F that includes labelling, reformulation of processed foods, and restricting the promotion of unhealthy foods, five remain unfinished as of June 2025, even though they were supposed to have been completed by the end of 2023 or before, according to a thesis submitted to the Wageningen University & Research.

Meanwhile, individual food companies are fighting the label. Danone, which appeared five times in our dataset as the plaintiff, dropped out of the voluntary Nutri-Score scheme in 2024 after its dairy products were affected in a revised scoring algorithm.

Lactalis, one of Europe’s largest dairy companies, went further: it asked the French Council of State in September to annul the decree adopting the revised methodology, arguing the new scoring does not conform with EU law. In June 2026, the Council referred the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Opposition to Nutri-Score has been led by Italy, which promotes its own system amid rising “gastronationalism” touted by its far-right government which has close ties with the agrifood industry. The country now has one of the highest rates of childhood and adolescent obesity and overweight (26%) in Europe, according to our media partner L’Espresso.

Yet labels are not a silver bullet

For all this fighting, there’s an uncomfortable truth that even the people who’ve spent careers pushing for labelling transparency will tell you: it is a weak lever on its own.

Tim Lang, a veteran food policy academic, told me that in his experience, labelling is “a weak form of intervention” and worth pursuing mainly because it pushes some manufacturers to reformulate.

Barry Popkin, a renowned nutrition epidemiologist who was involved in the Chile studies I cited above, put it to me more bluntly over email.

Global food companies have “in their DNA” a resistance to any regulation they do not get to help design, and they are wary of rules that seem minor, because a small win for public health could open the door for other policies.

“They created websites, lobbied hard, and did so much to obstruct our progress and this happens in all our countries - now in Africa and Asia, and they play hard ball. The courts is one tool.”

Mélissa Mialon, a researcher at Inserm/Université Paris Cité and co-coordinator of the Global Commercial Determinants of Health Action Network, frames industry’s resistance as strategic.

“The industry doesn’t want front of pack labelling because it’s a first step towards classifying the products for its healthiness or not, and then it gets easier to tax them, it gets easier to put bans on them for marketing and those types of things.”

Scott Faber, Senior VP for Government Affairs at the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law, told us the industry has built a sophisticated bench of lawyers, nutritionists, marketing experts and lobbyists with two jobs: protect the status quo, and shift the blame for diet-related disease from the companies making the products to the consumers buying them.

He should know. Before joining EWG, he was chief lobbyist for the Consumer Brands Association, whose membership includes many of the same beverage and food manufacturers now suing governments over public health laws.

“It’s impossible to estimate all of the resources that are being dedicated to defeating efforts like beverage taxes, and food disclosures,” he said.

“This isn’t so much about whether consumers might choose to buy less soda or more soda. If consumers do choose to buy less soda, the beverage companies will make the same money selling them other beverages.”

“This is not a fight about money. This is a fight about power, and companies simply don’t want policymakers playing a role in shaping how consumers make choices.”

In the above sentence, he was speaking specifically about soda taxes in the United States, but I feel the same logic applies to food labelling globally.

The SOFI connection

This is where the labelling battle and the latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 (SOFI) report meet.

The decline in chronic hunger is encouraging - 7.8% of the population in 2025 (that’s nearly 1 in 13 people) compared to 8.1% in 2024 and 8.6% in 2022.

What’s less encouraging - Africa now accounts for the largest number of hungry people in the world for the first time.

But the biggest concern - to me at least - lies in the nutrition numbers.

• Anaemia in women aged 15 to 49 years is worsening in nearly all regions: 30.7% in 2023, from 27.6% in 2012.

• Adult obesity now affects 16.2% of the global population. That’s nearly 1 in 6 adults. In 2012, that number was 12.1%.

• The average global cost of a healthy diet has climbed to $4.28 (in purchasing power parity terms) per person per day in 2025 in line with the overall rise in food inflation.

• This is an increase from $3.44 in 2021 and $2.94 in 2017.

• This is too expensive for around 2.69 billion people, close to a third of humanity. In Africa, roughly two-thirds of the population are priced out of a healthy diet.

• Globally, 69% of children 6 to 23 months, and 37% of women lack minimally diverse diets.

In the opening foreword of the report, which came out last week, the heads of five UN agencies - FAO, WFP, IFAD, WHO and UNICEF - behind it wrote: “A healthy diet is fundamental to human development”.

“A healthy diet supports childhood growth, protects long-term health and well-being, and fosters productive and resilient communities. Yet, it is economically out of reach for one-third of people globally, thereby contributing to all forms of malnutrition. At the same time, the costs to society of diet-related non-communicable diseases continue to rise.”

In case you’re wondering…

Because of its focus on the national average cost, the report acknowledges it excludes things like food environments that influence what we eat, but said they’ll be addressed in a forthcoming FAO report.

Even without the bigger framing, I believe the numbers here, together with our investigation, paint a fairly comprehensive picture of how we are boxed in by rising costs of nutritious foods on the one hand and powerful companies making it hard for us to determine if what we can afford is healthy.

Tackling this requires tailored approaches but there are two broad interventions we can embark on:

• Make nutritious foods more available and affordable (suggested by SOFI)

• Establish a Big Tent coalition that will pressure governments to govern, vote with our wallets on companies blocking public health policies, and support folks doing either or both.

That means, among other things, repurposing subsidies and directing research towards fruits, vegetables, and legumes, improving infrastructure and logistics to reduce food loss and waste, and reducing labour and other input costs.

It also means enacting policies that will raise the price of foods that harm our health, so that the cost is not borne by us or the environment (“externalities”) but those who are producing the food.

There is a through line between the 239 lawsuits we found and the cost-of-living crisis affecting so many people around the world.

Like Scott Faber said, this is about power. Some are wielding it in a way that allows them decide who can afford healthy diets and who cannot.

Thin’s Pickings

1. This Teen Took on a $10 Trillion Industry. We Might All Be Healthier Because of Him. - The New York Times

   Julia Belluz, co-author of Food Intelligence, one of my favourite books this year, argues that strategic litigation “may be our only path to a healthy food environment”.

   I mean, if companies are suing governments to stop public health policies, perhaps it can be a two-way street?
   

2. Skeptics of the Ultra-Processed Food Concept Get a Lot Right, But Reach the Wrong Conclusion - Confounding Factors

   Nutrition science researcher Erin Hudson’s thoughtful response to the recent Vox article that said concerns about ultra-processed foods are a nothingburger (I’m rephrasing here).
   

3. MAHA’s Fascist Turn - Raj Patel

   This is worth a read whatever your thoughts are of MAHA, and if you were as bewildered as I by Senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and MAHA leader Cally Means’ unprovoked attacks on Marion Nestle.
   

4. Duped - ABC Four Corners programme

   The first of a two-part investigative TV show that looks into problems with food labelling in Australia, featuring the Health Star rating system I mentioned above. Fascinating and horrifying. Thanks Jezza for sending me the link.

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’ll also be speaking about the investigation at this webinar next Tuesday. Do join us.

I hope to cover the UN’s flagship annual hunger report, which came out this week, in the next issue.

On Wednesday, together with an extraordinary team of media partners across four continents and my colleagues at Lighthouse Reports, we revealed how Big Food uses legal challenges to delay, dilute, and derail laws that could improve public health.

The Team

First off, I have to thank the phenomenal journalists who made this investigation possible. I feel incredibly privileged to have worked with them.

This is a very challenging time to be a journalist, but far more so if you are holding the powerful to account. So let me say it for the umpteenth time: please support good, independent journalism.

These are the newsrooms we worked with, in alphabetical order: Agência Pública (Brazil), Cuestión Pública (Colombia), L’Espresso (Italy), Il Fatto Alimentare (Italy), Follow the Money (the Netherlands), The Guardian (the UK), Lighthouse Reports, O Joio e O Trigo (Brazil), Quinto Elemento Lab (Mexico), Santa Cruz Local (the US) and The Wire (India).

The Findings

I’m sharing these amazing data visualisations (thank you, Revisual Labs!!!) because they provide, in just five simple charts, the key global findings from the investigation.

I’d also urge you to read the individual country stories because they are all very different, eye-popping, and provide much-needed local context the global findings alone can’t capture. I’ve listed them all below under Thin’s Pickings. Just make sure there’s a translation extension in your browser.

We reached out to the companies and organisations named in the investigation with detailed questions. We heard back from very few of them, but when we did, we incorporated their responses in the stories, even though most were short and didn’t address many of our queries.

The Things We Can Do

Well, we know what we’re up against - powerful transnational companies with pockets deeper than many governments. But there are things we can do.

• Read and share the investigation, and the individual country pieces. They tell very different stories about how the same playbook plays out across different legal and political systems.

• Tell your government you expect it to legislate in your interest, not the food industry’s. And that you will be watching what it does when it faces legal pressure to back down.

• Back the policymakers who are trying to do the right thing. Public health officials and legislators who push forward on labelling, taxes, and advertising restrictions often do so at political cost; they need to know there is public support behind them

• Call out the companies. When a brand you recognise appears in a lawsuit against a public health law, say so publicly; consumer pressure and reputational risk are among the few levers that move large corporations.

• Support civil society organisations doing this work. They include groups like El Poder del Consumidor (Mexico), CAJAR (Colombia), ACT (Brazil), and others who have spent years tracking these cases long before we arrived.

• Support independent journalism. Investigations like this one take months and depend on newsrooms that are not beholden to the advertisers they cover.

We’ve also made publicly available our full dataset of 239 cases here, and Big Food’s pre-action letters to the UK government here.

Thin’s Pickings - Big Food vs. The People Edition

• Global: The main investigation page brings together all the stories and the global figures, and The Guardian copy provides a hard-hitting overview with quotes from public health experts.

  Big Food vs. The People - Lighthouse Reports

  If all else fails, sue’: how ultra-processed food firms are using the courts to obstruct health rules - The Guardian
  

• Mexico: the country with the largest number of lawsuits (193 out of 239), many of which are against the labelling regulation. The companies argued that the laws were a violation of their constitutional rights, “demonised” their products, or violated consumer rights.

  Mexico, the battleground of the ultra-processed food industry - Quinto Elemento (In Spanish)
  

• Colombia: Lawsuits mostly targeting health taxes and front-of-package labelling, almost all constitutional challenges brought by individual citizens, many of whom have links with food companies. We published this on May 27, 2026. There’s also a Spanish version of the global findings.

  What’s in your kids’ lunchboxes? Too much sugar and a lucrative business for political parties - Cuestión Pública (In Spanish)

  Big Food vs. the people - Cuestión Pública (In Spanish)
  

• Brazil: In all but one of the 17 lawsuits, the plaintiffs were industry associations, whose members include some of the world’s largest food companies (Cargill, Coca-Cola, Ferrero, Kellogg’s, Mondelēz, Nestlé, PepsiCo). Some cases have dragged on for over 16 years, leaving the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency, ANVISA, hamstrung.

  The People vs. Big Food: How the food industry blocked advertising regulation in the country - Agência Pública (In Portuguese)

  How the food industry blocked advertising regulation in Brazil - O Joio e O Trigo (In Portuguese)
  

• United States: A two-parter focusing on the American Beverage Association’s aggressive legal efforts to overturn a soda tax in Santa Cruz, which it has so far failed to do, and the group’s earlier success squashing a soda tax effort in Watsonville, a neighbouring city.

  A decade ago, a soda tax effort fizzled in Watsonville. Advocates blame Big Beverage. - Santa Cruz Local

  How Big Soda nearly killed Measure Z in Santa Cruz - Santa Cruz Local
  

• Europe: Across the European Union, countries have struggled to even pass taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages, because governments frequently face legal threats before legislation is adopted.

  A refined strategy: how Europe’s industry lobby managed to block sugar taxes - Follow The Money

  A refined strategy: how Europe’s industry lobby managed to block sugar taxes - Follow The Money (In Dutch)
  

• Italy: Two articles looking at the Italian confectionery giant Ferrero and its lawsuits and threats in Mexico and the UK, and how the company’s influence both domestically and internationally is connected to Italy’s agroindustry.

  Big Food vs. Public Health: 239 Lawsuits to Stop Labels, Taxes, and New Rules - Il Fatto Alimentare

  Big Food’s Secret War: how junk food giants hold our health hostage - L’Espresso
  

• India: The article traces the decade-long process of implementing a front-of-pack labelling law by the Indian food regulator, the FSSAI, and how, in the absence of a mandatory policy, social media influencers raising their concerns have faced lawsuits.

  India Is Delaying Front-of-Pack Food Labels – and Consumers Are Paying the Price - The Wire

There are also:

• A combined Latin America piece by the four media partners in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil (here and here).

• This 90-second video about the investigation from Dr. Chris van Tulleken, professor, doctor, and bestselling author of Ultra-Processed People.

• Marion Nestle’s Food Politics blog also covered our project.

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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1. The video I mentioned in my post last week that was produced as part of a three-year research project on the challenges - and defense - of national-level public health policies regulating the food, tobacco and alcohol industries at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Make sure to watch it.

2. HOT OFF THE PRESS: An investigation that has just been published, led by the indefatigable Margot Gibbs, together with Charles Boutaud - both my colleagues at Lighthouse Reports - and Raphaëlle Aubert at Le Monde.

In early 2024, many capitals in Europe were rocked by large-scale farmer protests, some of which turned quite violent.

Farmers were angry at a lot of things, including the EU-Mercosur trade deal, low incomes, excessive bureaucracy, and what they saw as the unjust distribution of subsidies.

Yet one of the few tangible outcomes has been the dismantling of green policies. I’ve written previously about the curious case of how government responses zeroed in on environmental issues.

We’re now two and a half years and multiple heat waves later (the one just a few weeks ago alone killed more than 10,000 people). As far as I’m aware, the other issues driving the protests have not really been addressed.

Please prove me wrong, Brussels insiders. I would dearly like to be wrong.

For a while, we’ve been working to understand some of the underlying issues that have put many European farmers in financial hardship, and whether they are, as policymakers were quick to point out then, truly caused by requirements to protect nature and reduce harmful chemical use.

Well, Lighthouse Reports and Le Monde have just published a groundbreaking investigation that reveals how French cattle farmers are reeling from an increasingly concentrated market.

Publicly-owned slaughterhouses, mostly of modest size, have disappeared. Many have been replaced by a Breton industrial group - the Bigard Group - that now reigns supreme in the French beef sector.

These days, “more than two-thirds of cattle farms rely on a very small number of slaughterhouses, at levels of concentration likely to affect competition”.

“For one in five farms, these levels exceed the generally accepted legal thresholds,” the Le Monde article revealed.

The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index

The HHI is a widely used measurement in which a value of more than 2,000 “indicates that a livestock farmer faces a situation that could undermine competition under European merger law”.

The team mapped the number of cattle farms in each administrative district, and using a separate dataset of slaughtering volumes, calculated the HHI and market share within different distance thresholds of each district.

What did they find?

• More than two thirds of farms are now located in what is considered a “highly concentrated market” where HHI thresholds exceed 2000 and competition is likely to be inhibited.

• And one in five farms are located in districts in which Bigard holds a “dominant position”, meaning over 50% of the market. This is a threshold generally considered unlawful in the context of French merger law.

Why is this a problem? Well, when you have so few firms dominating a market, it could lead to market abuse, reduce competitiveness, make it hard for new entrants, and also leaves us more vulnerable to shocks.

In this case, farmers in such concentrated markets become dependent on the practices and prices of the dominant firms, which are more likely to collude rather than compete on their buying price.

Many Farmers Lose, One Firm Benefits

The result of Bigard’s dominance - €5.8 billion in turnover, 60 sites, and growing revenues - is that slaughterhouses are now farther away, industrial ones generally offer fewer services, and they are able to set the terms and prices when purchasing cattle.

In a nutshell, farmers now have less choice, less bargaining power, and less money. The investigation found that in the 15 years after Bigard’s mergers, pre-subsidy losses doubled.

“Every kilometre travelled causes stress for the animals and weight loss due to dehydration, meaning less money for the farmers.”

The joint investigation highlights a divergence during the 2010s: the purchase price of cattle fell (farmers receive less) and the cost of beef rose (consumers have to pay more).

Essentially, Bigard was paying less to farmers, but those lower prices were not passed on to the consumers. On the contrary, consumer prices were rising, as confirmed by the French Price Observatory.

Meanwhile, Bigard’s profits jumped.

“Between 2004 and 2023, the group’s profits more than quadrupled, rising from 12 to 57 million euros. The company has also paid out 300 million euros in dividends to its shareholders over the last decade.”

What’s striking is that Bigard had actually not broken any competition rules. The Competition Authority or its predecessor approved the mergers, but did not systematically take into account the regional consequences, the report notes.

The article quotes Anne Witt, a professor of law at EDHEC Business School, who said the failure to consider the effects on farmers is part of a wider culture in which competition authorities have focused primarily on protecting ‘consumer welfare’ – that is, low prices – while ignoring the broader context of the value chain.

“Maintaining purchasing power is said to be “one of the reasons why competition authorities have not taken such a keen interest” in producers. “Who cares if a company leaves the market as long as consumer welfare is not affected?””

Something’s Gotta Change

While green policies were gutted supposedly to appease angry farmers, a massive slaughterhouse monopoly was quietly squeezing France’s cattle industry to the bone.

I’ve said time and again - and those way smarter and more knowledgeable than me have done so too - that competition is not merely a technical issue, and I can’t think of a more illustrative example than this investigation by my colleagues.

In Europe, we hear a lot of talk about the regeneration of the farming sector, particularly for livestock. But who wants to farm in such conditions?

We also hear a lotabout how traditional and artisanal farming in France is. But this work, alongside our previous exposé into the French farm union, shows that France and Europe are not impervious to the forces and rationales that have created massive conglomerates in the U.S. at the expense of smaller farmers and ordinary people.

Can policymakers who keep banging on about how much they care for farmers and Europe’s food sovereignty please stand up and do something?

So, what does ‘doing something’ look like? Here are a few suggestions from my colleagues:

• Tighten the thresholds: Lower the legal benchmarks that allow mega-mergers to slip through unchallenged.

• Elevate food sovereignty: Can we rethink the philosophy of antitrust regulations? Can we enshrine food sovereignty as a higher-order principle that competition law is mandated to serve?

Also, our methodology is open for all to see. I would love journalists in other countries to use it to start their own investigations.

Further reading

• How Bigard, which swallowed up Charal and its competitors, dictates slaughter rules to cattle farmers - Le Monde

• Cut to the Bone: Farmers at the mercy of the meat monopolists - Lighthouse Reports

Thin’s Pickings -

1. Inside Big Ag’s Plot to Kill The EU Green Deal - Grilled

   Former Unearthed investigative journalist Zac Boren’s new project has been hitting it out of the park.

   This time, he reveals, through internal meeting minutes, how Europe’s most powerful farming lobby, Copa-Cogeca, worked to undermine efforts to make farming more sustainable.
   Long-time readers of Thin Ink will be familiar with Copa-Cogeca. For those who are not, these previous issues should help.
   

2. Setting the record straight: Calley Means - Food Politics

   Marion Nestle’s point-by-point rebuttal of some head-scratchingly inaccurate accusations from RFK Jr’s top food advisor and MAHA senior figure, Calley Means.

   The attempt to smear Marion is utterly baffling, and I really hope the MAHA faithful do some research before jumping on the bandwagon. Even a cursory glance would expose the inaccuracies.
   

3. Time for a break? - Food Fight Files

   Thoughtful ruminations from Stuart Gillespie, author of Food Fight and previously featured in Thin Ink, on Wildfarmed’s deal to supply Nestlé with regeneratively farmed wheat for its KitKats.
   

4. The World’s Largest Meat Company Abandons Its Climate and Deforestation Goals - Inside Climate News

   “In its recent annual sustainability report, released last week, JBS dropped its ambitious commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2040 and omitted any mentions of its previous goal to eliminate deforestation across its supply chains in Brazil,” wrote Georgina Gustin.

   I guess at this point we shouldn’t be surprised. But we can still be disappointed, right? Thanks to Duncan for pointing me to this one.
   

5. How Might a ‘Super El Niño’ Affect Food, Forests and Water? - World Resources Institute

   Five WRI experts on what could happen if scientists’ predictions of a “Super El Niño” come true.

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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Hope to be back to regular programming soon.

In the meantime, hope everyone is able to stay cool, literally and figuratively.

A Continuation From Last Week….

In the large Venn diagram of public concerns, there’s a significant overlap between food systems and public health.

I’m also convinced that overlap shrinks dramatically once you add trade and law, two other dimensions that are just as central to food systems and public health but long seen as too technical, too complex, too… not for me.

After arguing last week that Commercial Determinants of Health (CDoH) should become more mainstream, I’m taking a step further this week: anyone who cares about building greener, fairer, and healthier food systems needs to be attuned to these two aspects - law and trade - as well.

First, a plea: bear with me on the acronyms.

Under the World Trade Organizaton (WTO), there’s something called the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT). It is administered by a dedicated committee that scrutinises whether national regulations such as labelling and packaging requirements impose discriminatory or unnecessary barriers to trade.

When WTO members - nearly all countries in the world - introduce new policies, they notify the WTO and other members can question or challenge them, raising what’s known as “Specific Trade Concerns (STCs)”. Some well-intentioned public health policies have been killed, weakened, or delayed after discussions at the TBT Committee.

This matters because some of the most influential players in the food and beverage industry are transnational companies with more money than many sovereign states, and one of their favourite arguments when governments want to regulate is: “your laws won’t pass muster at the WTO because they impinge on trade.” I’m paraphrasing, but you get the gist.

It’s an argument that often prompts policymakers to hold back, especially in nations with limited resources.

But a three-year research project led by Amandine Garde, Professor of Law at the University of Liverpool, and Gregory Messenger, Professor of Trade Law and Policy at the University of Bristol Law School, has done something important: it lifted the veil on these proceedings dating back to 1995.

The team went through meeting minutes and data from a platform on the TBT process, and built a novel database analysing over 900 STCs raised at the TBT Committee over the past three decades, which is now publicly available for other researchers and curious minds.

What they found bursts a central myth: WTO rules do allow governments to regulate to protect public health, countries have prevailed in putting their citizens’ wellbeing above corporate profits, and there are clear principles for drafting policies that will clear the WTO hurdle.

Wildfire Collective has produced a five-minute video distilling all of this, and it’s almost ready. Watch out for it on this page: I’ll share it as soon as it’s out, and it will be worth five minutes of your time.

A Mixed Bag on Livestock

This week, the EU published its first-ever Livestock Strategy (here, here, and here) and Protein Plan. I only had time to go through the former so I’m going to comment only on that document, and mostly through the lens of two investigations I was involved in.

Let’s start with the good news for a change.

• Nearly 6 years since 1.4 million citizens from all over Europe called on the EU to end the practice of keeping farm animals in cages, the European Commission seems to be finally moving ahead with phasing out this inhumane practice, at least for laying hens and sows.

  The strategy specifically mentioned the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) that started it all and said the phaseout will focus “on sectors where a transition to non-confined housing system is feasible, is evidence-based and accompanied by sufficient transition periods and financial support allowing farmers to adapt”.

  The process is also likely to be expensive: “Given the scale of the investments needed, the transition will require support that spans the next financing period and beyond.”

  In October 2023, we at Lighthouse Reports published an investigation into how a set of four animal welfare laws came undone following intense pressure from the livestock industry. These laws were supposed to end practices such as keeping farm animals in cages, slaughtering day-old chicks, and the sale and production of fur. I’ve written about it for Thin Ink too.
  

  But it seems at least the days when animals are held in cages and day-old chicks are slaughtered are numbered. Compassion in World Farming, which led the ECI, welcomed the announcement but called for an ambitious timeline for all other species.

• The strategy also mentioned improving risk management for livestock farmers, including through insurance and reinsurance.

  This is much-needed, given how farm animals remain invisible in EU disaster planning and response, and how the burden of more frequent and intensive climate disasters is borne by livestock farmers practising high animal welfare and extensive agriculture (the opposite of intensive farming - fewer animals, more space, lower inputs).
  

• The stuff on environment and competition? Much less to celebrate.

  Some of the most worrying lines are about methane emissions from livestock, which the strategy itself acknowledges “represent the largest source of agricultural emissions in the EU”, yet said more accurate measurements are required.

  “Discussions are on-going to explore the need to take account of the biogenic nature of methane emissions as part of a short-term carbon cycle,” the report said. “More refined approaches are needed to better reflect real management practices and ensure a more accurate and fair assessment of livestock’s climate performance.”

  The European Environmental Bureau (EEB) blasted the language, saying methane is a major driver of ground-level ozone pollution and is harmful both human and environmental health.

  The references to a simplification of the Nitrate Directive, which aims to protect Europe’s waterways from pollution from fertilisers and animal manure, was also criticised by Marco Contiero, EU Policy Director on Agriculture for Greenpeace.

  “Nitrate pollution in our water is arguably the most significant problem caused by intensive livestock systems in Europe, and the subject of years of political and legal disputes in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, France and Spain, among others. By avoiding to address the root cause of nitrate pollution, the unsustainable amount of animals concentrated in factory farms is some European regions, the Commission makes itself look ridiculous,” he wrote in an email.

  May I once again refer you to two previous issues of Thin Ink?
  

  European Coordination Via Campesina, the union representing smallscale farmers, welcomed several elements of the strategy but said both documents “do not provide adequate answers on fair prices, market regulation and the growing concentration of livestock production”.

  “(Both) rely heavily on technological solutions, including digitalisation, genomics, carbon farming, biomethane and new genomic techniques (NGTs), while giving insufficient attention to the structural changes needed to build resilient and agroecological livestock systems,” the group added.

Reading through the Strategy document, I can’t help but feel that the third sentence is the key to Brussel’s thinking on livestock.

“The EU livestock farming sector plays a crucial role in contributing to food security by providing high quality protein, not only in the EU but also at global level, with a positive EU trade balance and a growing demand for EU products thanks to world-leading standards, quality and sustainability, which allow them to carry the flag of European excellence across the globe.”

To me, this is a disingenuous line, conflating staving off hunger outside Europe with the EU’s export of expensive prosciutto, jamon, aged Comté, and parmigiano reggiano which brings “positive EU trade balance”.

The growing demand for these luxury items isn’t coming from people living hand-to-mouth in Myanmar, Venezuela, Gaza, or Sudan. It’s coming from affluent people around the world who are consuming more meat.

Thin’s Pickings

1. More on Commercial Determinants of Health

   Two pieces relating to last week’s topic: “The Winner of the World Cup is....Coke?” from Unjunked and this LinkedIn post on how Bayer’s stock rose 17% after the Supreme Court ruling and what it means for public health.

2. The World Has an Anchovy Problem - Bloomberg

   “The anchovy sits at the bottom of a crucial supply chain that sustains the $500-billion-a-year global aquaculture industry. Anchovies are the main ingredient in fishmeal, and without enough of it, global production of salmon, seabass, shrimp, oysters and other seafood will suffer, pushing up supermarket prices.”

   What’s causing its shortage? El Niño.

3. More Palantir questions for WFP - The New Humanitarian
   

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’m snatching free moments during travel and meetings to write this instead of the normal, leisurely full-day thing, so I’m going to keep this short. Besides, last week’s issue was a long one and you probably need a break from all these newsletters too.

Last point and for full disclosure: I used Claude to trace the term’s origin and history, then fact-checked the sources. I discovered two earlier pieces the machines missed, so I’m feeling a little smug right now.

Hope everyone is staying cool.

I don’t remember the first time I came across the term “Commercial Determinants of Health,” or its clunky acronym CDoH.

However, I do remember thinking, “What a mouthful!” And “What on earth does it mean?”

That’s why WHO Europe’s 2024 report was groundbreaking and illuminating for me. It delved into the powerful actors, including food and beverage companies, and the tactics they deploy to maximise profits and undermine public health, while framing their activities as supporting freedom and consumer choice.

It identified four corporate products - tobacco, ultra-processed foods, fossil fuels and alcohol - as responsible for the deaths of nearly 7,500 people every day or 2.7 million deaths a year in the WHO’s Europe Region.

I devoted a whole issue of Thin Ink on it.

Since then, more studies, research, and papers have been published about this term, probably to the displeasure of the corporate players who use these tactics. So I wanted to spend this week looking at it in a bit more detail.

The Origin Story

The earliest mention of the term I could find was in August 2012.

“The marketing campaigns of multinational corporations are harming our physical, mental, and collective wellbeing,” and public health should be concerned with the commercial determinants of health, wrote Gerard Hastings, Director of the Institute for Social Marketing at University of Stirling, in an analysis for the BMJ.

Four months later, Swiss-based academic Ilona Kickbusch argued that “we totally underestimated globalised corporate power combined with its global marketing onslaught and its transnational influence on political decision-making.”

She titled her editorial: “Addressing the interface of the political and commercial determinants of health”.

However, it wasn’t until March 2013 that CDoH had a proper defintion - “factors that influence health which stem from the profit motive”, according to addiction researcher Robert West and health psychologist Theresa Marteau.

A similar term emerged later that year when John Millar, a physician at the School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia, published a two-page commentary “The Corporate Determinants of Health”.

He wrote of companies “selling products that are damaging to health and the environment, at prices that do not account for these damaging effects and often target consumers that are ill-informed and susceptible” and identified producers of “tobacco, alcohol, drugs, junk foods and beverages, resource extraction, arms production and the electronic media” as belonging to that group.

“Governments have a responsibility to take action when the market mechanism fails in this way,” with the food and beverage sector a priority for action, he added.

But the definition that has become prevalent came in December 2016, in a Lancet commentary by Kickbusch, Luke Allen, and Christian Franz: “strategies and approaches used by the private sector to promote products and choices that are detrimental to health”.

NOTE: The term itself doesn’t assign value. A determinant can be good or bad. However, much of the research and the definitions above have focused on the bad actors because that’s where policy changes are needed most.

What does all that mean?

It means your health is shaped not only by your genes, your doctor, or your lifestyle choices, but also by commercial activities from corporations with considerably deeper pockets than many national governments and civil society groups.

What products are available and affordable to you, how they are marketed to you, and whether there are any regulations that affect their availability, affordability, and ubiquity also shape your health significantly.

According to scholars, corporations play a very important role in determining these things. Hence, “commercial determinants”.

The CDoH “playbook” includes marketing products that are detrimental to health; extensive and highly integrated supply chains that make such products easily accessible; political activities like lobbying, litigation, political donations, corporate social responsibility initiatives, and embedding themselves in public-private partnerships and government commissions.

It also includes funding industry-friendly science; actively promoting misinformation; and sowing doubt and confusion over evidence linking their products to ill health; and using international trade arrangements to resist regulations.

Academic literature has identified these sectors as having products and practices that harm our health: tobacco, alcohol, food, fossil fuel, chemicals and pesticides, firearms, mining, pharmaceuticals, and gambling.

But I’m going to focus on my passion topic and something we come into contact with every single day - food and drinks.

The globalisation of trade, the way our corporate, economic, and political systems work, and the neoliberal and capitalist ideologies have also been identified as facilitating CDoH.

The WHO has a factsheet on CDoH that’s worth pursuing, and the agency has also been preparing a Global Report on the Commercial Determinants of Health. Watch this space.

Why it matters

Well, it can determine whether we live a long, healthy life or not.

The terminology is unwieldy and it’s tempting to see as an academic term that wouldn’t catch on in real life. But I think it should become mainstream.

We are currently facing an unprecedented public health crisis:

• 75% of global deaths or 43 million lives lost are due to non-communicable diseases (NCDs)

• Nearly 3 out of 4 of these deaths are in low- and middle-income countries

• Cardiovascular diseases account for most NCD deaths, followed by cancers, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes.

For a long time, the industry has framed ill health as a result of “personal choice” to prevent regulatory accountability, and labelled governments that attempt regulate as “nanny state” to sow fear among policymakers.

But how much choice do we actually have if all that we can find and afford is food that could give us hypertension, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease?

• For example, if you live in one of those food deserts where fresh food is a half-hour drive away and you don’t have a car, it is going to be incredibly difficult for you to eat fresh, seasonal food.

• Or if you are in a food swamp, surrounded by snacks, sugary drinks, and sweets, well, it’s going to take a whole lot of willpower to go in search of healthy foods. Often, food deserts and food swamps are the same place.

• How about being bombarded by advertisements of crisps, chocolates, and fast food every time you look at your instagram feed, walk to the bus stop to get to school or office, or watch your favourite show? Chances are that at least once in a while, some of us are likely to be famished when they pop up and be tempted to reach for them.

• Even if you live somewhere near fresh produce and studiously avoid the marketing and promotion of junk food, what if, due to time and costs constraints, the only meals you can eat are loaded with sugar, salt, fat, and additives?

• Consider this one: you’re an exhausted new mother who see aggressive marketing and advertising - including at your doctor’s clinic, on the website of your physician association, or by your own social circle - that formula milk is equivalent or even superior to breastfeeding.

  • The science is clear - breastfeeding protects both mothers and children, reducing the risk of infections, obesity, and certain cancers - but you’re being told your child will have a higher IQ if they take formula milk, or that it will help you get back to work quicker and contribute to the household. What would you choose?

  • Millions of mothers, in exactly that situation, chose formula.

Government policies can temper the situation: zoning laws to make sure there is a dearth of - or deluge of - certain types of shops, providing clear information on food packaging so you know if what you’re eating has too much sugar, salt, or fat, or restricting where and when certain products can be advertised.

It’s Not You. It’s Them.

These are just the more visible activities, the ones we encounter in our daily lives.

The food environments around us, the advertisements targeting our children, the price gap between a bag of crisps and a bag of apples? Well, these are the product of deliberate commercial decisions, not accidents of the market.

But there is also a less visible layer that is, in some ways, even more powerful: the lobbying, the political donations, the funding of industry-friendly research, and the quiet capture of the regulatory bodies meant to hold these industries to account.

This is where the real power lies, and where investigative journalism, public health research, and advocacy have the hardest and most important work to do.

Both layers can be addressed through regulation and the evidence shows that regulation works.

• Chile’s warning labels reduced purchases of products carrying them by 37% for sugar, by 22% for sodium, and nearly 16% for saturated fat.

• Colombia's healthy tax survived 17 legal challenges and raised the equivalent of over US$700 million in its first full year of collection.

• The WHO's tobacco control framework has saved millions of lives since coming into force in 2005.

So if you’re ever tempted to beat yourself up for not having the willpower to resist a pack of crisps or a can of soda, remember this line from a report by the The European Economic and Social Committee(EESC):

“Health is a fundamental human right shaped by a complex set of social, economic, commercial, environmental and digital determinants. 70% of the state of health is influenced by these factors, compared to only 10% for individual behaviours.”)

Papers that helped me further my understanding of CDoH

• The commercial determinants of health

• Defining and conceptualising the commercial determinants of health

Thin’s Pickings - CDoH Edition

Commercial power, conflicts of interest and health policy with Elena Whitham - Money Power Health with Nason Maani

A sharp, accessible conversation with the former Member of the Scottish Parliament and Minister for Drugs and Alcohol Policy in the Scottish Government about how industries that profit from harmful products gain influence over the policies meant to regulate them.

The Deck is Stacked Against Healthy Eating - The New York Times

A brisk opinion piece arguing that the barriers to healthy eating are structural, not personal, and that blaming individuals for poor diets while corporations engineer the food environment is both scientifically inaccurate and politically convenient.

The Supreme Court’s Decision about Glyphosate: Wrong, Infuriating, and Un-MAHA - Food Politics

I can’t summarise this bone-headed decision that handed over public health to the agrochemical industry better than the OG of nutrition science Marion Nestle - Wrong, Infuriating, and Un-MAHA.

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 slept fitfully in a hotel room that mercifully had a small fan, listened to inspiring women shaping the future of food, and attended a funeral for the food system replete with rousing calls for change, poignant readings, and delicious refreshments.

I moderated a discussion where indigenous leaders spoke of how they have kept rainforests standing for generations, heard how Europe and Africa can advance food and climate resilience in the run-up to COP32, made new friends, and caught up with old ones. On the way home, I devoured pages of The Ministry For the Future.

There was a common theme running throughout the events and the book - collective action and shared goals and responsibilities. It all felt very apt to this week’s Thin Ink.

I first met Jose Luis Vivero Pol in October 2019 in Yangon, Myanmar, at a forum on evolving agrifood systems in Asia. This was before COVID-19 and the coup turned everything upside down, and my birthplace was buzzing with possibilities.

I was emceeing the two-day event, and Jose Luis was one of the speakers. I was struck by both his knowledge and his passion for the work he was doing and of my country.

I learnt later on this is quintessential him - he cares deeply about all the countries he has worked in a career spanning three decades, most recently Cameroon. He has worked for civil society, the European Commission, the FAO, and the WFP, but it’s his academic work that I want to focus on.

For many years, he has been advocating for food to be governed as a commons, not only as a commodity. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea. Finally, when he had a moment of free time in between assignments, I asked him to explain the basic principles, which he did for nearly two hours.

So below is a heavily condensed and edited version of our conversation, including what gets lost when food is only valued by its price, why Garrett Hardin’s famous “tragedy of the commons” got it backwards, and what it would actually take to reverse decades of food commodification.

Take this as a beginner’s guide. I hope to keep digging into this subject in the coming months and years.

THIN: You’ve argued that food is a biological necessity, a cultural expression, a human right, as well as a traded commodity, all at the same time. You’ve also said we’ve let the commodity dimension swallow all the others. What do we lose when we determine food’s value only by its price?

JOSE LUIS: That’s a very complex question, so I will try to unpack it. Firstly, it’s important to recognise that considering food as a commodity, a commons, a human right, or a public good - these are all social constructs. They are not givens. They are time-, place- and society-bound considerations.

We have organised our societies in a certain way, but they could always be organised differently.

Food is mostly valued as a commodity because its tradability in monetary terms becomes its most relevant dimension. I’m not against trading food. Food has been traded, exchanged or bartered for millennia.

But commodification, in a more technical sense, is something different: where the value of food for human societies is exclusively determined by its price in the market. And this price determines who gets access and who does not.

So caviar is highly priced and therefore considered highly valuable. Maize or quinoa have lower prices and therefore treated as less valuable. But food is much more than that. Food is culture. It is medicine in some contexts. Some foods are sacred. Food is a human right in many countries. In others it is regarded as public good. And all over the world, food is one of the renewable resources Earth offers to humans to feed.

When the tradable dimension obscures the others, we end up with what I would call the absolute commodification of food that dominates the industrial food system today. Value and price are conflated. Therefore, you can only get access to food if you have enough money to pay the price, and that explains the problem of access that we have in all the countries in the world, both in the Global North and South.

THIN: So what you’re saying is that food can be a commodity, but not only that.

JOSE LUIS: Yes, nicely phrased. Food can be a commodity, but not always and not only. I’d like to develop parallels with current public health and education systems found all over the world.

For instance, under universal health systems, you can pay for health treatment if you wish, but you can also get access to health as an entitlement if you are living in countries like Italy or Spain, where we are.

So if you have a heart attack on the streets, there will be an ambulance that will come to carry you to the hospital, and you will be healed without paying any money. Well, you have already paid for those services with your taxes, but you don’t have a monetary transaction with the state or a private hospital for this treatment. Health is not commoditised in our countries. Actually, it is enacted as a constitutional right and valued as a public good.

You can pay for your medical treatment… but in general, the institutional architecture of public health systems in Europe ensures that everybody, regardless of their purchasing power, will get access to adequate health services. The same applies to education. Education for All schemes are widely accepted as a mainstream policy, beneficial to all.

I’m proposing a similar system to be applied to food: a public food system, combining public and private actors, that guarantees adequate food for all, as a mandatory entitlement, as a commons and public good.

THIN: That’s a great analogy! Now, is this where the food as commons come in? First though, I’d like you to talk about the terminology itself. The word “commons” can mean a lot of things in English, like shared or public. What do you actually mean by food as a commons?

JOSE LUIS: Commons can be a noun (a resource), but I actually think it is better defined as a verb: commoning. Doing things together. Taking decisions together. Governing a resource together. Actually, commoning is direct democracy. It is also related to sharing: not only the use of a resource but also the management responsibilities and the duty of care.

There are four elements in each commons: the resource (that can be material like fish or immaterial like knowledge), a community connected to that resource, rules and institutions that the community develops in order to govern it, and finally, a purpose for that institution All the commons are governed with a goal in mind.

And with food, the reason is obvious. Food is governed by the communities (neighbourhoods, tribes, etc) because it is essential to each commoner (a member of a commons). Every human being, every single day, regardless of age, culture or religion, needs to eat. And because food is essential for everybody, my argument is that everybody should have some say in how it is produced, distributed, and governed.

But I always make one important clarification here. Commons do not mean something that belongs to everybody or to nobody. A commons cannot exist without a community.

This is what scholars like Elinor Ostrom, the first female economist to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, spent decades documenting: commons are not chaotic free-for-all systems. They have institutions, sanctions, unwritten rules and boundaries like formal institutions. They are often extremely sophisticated systems of governance that are attuned to their environments and societal needs. That’s why they are so resilient.

THIN: How is this different from food as a public good, or food as a human right?

JOSE LUIS: I like to refer always to food as a public good, human right, and commons. I don’t want to be a hardliner of valuing food as a commons exclusively because I recognise that food has multiple meanings.

Enacting food as a commons, the authority to govern food rests primarily with the community. With food as a public good, the authority lies with the state, whereas with food as a human right, it becomes a legal construct with right holders and duty bearers. Governments have obligations, but judges and courts also become important, because if that right is violated, people can seek legal remedy.

I sometimes think of those definitions as being on opposite sides of a river. On one side, food as commodity. On the other, food as commons, public good and human right, recognising the multiple dimensions and the essentialness of food to every human being

So they overlap in many ways although they do not refer exactly to the same political concept.

THIN: What about food sovereignty? Where does that intersect with food as commons?

JOSE LUIS: The food sovereignty movement shares a lot of commonalities with the idea of food as a commons.

Actually, both reject the idea that food should simply be treated and allocated as a commodity, and both insist that people should have much more democratic control over food systems.

For many years, the food sovereignty movements did not explicitly use the language of commons. But more recently, that has started to change, partly because more people are paying attention to indigenous peoples’ food systems, where this way of thinking has existed al along.

If you look at indigenous communities - from the Inuit in northern Canada to groups in Papua New Guinea - they value food differently. For them, food is sacred. It is relational and a Mother Earth’s product. There is a connection between food, natural cycles and divinities.

I’ve always felt very aligned with food sovereignty movements. My contribution, if I can call it that, is simply to say perhaps we should recognise more explicitly that many indigenous peoples’ food systems, and also many contemporary food initiatives like community-supported agriculture or food-sharing initiatives, are already treating food in this multidimensional way.

THIN: Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” is one of the most cited ideas in modern economics. You’ve pushed back on this. Why do you think that framing is wrong when it comes to food systems?

JOSE LUIS: Firstly, I think Hardin’s paper was mislabelled from the very beginning. It wasn’t the tragedy of the commons. It was the tragedy of resources that belong to no one.

The commons, they belong to the commoners, to the communities. That could be an ethnic group, a neighbourhood, perhaps a village. They have institutions and rules. That is something Garrett Hardin forgot.

He described the commons as the Wild West, as a no man’s land. Everybody could go there and grab whatever they want without rules. But that is not true.

Take the acequias in southern Spain, for example - traditional irrigation systems managed collectively by farming communities in Sierra Nevada. If I live in Granada city, I cannot simply decide I have rights to that water because I am not part of the community governing it.

Or take the Scandinavian countries, where people can forage berries or mushrooms or fish trouts in the rivers on land that do not belong to them under the customary Viking-inherited “every man’s right.” That doesn’t mean unlimited access to do anything.

Secondly, the concluding consequence of Hardin’s paper was that once you erase community governance and institutions, then privatisation or state control begin to look like the only alternatives. But they’re not because those commons already have governing institutions.

Finally, Hardin’s paper has been extensively debunked by many authors for several decades, so I am not the only one criticising its relevance to justify privatisations or state seizure.

THIN: Take us back to the beginning. How did you even get interested in this concept in the first place? Was there a lightbulb moment?

JOSE LUIS:  I’ve worked in food systems since 1998. I started with an assignment in Georgia, then worked with NGOs, the European Commission, FAO, and currently in the World Food Programme.

Throughout this period, the dominant narrative and the policies and programs most often referred to are always market driven. Like we need to facilitate businesses in the food system, we need to be more competitive, to sell better and more, to have better trading and negotiating power. Because as a commodity, the best allocation mechanism for food is globalised markets.

So I was wondering: why is that? Why don’t we think about public solutions, public programmes and public budgets (for food) in the same way we do in general for health and education? That was like a worm in my brain.

This question stayed in my head for maybe 15 years.

Then during my PhD in the University of Louvain, with Olivier De Schutter as my supervisor, I finally had time to step back and think seriously about it.

That was when I discovered inspiring authors such as Elinor Ostrom, Karl Polanyi, or Peter Kropotkin’s work on mutual aid, and a whole body of thinking around commons and cooperation as the fittest survival strategy for human beings.

And I suddenly realised there were millions of people already organising food systems differently, below the radar, outside the mainstream - indigenous communities and smallholder farmers. I even discovered the abundance of common lands in Europe that most people don’t even know still exist. We’re talking about hundred million hectares more or less. It’s incredible.

So it wasn’t really a sudden moment. It was more like a long accumulation of questions and doubts finally coming together.

THIN: Wow… I never knew about the common lands in Europe. I guess it feeds into this vicious cycle where people don’t know that a concept already exists in practice and is working, because they don’t see the examples or the body of research, and therefore we think the system we currently have is the only one we got.

JOSE LUIS: A colleague of mine, Antonio Manzoni, an Italian researcher, was analysing all the documents in the Common Agricultural Policy - legal documents, policy documents, subsidies, etc. and he found not a single mention of commons or common lands in Europe. They do not simply exist as policy-relevant subjects.

It’s a question of being below the radar, either inadvertently or on purpose. The commons are not seen, valued or measured in many European countries, and remember, you only value what you measure. They are not rendered visible, because the states and the markets don’t have an interest on doing that.

Because if they recognise how relevant the commons are for human beings, not only indigenous peoples, but also for Caucasian Westerners in London, well…. You need to pay some attention to institutions that are neither state- nor market-driven.

THIN: To me, seeds are one of the clearest examples of going from commons - where people share and manage them - to being privatised, legalised, and protected behind patents. Do you see it the same way too? And what do you think of the argument that farmers need better, improved, more resilient seeds to adapt to climate change and that can only be delivered through privatisation?

JOSE LUIS: I think the underlying statement or rationality that many in good faith advocate about this idea of privatisation of seeds is because they think only privatised seeds will incentivise innovation. Only by limiting the monetary profit to those who breed and improve the seeds, the good traits of seeds will be developed by private food companies.

Those who defend the privatisation of seeds don’t value the innovation being carried out through centuries and millennia by smallholder farmers, benefiting the whole humanity because it is shared as open-access knowledge. Sometimes thousands of minds working openly on a problem can produce better solutions than just a group of private breeders. Look at open-source software such as Mozilla Firefox, or even recipes by superstar chefs.

I’m not against making profits, I’m against profit maximisation at any cost, especially when the negative externalities fall upon nature, distant places, cheap labour or seed custodians, mostly women.

THIN: What would you say are the first steps towards de-commodifying food and governing it as a commons?

JOSE LUIS: The first step is recognition. I borrow here from Nancy Fraser’s work where she said states and market actors first need to recognise the legitimacy of the commons, collective actions for food, and indigenous people’s food systems. Those food systems do exist, are relevant to the people, are resilient to shocks (climate, economic and conflict) and are thriving despite waves of privatisation and enclosure.

The states may then use tools to govern and support those commons, such as laws and regulations, public budgets, targeted subsidies, and public procurement schemes. Actually, public procurement is a wonderful tool to leverage the transition towards more sustainable food systems.

The other day I read the New York municipal council is the second-largest food purchaser in the U.S., spending over $500 million annually to serve meals across public schools, hospitals, homeless shelters, and correctional facilities. So you can imagine the power of the Municipal Council to exert an influence in the food systems in New York state.

Subsidies are another aspect. They are heavily focused on a few caloric staples such a maize, soybeans, and industrial meat production… but if commons institutions were recognised and protected by law, then policies and regulations that favour their survival and expansion could be enacted and promoted through subsidies.

Institutionally speaking, we shall find a better balance in the triangle between three major political agents of the food systems: the enabling state, the social market, and the self-regulated collective actions. Currently, in most national food systems, collective actions/commons are occupying a small corner. I propose they should be facilitated to occupy a larger share in the food provision domain.

Disclaimer: I don’t want the commons to occupy the entire triangle because there is a commonsensical role for the states (food as a public good and human right) as well as the markets (food as a commodity).

THIN: Are there real-world examples of food already being governed as a commons?

JOSE LUIS: Yes. Thousands all over the world. Earlier, I talked about “every man’s right” in the Scandinavian countries.

Elinor Ostrom studied the lobster fisheries of Maine extensively: how communities developed their own rules and regulations around sustainability, quotas (who can fish, how many lobsters per day), and closed seasons to allow new broods to come through. She also studied the orchards and vegetable gardens of Huertas in Valencia.

In Cameroon and across Sub-Saharan Africa, there are thousands of examples - savannah lands, forest lands, pasturelands - where governance has been officially transferred from central governments to customary chiefs. Actually, researchers and UN institutions are claiming that almost half of Africa is still collectively governed as a commons (customary food systems).

The final example I would like to bring was issued by IFPRI, a CGIAR institution. They documented that 350 million people in India depend on common lands for their livelihoods nowadays. That means that one fifth of India is officially managed as common land.

THIN: What would you say to ordinary people who care about food but feel trapped inside the current system that is not of their making?

JOSE LUIS: My suggestion would be to take food seriously and act accordingly

Don’t take it for granted simply because you have money and can go to the supermarket to buy the food you want. Join an alternative food system like food buying groups, community-supported agriculture, or food sharing initiative in your city or village. Alternatively, you can become a member of your municipal food council.

Buy locally, seasonally and ecologically when possible. Grow something yourself, even something small. That food tastes differently.

Get cooking.

Be an active citizen and eater. Don’t be just a passive consumer.

A final disclaimer: I’m saying this for people like us (urbanites) not to people in South Sudan or rural Bolivia, because they already produce and consume their own food.

THIN: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

JOSE LUIS: I’ve been regretting a lot that this idea has not gained enough traction.

I would like to see more people writing, speaking, and collecting cases in the world and making this point more visible. If we want to shift the narrative, we need to convince more decision makers and bring more people to our sides.

I don’t talk about commons only, okay? Remember, it’s about this side of the river, including food sovereignty, food democracy, alternative food movements, food as human right, commons, and public good. Don’t be trapped in limiting or exclusionary definitions.

I’m pretty sure I won’t see something like a universal food access system in my lifetime - something equivalent to universal healthcare or public education - but I hope that will happen in a few generations. In any case, the seed has to be sown a century earlier.

Thin’s Pickings

1. Cattle and Soy capture 47% of family farming funds over three decades - O Joio e O Trigo
   A longread on how a programme set up to support family farms may be unwittingly supporting monoculture, according to the Brazilian investigative outlet which has recently launched a regular newsletter in English. You can subscribe here.
   

2. Why Your Summer Tomatoes Cost So Much - Bloomberg
   ”Weather has long affected grocery store prices, but increasingly frequent bouts of extreme heat, drought and flooding are putting household budgets on the frontlines of climate change.”
   

3. The War Forgotten by the World Is an Apocalypse Now - The New York Times

   For all its shortcomings in the coverage of domestic politics or Gaza, NYT remains one of the very few international outlets not to have forgotten Myanmar. This is a must-read. Pair it with this excellent documentary from the BBC that came out a couple of weeks ago.

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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How you take the news depends on which side of the debate you’re on. GM Watch warned of opening “the floodgates to a wave of patents”, small-scale farmers’ union ECVC said the EU has “betrayed farmers, consumers and seed SMEs”, but Syngenta’s Head of Europe hailed it as Europe “finally” choosing innovation.

My own position on GMOs and NGTs has shifted over the years - I used to be firmly against them, but now I see them as one of the tools in our toolbox - but my opposition to the weaponisation of Intellectual Property rights, the foot-dragging over traceability and transparency, and the corporate concentration of the seed sector remains firm.

It’s also telling when a vast majority of supporters for a policy happen to be some of the world’s biggest conglomerates who will financially benefit from it. Anyway, watch this space.

By the way, I’m in London next week for Climate Action Week and moderating the event, “Who keeps rainforests standing?”, on June 23. If you’re in London too and want to chat food and climate, drop me a line.

If you’re lost among the myriad of LCAW events, Oliver Camp has created an incredibly helpful list of food systems-related sessions. Find them here.

Time for another round-up of interesting reports and papers and there’s an obvious theme here.

It’s mostly to do with our current farming systems: their wastefulness, their contribution to climate change, and how, despite outwardly defending them, the industry is well aware of their problems and have found a convenient solution in the form of “regenerative agriculture”, a woolly term that can mean many things to many people.

But there’s also a small ray of hope: alternative systems already exist and are thriving. We don’t have to be held hostage by our lack of imagination or our fear of the unknown.

Stuck In A Fertiliser Trap We Can’t Get Out Of

Between 2019 and 2024, European farms spent 16.4 billion Euros on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser that never reached crops, according to a new briefing on Europe’s structural vulnerability to energy markets from Zero Carbon Analytics (ZCA), an international research group on climate change.

The excess nitrogen fertiliser not taken up by the plants then leaked into rivers and streams, leading to nitrate contamination of groundwater and excessive water pollution. Instead of becoming food.

The analysis puts a number on the cost of Europe’s gas‑based fertiliser dependency, both in terms of wasted money and strategic vulnerability. It also shows how those costs could be reduced and make the food system here more resilient and sovereign.

“Total environmental damage costs from synthetic nitrogen losses were EUR 233.7 billion across the six-year period, with water pollution accounting for 79% of total estimated costs and air pollution accounting for the remainder,” the briefing said.

“If public support were redirected from sustaining the current input‑intensive model toward helping farmers transition to lower‑input, higher‑resilience systems, the economic and environmental gains could be substantial,” Dr Joanne Bentley-McKune, the author of the paper, told me via email.

Context 1: What do we mean by nitrogen fertilisers not reaching the crops? A 2024 special report on land said only 46% of nitrogen applied as fertiliser is taken up by the crops and the rest “runs off into freshwater bodies, and coastal areas with dire consequences for the environment”.

So the 17 countries Joanne and her team studied are above the global average, because based on Eurostat’s official Gross Nutrient Balance data, the nitrogen use efficiency ranged from about 65 % to 72 %.

It still begs the question: how are we happy with a scenario where the best case is losing a third of what you put in and the worst is losing more than half?

But EU’s efficiency is nullified by the scale of its use.

“Efficiency (NUE) is a ratio; it doesn’t tell you about scale. Because the EU applies so much nitrogen, even that ~30 % loss translates into billions of euros and large volumes of gas. Other regions might have lower efficiency but far lower total inputs, so their absolute waste is smaller. That’s an important nuance,” Joanne said.

Context 2: Fossil fuels are responsible for nearly 60% of global fertiliser production, with mined ores providing feedstock for the rest.

Context 3: Europe’s ammonia industry runs almost entirely on natural gas which means volatility in the energy markets affects fertiliser prices and production. Given the high level of fertiliser usage - estimated at 10 million tonnes a year - it is not only a chronic drain on resources but also translates into 14.1 billion cubic metres of natural gas wasted.

“This wastage represents a triple loss: farmers pay for inputs that never reach crops; natural gas – burned at great cost as a feedstock to synthesise fertiliser – is consumed for no productive purpose; and the synthetic nitrogen applied to croplands, whether it reaches a crop or not, causes environmental damage costing society billions of euros every year,” the paper said.

Some nitrogen loss is unavoidable, but the waste we’re seeing also “acts like a multiplier”, said Joanne. “When gas prices spike, farmers pay more for all the nitrogen they apply, including the share that never feeds a crop, making the system more sensitive to energy shocks than it needs to be.”

The top spenders - or losers, take your pick - during the period were France, Spain, Poland and Germany, together accounting for more than half the value of all the states included in the analysis. They represent some of Europe’s largest arable producers with large-scale intensive crop production.

“Even though their nitrogen‑use efficiency is relatively good (around 70%), the sheer volume of fertiliser applied means the absolute waste is large,” Joanne said.

“For example, Netherlands is one of the most intensive agricultural producers in Europe, but it doesn’t appear as high on our wasted‑spend chart as France or Germany. That’s not because it’s more efficient (in fact, its nitrogen‑use efficiency is lower, around 55 %) but because the Dutch system is dominated by livestock, so most of its nitrogen comes from manure, not from synthetic fertiliser.”

European farm unions have been incredibly vocal about keeping fertiliser prices low and availability high because farmers are facing enormous cost increases. But maybe we should rethink a system that has made them vulnerable in the first place,

“The problem isn’t just that fertiliser is expensive but that the whole system is built on a volatile gas‑based input. Every time there’s an energy shock (whether it’s the invasion of Ukraine or the Hormuz closure) fertiliser bills spike and farmers are hit.”

“If we keep subsidising that dependency, we’re essentially paying to preserve the vulnerability that causes the crises.”

Proven, cost effective tools and measures already exist to reduce synthetic fertiliser dependency and diversify nitrogen inputs, she said, citing precision nitrogen application, legume rotations, and crop varieties that need less nitrogen.

The briefing also gave two examples: South Africa, which applies only a third of the synthetic nitrogen fertiliser per hectare as France but achieves 78% of France’s cereal yields, and Paraguay, which applies a similarly quantity through nitrogen-fixing legumes, and produces 76% more grain per kilogram than France.

If you want to read more on fertilisers, here are my previous issues: The Fertiliser Trap, Path to a Livable Planet, Food Systems, We Have A Fertiliser-Induced Problem!

We’ve Got To Sort Our Rice Growing Together

Net greenhouse gas emissions from rice paddies have doubled over the past 70 years, including a 44% increase in methane emissions, primarily due to more land being used to grow rice, using more inputs (both chemical and organic), and cropping more often (up to three times a year in some countries), according to a new global assessment.

Over the past decade, that amounted to about 1.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per year on average, roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of 239 million cars, said the study’s authors.

“This makes rice-growing the largest emissions source in agriculture outside of livestock, and rice demand is expected to keep rising,” they wrote.

This is an important paper, because while we have a plethora of studies and exposés into the close relationship between methane, which is 80 times more potent than CO₂ over a 20-year period, and livestock, there is much less discussion around rice cultivation.

In the grand scheme of things, livestock still emits much more methane than rice paddies - 30% versus 8%, excluding emissions from manure - but we’re in an “all hands on deck” moment and methane’s short-lived nature means the quicker we can reduce its emissions, the better for us.

Unfortunately, the paper is behind a paywall (urggghhhhhh) and I wasn’t organised enough to get a copy from the authors in time for this issue, so I’m basing this write-up on their op-ed in The Conversation and the LinkedIn post of Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project and one of the authors.

The expansion of rice growing areas is responsible for over half of the global increase in emissions. For example, Africa has roughly doubled its acreage since the 1960s. However, specific practices also play a role.

The authors identified how leaving rice stalks in the field after harvest and then ploughing them into the soil to improve soil fertility was responsible for about 18% of rice’s increase in overall net emissions since the 1960s.

Flooded rice fields remain a key contributor: the organic matter inside them breaks down without oxygen, produces methane, and escapes into the air as the plants grow.

This type of rice accounts for over 90% of the rice we consume and its production, particularly in Asia, “contributes approximately 80-90% of global rice methane emissions”, said Hayden Montgomery, Program Director for Agriculture at The Global Methane Hub, who was not involved in the study.

Rice not grown in flooded conditions have lower yields but there are efforts to change that through varieties that can still be productive in non-flooded conditions, Hayden told me in an e-mail.

Heavy reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilisers - usage up 76% after 2000 - also led to rice paddies emitting more nitrous oxide (N₂O), 300 times more powerful than CO₂ and the main man-made substance damaging the planet’s protective ozone layer.

The authors of the paper wrote listed practices such as reducing fertiliser use and residue applications, managing irrigation to allow dry periods in between flooded ones, and reducing tillage, as ways to lower emissions.

However, the reduction is fairly small - only 10% - and switching from chemical to organic fertilisers does not necessarily improve the situation, at least from the emissions perspective. Also, the benefits from no-till farming is very much region-dependent, they said.

In his LinkedIn post, Pep made an important suggestion: “Rice cultivation, as is also the case for other GHG sources associated with food production, needs to be a prime target for Research & Development, as we don’t have enough abatement options at hand yet.”

As a voracious rice eater - have I mentioned I once had the nickname “Powered by Rice”? - I hope others take note.

Regen Ag: A Long Way Down To Nothing At All?

Two recent reports from two main corridors of power - Washington and Brussels - looked at the buzz around regenerative agriculture from different angles.

• Friends of the Earth (FOE) United States evaluated 10 prominent regenerative food labelling programs to see how they stack up in terms of key parameters: reduction and/or phase out of harmful pesticides and fertilisers, building soil health, verifying farmer practice, and tracking product from farm to shelf. There’s a short summary.

• Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), meanwhile, traced how it became a buzzword in Brussels, exposing how agrochemical giants and global food and agribusinesses are pushing for a type of regenerative agriculture that will allow them to continue polluting, poisoning, and profiting. The PDF version is here.

The Labelling Report Card

“We found that regenerative labelling programs vary widely in their agrochemical restrictions, soil health requirements, and verification systems. Some programs are able to provide strong assurance to consumers and purchasers about the finished product, others provide strong assurance about practices on the ground, while others don’t have transparent or robust enough verification models to guarantee either.”

In other words: it’s a bit of a mess.

Some labels allow toxic pesticides, even though many consumers are likely to assume that the term “regenerative” means such products are not used.

The evaluation for agrochemicals is the most detailed part of the report, broken down into seven different aspects: prohibiting pesticides, reducing their use, integrated pest management, prohibiting synthetic fertilisers, reducing their use, and the use of GMOs, as well as seeds coated with neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides associated with extensive threats to soil organisms and pollinators.

More than a third of the labelling schemes failed to meet the bar on these standards.

Soil Health, broken down into feeding the soil, cover crops, appropriate tillage, and crop rotations, fared better, with almost all labelling schemes at least partially meeting the bar in one or more categories. The same is true for verification and traceability.

Overall, labels that build on organic standards and ethos are the most reliable, the analysis found.

FOE’s analysis also included three other pillars of regenerative agriculture - whether the label includes criteria related to 1) deforestation, 2) animal welfare, and 3) social fairness, including farmworker rights and protections.

“The growth of regenerative labels reflects shortcomings in current agricultural policies, which continue to favour industrial, chemical-intensive farming systems rather than supporting regenerative practices at scale,” said FOE.

Who’s Creating the buzz?

Since late 2024, the pesticide, dairy, and big food industries have lobbied the European Commission, using the concept of regenerative agriculture to promote practices such as the continued use of synthetic pesticides and chemical fertilisers that are linked to environmental harm, said CEO.

Leading the charge are some of the best-known food and farming conglomerates (Bayer, Syngenta, Yara, Cargill, Unilever), their associated financial institutions (Rabobank), and industry groups, it added.

It specifically identified groups such as the Forum for the Future of Agriculture (FFA) (co-founded in 2008 by Syngenta and the European Landowners Organisation), One Planet Business for Biodiversity (whose members include Nestlé, Unilever, Microsoft, and Google), and projects such as the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) platform, which has 190 global food and farming companies including ADM, Danone, PepsiCo, McDonalds, etc.

These entities have repeatedly met with the European Commission to push for a particular type of regenerative agriculture: “outcome-based” which, instead of setting management practices for farmers to follow, “allows flexibility and context-specificity in the approach to achieve desired outcomes” as per the SAI platform.

But watchdogs like CEO and green groups point out that measuring outcomes is incredibly complex, costly, and time-consuming, and worry this is just a backdoor to the continued use of harmful - and wasteful - agrochemicals.

“Despite the existence of an organic community with governing stakeholders (farmers, consumers, conservationists, retailers, processors, inspectors, and scientists) that has evolved over at least seven decades and is codified in the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) of 1990, the term “regenerative” is now increasingly being advanced as a loosely defined alternative to the organic standard and label, which is transparent, defined, certified, enforced, and subject to public input,” the report said.

The private sector is also pushing for more support for regenerative agriculture under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the bloc’s €380 billion farm subsidy programme, and some industry groups have suggested that their own frameworks could be used to determine which farming systems qualify for CAP support, according to CEO.

Groups like Agroecology Europe fear the prospect of private standards shaping the distribution of public funds, with research and investment flowing towards self-defined private initiatives.

“Regenerative agriculture is the new buzz word, and provides a smoke screen for agrobusiness to conceal destructive monoculture practices and input-intensive ways of doing agriculture. It’s a bit like fossil fuel companies such as Exxon saying “yeah but we are also investing in fuels from algae” while keeping 98% of their income from fossil fuels,” Yogi Hale Hendlin, Public Health Scientist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, told CEO.

Andhra Pradesh Shows We Don’t Have To Be Stuck

For once, let’s end the newsletter on an upbeat note.

This year’s Food Planet Prize - the world’s largest environmental award, worth $1.5 million - went to Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF), “for its role in leading one of the most ambitious transitions to agroecology ever undertaken”.

Those who follow agroecology know APCNF well. For the uninitiated, the prize committee summed it up well.

“Over the past ten years, 1.8 million farmers in southern India have joined what is now one of the world’s largest transitions to natural agriculture - and the numbers keep growing.”

“Launched by the government of Andhra Pradesh, APCNF works through women’s collectives and a network of over 10,000 farmer trainers to help smallholders abandon synthetic inputs in favour of natural farming practices rooted in soil science and traditional knowledge. Year-round cover cropping and pre-monsoon dry sowing are among the methods being adopted across more than 8,000 villages.”

Since its launch in 2015-2016, this closely-watched and much-lauded agricultural programme said it increased farmer incomes by up to 66% over time and reduced greenhouse gas emission up to 46% per acre.

But don’t just take their word for it. A true-cost accounting study using the EU’s TEEBAgriFood framework found that adopting APCNF led to greater crop diversity, similar or higher yields, higher incomes, lower input costs, improved local economies, improved social networks, and reduced health costs.

APCNF said it “dedicate this recognition to the women farmers, self-help groups, community resource persons, farmer scientists, and community leaders whose commitment and leadership transformed a vision into a people’s movement.”

“This recognition is not the culmination of a journey. It is the beginning of a larger global movement. The Food Planet Prize will help us strengthen research, empower farmer scientists, share knowledge, and build pathways for countries seeking sustainable regenerative agricultural transformation.”

Thin’s Pickings - Health-Harming Foods Edition

1. How Big Tobacco helped design Lunchables - and gave birth to the ultra-processed food industry - Fast Company

   This news article is perfect for those who don’t have the time to go through the recent blockbuster issue of American Journal of Public Health focusing on UPFs. This piece focuses on one of the articles that linked how R&D from the cigarette business was used to make ultra-processed foods that were designed to be hyper-palatable and encouraged overeating.
   

2. A single, mandatory warning label on unhealthy foods is key to a joined-up approach to obesity - BMJ

   Christina Vogel, professor of food policy and director, Centre for Food Policy, argues that the UK public is confused over different nutritional information available in different settings: while buying prepackaged foods, visiting restaurants and takeaway chains, or eating in schools.
   “This patchwork of policies… enables dishonest marketing that can cause confusion, as companies can add misleading claims such as “healthy,” “organic,” or “added vitamins,” even if a product is (high in fat, sugar, or salt) HFSS.”
   

3. Harms of Framing Obesity as a Disease of Individuals - JAMA Health Forum

   Three public health scholars on why current obesity framing “reinforces food, pharmaceutical, and wellness industry communication strategies emphasising obesity as a problem requiring medical treatment, rather than prevention” and ignores “food environments individuals find themselves in, which are shaped by government-set laws and financial incentives for the food industry”.

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’s a fair bit of self-promotion this week.

• There won’t be much food systems content, but the issues we care about are still front and centre: human rights, independent journalism, refusing to give up in the face of what can seem like insurmountable barriers, exposing profiteers, and good governance.

• There are a lot of videos to watch and stories to read so there’s no separate Thin’s Pickings section this time.

And if you’re wondering about the sub-title, it’s not about the infamous slap. Keep reading.

I’ve often talked about the two worlds I inhabit: food systems and Burma/Myanmar. I move between them daily, and have spoken before about how growing up in a poor, agrarian, and isolated military dictatorship has shaped my reporting and understanding of global food systems.

Still, last week, the two collided in a way they hadn’t before.

I was in Oslo, attending and speaking at the Oslo Freedom Forum. Two days before my speech, an old friend who knows about my food systems work brought me to a municipal farm just outside the city. It was a clear, beautiful day and families were out of in force.

There were vegetable patches, regal-looking chickens, ducks, bees, and the fluffiest, friendliest sheep I’ve ever met. I won’t forget the image of a curly-haired boy whose eyes lit up with wonder as his palm travelled down a lamb’s back, or the collective awe of a group of kids when a volunteer unveiled a beehive.

The 1.8-hectare farm has a manager - a farmer employed by the city government - and two volunteers. She told me every animal plays a role - chickens for the eggs, ducks to eat invasive slugs and snails, and sheep to provide wool for clothing and cover plants in lieu of plastic.

She’s also getting piglets, she said, for their manure and their ability to root through the earth, clearing weeds and providing natural tilling. But pigs are voracious foragers and need ample space to roam. Having more than two on this farm would overgraze the land and destroy rather than regenerate the soil, she added.

Her comments brought to mind the multi-storey pig farm in China with over 3 million sows, which I mentioned in last week’s newsletter. I’m still thinking about that comparison.

The Oslo farm is a working one but set up specifically for education - schoolchildren visit three times over the course of the year, helping to prepare the land, sow seeds, care for the animals, and witness the harvest - and possibly, slaughter - at the end.

Listening to her filled me with a wish I’ve always had - that everyone’s education should involve some learning about the land and food production. I’d happily have traded some hours of high school spent reading pages upon pages of heroic mythical kings or trying to make sense of physics for time on a farm like this.

Two days later, I went on stage in front of more than a thousand people, urging them not to forget about Myanmar and warning them that what happened to my country isn’t an anomaly. Later that week, the Global Investigative Journalism Network publicised a 10-minute video of me sharing tips on how to investigate food insecurity, and food systems expert Jose Luis Chicoma published a newsletter in which, for once, I was the interviewee rather than the interviewer. On Friday, the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) published an interview with me, where they asked me to connect my food and climate reporting with my work on Myanmar and my speech at OFF.

That’s when it hit me: I’d come full circle.

OFF was the third big global conference I attended in as many weeks this Spring, and at first it was truly discombobulating to see the deterioration of human rights and democratic norms at the front and centre of every session and discussion.

There were rousing speeches, thoughtful takes, and inspiring conversations, all centred on how power is being wielded to oppress, discriminate, and sow fear and division.

Notwithstanding the heavy subject matter, I found it incredibly refreshing, because I was beginning to despair at how some of the premier global events on social change and public health I’ve recently attached brush past these issues. I also believe governance, power, and rights are where food systems failure are most entrenched and most in need of change.

That said, I did have some qualms.

The theme for OFF this year is “Dismantling Dictatorship”, and while listening to Noor Pahlavi’s powerful speech, I couldn’t help but think of how her grandfather - the last Shah of Iran - consolidated his power with the help of Britain and the U.S. after the overthrow of a democratic government that nationalised Iran’s oil; how he ruled with an iron fist; and how that legacy helped pave the way for the current Islamic Republic. Nor did she mention the U.S. - Israel attacks that are contributing, at least in part, to the suffering of Iranians today.

I also felt there was far too much optimism, and far too little scrutiny, around cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence - technologies with theoretical potential to help resist authoritarianism, but whose real-world use so far has largely been limited to fraudsters, self-promoters, and billionaire tech bros, several of whom have either cosied up to authoritarians, bought up media outlets to shift narratives on climate, food, and rights, or both.

I also wish there was someone from the Global North - maybe the United States? - and someone from Palestine to talk about the situations in their own countries.

Still, I came away with some surprising realisations: Richard Gere seems like a genuinely decent guy, truly committed to the cause of Tibet; María Corina Machado came across as remarkably stateswoman-like (though I have questions about some of her strategies), and eight minutes, it turns out, is enough time to tell a story that resonates.

So here’s a selection of speeches from OFF that struck several chords with me. Please do watch them. The topics are dark, and the speeches paint a picture of a world moving backwards, but they stop well short of what I’d call torture Olympics territory.

These speeches aren’t about suffering for its own sake, they show us what we can do, and they are galvanising. I hope they have the same effect on you.

The Journalists

Stefan Kefas: in lesser hands, this speech about mass abductions by Fulani Islamist militants in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region could easily stoke knee-jerk division and prejudice. Instead, in explaining how his exposés of the crimes made him a target of both the government and the militants, Stefan brought balance, nuance, and a big heart to the story.

Supriya Sharma: as Executive Editor of Scroll, a fiercely independent Indian news outlet, Supriya painted a vivid picture of the erosion of human rights in a country that once prided itself on being the world’s largest democracy, and the continued shrinking of space for media, civil society, and minority groups.

While Stefan, Supriya, and I were the only journalists on the main stage, I met many more at dinners and panel discussions and those stories were sobering.

A Ukrainian journalist said her staff no longer wear flak jackets marked “PRESS” because it makes them deliberate targets for Russia forces. A veteran Cambodian reporter based in DC, who lost his job to Trump-era, cuts told me he and his former colleagues drive Uber by day and continue broadcasting at night, using their own resources. A Norwegian journalist reminded us that press freedom now exists in only a handful of countries - 7, to be precise - with the host country topping the list.

The Rebels

Luaty Beirão: you might be tempted to do an eye roll at the term “dissident rapper”, but ponytailed Luaty, jailed for discussing Gene Sharp’s book “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, is the real deal. In shorts and a t-shirt, he spoke about his time in a maximum-security prison, his 36-day hunger strike, and his ongoing work to free Angolans from fear and get them to the polls. He also called out Will Smith for cosying up to Angola’s dictator and helping promote the country.

Yirgalem Fisseha: a poet who once worked for Eritrea’s state media, Yirgalem didn’t grasp the truth about her country until she angered the authorities, was imprisoned, and tortured until she lost consciousness. Yet she refuses to be broken. I hope one day to own a stage with half her swagger.

Mohammad Al Abdallah: a human rights lawyer who shared a prison cell with his father under the Assad regime, Mohammad founded of the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre and continues to call out government failures and demand accountability, regardless of who’s in power.

The Lawmakers

Lobsang Sangay: in less than six minutes, the former elected Presdient of the Central Tibetan Administration delivered a powerful and clarifying advice: don’t just dismantle dictatorships, replace them with people who know how to administer and govern, not just protest.

Claudia Ortiz: one of only three opposition legislators in El Salvador, Claudia spoke, with nuance and empathy, about having a front-row seat watching how democracy was dismantled and due process discarded in her country, in the name of cracking down on gangs.

Carmen Lau: a former elected councillor who fled Hong Kong in 2021, Carmen now has a million-dollar bounty on her head and has faced gender-based attacks for defying China. Despite the threats, she soldiers on, and her parting words reminding us of the link between our addiction to cheap goods and China’s global reach particularly hit hard.

The Self-Promo (coming full circle)

My speech at OFF2026, titled “From Dictatorship to Democracy and Back Again”

My video with GIJN Academy, “Reporting on Food Insecurity: Tips and Tools for Journalists”

My interview with DVB, “Dismantling Dictatorship in Myanmar”

My Q&A for Jose Luis Chicoma’s newsletter Food + 1

Let’s move on from authoritarianism and power to bureaucratic gatekeeping and passport privilege…

This part will be a familiar one to those of us with what I’d call “crappy passports” - which, not coincidentally, often means we also come from crappy, dictatorial governments. Whether or not you have heard of the name VFS Global will depend almost entirely on where you were born.

For the unfortunate among us, VFS Global often stands in the way of our aspirations to travel for work, study, or to reunite with family. It is often our first - and only - port of call before our entry to most EU countries, the UK, and Canada: the company accepts and processes visas on behalf of 71 governments around the world.

I have spent countless hours of my life at VFS Global centres across Asia and Europe, clutching reams of printouts detailing my financial, employment, and marital status, stressing about whether I’d be granted a visa for my master’s studies, a family reunion, a work trip, or a nice holiday I had been dreaming about.

I’ve had to pay extra to expedite the process around my work schedules. I’ve had to pay extra to keep my passport with me during the two to three weeks the visa was being processed. But I’m luckier than most: it was painful, but for the most part, I could afford to pay.

Two weeks ago, my colleagues at Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with 14 media outlets, published a year-long investigation into how the company - majority-owned by Blackstone, the private equity giant and major Trump donor - has built a system of aggressive, and at times dishonest, upselling that exploits people travelling on “weak” passports.

“VFS has built a highly profitable business around supplemental services: SMS alerts, courier delivery, document scanning, premium lounges and at-home appointments, according to the company’s financial statements and an analysis of customer receipts,” wrote Politico in its piece on the investigation. It’s a must-read.

You can find Lighthouse Reports’ page on the investigation here: The Visa Empire: Borders As A Business.

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 were also talks about China and its security apparatus, by people who have felt its ire, and whether and how to engage with the superpower.

Given that this week’s Thin Ink is about China and its food systems, I guess it was inevitable that I’ll see some parallels in how Beijing’s thinking on security and control shapes not just its politics, but also in the way it feeds its population.

“Why China? It’s the elephant in the room in the global food system. It’s the thing that has an enormous impact that we’re just not discussing... From the outside, it’s either incredibly critical or overly celebratory, and we try to strike a tone that isn’t either of those things. There’s still so much inaction in the whole food system. And here, there’s just massive action, and it’s coordinated, and it’s happening in an actual transformation, not just a transition.” — Matthew Kessler

Matthew was explaining why the latest TABLE podcast he is hosting is focused on China. His eloquent comment illustrates the challenges of reporting on China: it’s easy to veer towards either extreme, particularly when it comes to food.

Because in terms of sheer numbers, China is the true centre of gravity in global food systems. It is also moving at an incredible pace, to the point where the whiplash could affect countries and ecosystems thousands of miles away.

Take just two examples:

• China has the world’s largest fishing fleet and the biggest fish processing capacity. The associated labour rights abuses and their impacts on migrants from countries like Indonesia have been well-documented by groups like the Outlaw Ocean Project.

• State-owned COFCO (China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuff) has also muscled its way into an elite group of companies - collectively known as the ABCDs - that controls up to 70% of the global trade in essential cereals, oilseed, and protein crops.

It is also a deeply undemocratic country, and it can be hard not to see food systems changes entirely through that lens. But while we’re debating about transitions in Europe and analysing the power of MAHA versus MAGA in the United States, China is executing hyper-scale transformations before our very eyes.

If we care about food systems transformation, we ignore what is happening in China at our own risk. The quote above encapsulates this.

Titled Feeding 1 in 6, the four-part podcast series managed to stay away from the two extremes, highlighting China’s achievements as well as problems. The first episode gives a good grounding for the following episodes that each focus on pork, rice, and fish. I thoroughly recommend it.

This week’s issue is based on my conversation with Matthew, who has appeared before on Thin Ink, the contents of the podcast, and some of my own past reporting.

Below are five key takeaways on how China is shaping what the world grows and eats.

1. The sheer scale of China affects global data and metrics.

When the UN published the 2020 SOFI report (an annual flagship report on chronic hunger), it seemed like we were looking at a success story.

While more than 820 million people (11% of the population) went to bed hungry in 2018, that number had dropped dramatically to 690 million (8.9%) by 2019.

The real cause of the 2% drop, however, was largely driven by China.

“Newly accessible data enabled the revision of the entire series of undernourishment estimates for China back to 2000, resulting in a substantial downward shift of the series of the number of undernourished in the world,” according to the FAO, the UN food and agriculture agency.

Due to China’s size - home to 1.4 billion people, 17% of the world - its bureaucratic adjustments altered the global baseline for undernourishment by tens of millions of people overnight.

The impacts on the ground have been consequential too and show how nutritional outcomes have shifted in a generation.

According to the long-running China Health and Nutrition Survey, more than 1 in 6 children and adolescents between 6–17 years are overweight, and 1 in 9 are obese. Alarmingly, more than 1 in 4 suffer from both overweight/obesity and micronutrient deficiency. This dietary and nutritional shift is likely to affect future metrics.

“We heard in like 2018 or 2019 that (China) has used more concrete than the US did in its entire 20th century. So, there’s this root of growth and development. But obviously, concrete has a huge environmental cost to it,” Matthew said.

“Similarly with the food production, the industrialisation of it means you have a huge increase in available calories and also access to more diverse diets than there were before. So you do have a very real effect of like rural areas moving from under nutrition to having calories and availability of other food sources.”

“That helped with real nutrient deficiencies, but with it, you also have these diet-related diseases connected to abundance in the industrialisation of food systems. So obesity and overweight - China grapples with all that at the same time. The most fascinating thing is you have every dynamic of the food system at play in China, dialled up in good and bad ways.”

Another statistics that stood out for me was in Episode 2, when Ron Lane, a Canadian swine expert who has been in China for over a quarter of a century, spoke of Muyuan Foods Group. The company has 3.23 million sows, exactly one half of the U.S. total sow population, he said.

2. China similarly shapes global food trade, production, & consumption.

Because of its massive consumer base, when China shifts its sourcing for whatever reason, it causes dramatic economic and environmental ripples across the globe.

For example, when African Swine Fever - a viral disease often fatal to pigs - swept through China in August 2018 and the country lost an estimated 27.9 million metric tonnes of pork output, it turned to other countries, particularly Spain, which led to an explosion of pig farms and agricultural waste in rural areas.

Spanish pork products to China accounts for 18% of Spain’s total exports, and the sudden surge in Chinese demand turbocharged an already fast-expanding industry which counted more than 33 million sows in November 2025, the largest in the EU.

The environmental consequences have been severe. As we have documented at Lighthouse Reports, the ecological collapse of Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon, Mar Menor, can be traced in part to the explosion of industrial pig farms upstream.

The same pattern repeats on the other side of the world for feed, a key ingredient of pork production. China is Brazil’s biggest soy customer, and between 2010 and 2017, imports increased by 170%. In September 2025 alone, 93% of Brazil’s soy exports went to China.

As Matthew puts it, the numbers defy easy comparison: “60% of globally traded soy (goes to China)… It’s just such a large number, and no other country occupies more than 3%. There’s no one even close in the ball park.”

That demand increased Brazil’s soy growing area by nearly 11 million hectares between 2017 and 2024, and according to Global Canopy, has driven over 70% of the carbon dioxide emissions risk from deforestation linked to China’s soy imports.

Then there is fish.

China touches a third of all internationally traded seafood, processing cheap protein on a scale that has reshaped coastlines from South America to West Africa, Matthew said. To feed billions of farmed shrimp, tilapia, and carp, Chinese aquaculture mills require millions of tonnes of fishmeal, and they are buying it up off the shores of some of the world’s most food-insecure nations.

One local fisherman told the BBC: “The Chinese are exporting our bonga fish to feed it to their tilapia fish, which they’re shipping back here to Gambia to sell to us, more expensively.”

Matthew acknowledges both sides of this ledger.

“(China is) providing an affordable protein source... you can look at local markets and see what was there before and what wasn’t, at what prices. At the same time, it’s absolutely devastating for local coastal communities. And because they don’t account for a lot of their environmental and social costs, everything has remained at such a low price.”

3. China is also reversing the direction of global learning.

For decades, the prevailing narrative about China and knowledge transfer ran in one direction only: China acquiring, borrowing, or outright stealing Western intellectual property and technology. That story is now obsolete in significant parts of the food system, according to Matthew.

“At least in the US, the only story about China and learning is about intellectual property theft. Now you have producers and the industry from the US and Europe, going to visit China to learn how they’re operating, with biosecurity.

“You can definitely have lots of negative things to say about the industrial food system, but if you compare strictly the industrial animal production in China to the US, I would say you can find examples where China has built some cleaner, more efficient, more circular systems. But there are also huge risks because it’s become more and more concentrated.”

How about hybrid rice commercialisation?

Estimates say this has led to yield increases of up to 30%, and fed millions more people. The man behind it, Yuan Longping - known as the “Father of Hybrid Rice” - is China’s version of Norman Borlaug, though far less known, said Matthew.

Yuan estimated that if half of the world’s rice-growing areas were replaced with hybrid rice varieties with a 2 tonne per hectare yield advantage, the increase in global rice production would be enough to feed between 400 and 500 million more people.

That is, of course, if you set aside concerns around the higher costs of hybrid seeds, the environmental trade-offs through increased use of chemical inputs, and the loss of farmer autonomy.

There’s also the South-to-South knowledge transfer, specifically in aquaculture, that receives almost no attention in Western coverage. China’s model has potential for replication elsewhere precisely because it has not yet been fully consolidated into large corporate entities.

“The fish farming is largely done by smallholders,” Matthew explains. “It’s a more resilient story, just because of the sheer numbers... And the bond between China and African countries is that they see themselves in each other, they see themselves at just different trajectories, different parts of their timeline and story.”

4. China’s shift from scarcity to abundance provides plenty of lessons.

Beyond the scale, what’s truly striking about China’s food system transformation is its speed. A country that experienced one of the worst famines within living memory has vaulted into an era of abundance and diet-related disease, skipping the slow, incremental transitions that took Western nations much, much longer.

A key reason for this sudden change is China’s willingness to experiment at scale as well as course-correct, aided by its strict, hierarchical system.

Matthew describes the aquaculture sector as the clearest example:

“Fish became the most unregulated sector of all, so it had the most innovation and also the most harm. They didn’t even have baseline assessments. There was tons of overfishing, tons of aquatic ecosystem pollution. That’s where the major example of course-correction happens. But I think it’s a trend you can find across all the sectors - the market was unleashed, yields were prioritised first, and then there’s been a reckoning.”

Unlike Western countries, which often get mired in ideological battles between industrial and agroecological models, China has the institutional capacity - and the political will - to run both simultaneously. It is simultaneously testing gene editing, intensive chemical inputs, and ecological farming in large provincial pilots, using top-down coordination that no market economy can replicate.

“China is a great experimenter,” Matthew notes, adding the country has invested a lot in agricultural research and development. “They are happy to try 15 different pilots and give them serious investment at a provincial level to see what works.”

“They’re dominating the present and future of papers, and they’re also attracting a lot more people to go through their schools. I heard so many anecdotes of researchers saying when they work with Chinese agricultural universities versus European or North American universities, (the Chinese) are spending weeks or months with farmers, as opposed to doing digital surveys. They’re in the field trying to figure out, are these results practical and being implemented?”

5. But not all of China’s achievements are transferable, replicable, or even desirable to replicate.

There is a version of this story that ends with a simple lesson: look at what China has done, and do likewise. But that would be wrong, and incomplete.

While the speed and scale of China’s food system transformation is genuinely extraordinary, some of it rest on foundations that no other country can simply import. For example, the kind of economic growth China has experienced is unique and unlikely to be repeated.

There is also the sheer concentration of state power, derived from a governance model that brooks limited dissent and has no meaningful equivalent anywhere in the democratic world.

As Matthew puts it, thinking aloud: “The incentives globally are different than what they are in China. It’s just more contained. They are not beholden to multinational actors and their bottom line and all the other perverse incentives in our food system. Whereas there, because of their history with food security, they really care about food availability.”

Of course, China’s ability to make fast decisions and enforce them consistently is partly a function of what it doesn’t have: an independent civil society that can slow, contest, or reshape those decisions.

Then there’s “induced demand” - the state taking an active role in creating and shaping markets. This is not just about regulating or providing subsidies - it is a fundamentally different conception of the relationship between state and market. Most governments and international development institutions shy away from this sort of thing.

However, this does not mean we veer towards the other extreme: portraying China simply as a story of what not to do.

As Matthew notes, “They’re doing the exact same thing that the West has done, but just on a much bigger scale and at a much faster pace. And so the impacts are so much greater.”

Yes, the environmental devastation wrought by China’s industrial livestock expansion is massive. But it is also not unique because it is the story of industrial agriculture everywhere. It’s just bigger and faster in China. But China also has the institutional capacity to course-correct when it chooses to, in ways that makes it difficult - if not impossible - for market economies.

“It would be disingenuous to not be critical at all. But it would also not be very real to not be impressed by the state and scale of transformation that’s occurred. The important part, or the difficult part, is that they are all connected. They are not separate stories happening to different people at different times. It’s all a version of the same story that’s happening. There are improvements and there are costs and consequences, and they fall on all these different people, and that’s real and true.” — Matthew Kessler

Thin’s Pickings

1. What the Meat Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know - The New York Times
   Nick Kristof highlights a provision in this year’s farm bill, which has already passed the House of Representatives, “to suppress the will of voters so that giant meat companies can abuse pigs”.
   

2. The Enshittification of Big Food - The Future Market
   ”Each substitution is individually defensible inside a procurement spreadsheet. Cumulatively, they produce food with the shape of the original and almost none of its content.” Great read from Mike Lee.

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 week’s issue is based on an investigation we worked on with Cuestión Pública, an award-winning Colombian investigative newsroom best known for its exposés on corporate and political power.

Published on May 27, the piece captures the enormous challenges faced by both consumers and governments trying to improve public health and the overall sustainability of food systems.

(P.S. I’m heading to Norway for the Oslo Freedom Forum. Please come say hello if you’re there too.)

Let’s begin by digesting - pun intended - these health statistics from Colombia.

• Nearly 1 in 4 adults were obese in 2022, compared to fewer than 1 in 5 in 2012. (FAO, 2025)

• The change is even more striking in terms of absolute numbers: 9.1 million adults were obese in 2022, compared to 5.7 million in 2012. (FAO, 2025)

• More than half of adults were overweight in 2015. (ENSIN, most recent national survey)

• Nearly 7% of children under 5 were overweight in 2024, up from 5.1% in 2012. (FAO, 2025)

• More than 30% of Colombians consume sodas - sugar-sweetened beverages, in academic parlance - daily, among the highest consumption levels in Latin America. (BMJ Global Health, 2023)

• Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) account for 76% of premature deaths in Colombia, with cardiovascular diseases being the main cause. (WHO, 2022)

• The costs of treating NCDs amounted to more than 6 trillion pesos (nearly US$1.5 billion) in 2021. Some estimates suggest that figure could reach 10.2 trillion pesos by 2030. (Ensayos Sobre Política Económica (ESPE), 2023)

I started with these numbers because they are the backdrop to a story that Cuestión Pública, our Colombian media partner, published this week.

“¿Qué hay detrás de la lonchera de tus hijos?Exceso de azúcar y un negociazo para los partidos” (roughly translated as “What’s in your children’s lunchboxes? Too much sugar and a lucrative business for political parties”) connects the dots between those statistics and the political and corporate forces making them so difficult to reverse.

It traces how, amid rising adult and childhood obesity, political parties in Colombia that are heavily financed by the ultra-processed food (UPF) industry have repeatedly blocked regulations and filed lawsuits seeking to overturn public health measures like “healthy taxes” and front-of-pack warning labels.

The “healthy taxes” refer to the tax reform signed by Colombia’s president in December 2022, after several years of delay. It introduced a 10% tax in 2023 on sugar-sweetened beverages and UPFs, increasing to 20% by 2025. The law was hailed as “groundbreaking” by public heath campaigners.

The story was published days before the high-stakes presidential elections on May 31 (Sunday), which currently has three main contenders and will determine the country’s future trajectory.

Much of the campaigning has focused on security and affordability issues, but Colombia’s pioneering approach to public health is at stake too, even if it is not being shouted from the stages.

Depending on who gets elected - or even who gets to the second round run-off - the country’s laws targeting foods that harm our health could be in jeopardy.

The outgoing, left-leaning President Gustavo Petro championed the measures, and Iván Cepeda, currently leading narrowly in the polls, has vowed to continue Petro’s social and environmental reforms.

But the other two candidates - establishment conservative Paloma Valencia and right-wing populist Abelardo de la Espriella - are pro-market and anti-tax.

In particular, Valencia, a political protégé of ex-President Álvaro Uribe, granddaughter of a former president, and a senator with Centro Democrático (Democratic Center), has explicitly said she will eliminate the taxes if elected, positioning her as a defender of shopkeepers, merchants, and the private sector.

Her campaign told Cuestión Pública in writing that removing the taxes would “help stabilise the basic family food basket without compromising the fiscal stability of the general budget.” She proposed replacing them with “technical working groups for industrial reformulation” with exemptions for companies that reduce sodium and sugar.

The Lobbying & The Law

There were nearly 20 legislative initiatives over the past decade that the government had put forward to regulate sugary drinks and ultra-processed foods, according to Cuestión Pública. These include regulating the advertising of UPFs to minors, restricting their marketing in school settings, taxing them, or making the less healthy ingredients more readily apparent.

Only two bills passed.

Law 2120 of 2021 established seals to warn about products that have high levels of added sugars, sodium, and trans fats. It required black, octagonal warning labels on the front of the packaging reading “High in Sugar,” “High in Sodium,” and so on. You can see similar labels in Mexico and Chile.

In April 2026, the Ministry of Health proposed a draft regulation that goes a step further, introducing a new, mandatory rectangular warning label explicitly reading “Advertencia Ultra Procesado” (Ultra-Processed Warning). This would make Colombia one of the first countries in the world to label food this way.

Law 2277 of 2022, created through Article 54 of the Tax Reform, placed a tiered tax on sugary drinks and a compounding tax on UPFs exceeding thresholds for sugars, sodium and trans fats.

Public health advocates, academics, and civil society groups view these laws with pride. The right-wing opposition, Big Food, and industrial business lobbies aggressively fought them.

Cuestión Pública detailed how lawmakers aligned with Big Food - including from Centro Democrático - tried to derail them: inviting lobbyists into Congress during the discussion of these laws, filing lawsuits, and introducing bills to overturn them.

The Funding & The Lawsuits

The newsroom also followed the money.

“In 2022, the year the health tax was discussed and passed, sugary drink and ultra-processed food companies donated 25 billion pesos (USD 6.8 million) across all their charities,” reported Cuestión Pública.

“This represented 40% of their total income that year. This is equivalent to the annual cost of care for more than 9,000 type 2 diabetes patients, according to 2019 figures.”

Between 2016 and 2024, such contributions by Big Food accounted for 30% of income reported by political groups, it added.

When the laws passed despite the lobbying and the funding, the lawsuits began: 17 challenges were filed, almost all by individuals, under a process that enables any Colombian citizen to challenge the constitutionality of laws or policies.

The plaintiffs include:

• law firms such as Gómez-Pinzón, which has represented one of the most powerful banking families in Colombia to take control of Nutresa, a leading multinational processed food company in Colombia,

• the constitutional lawyer Juan Manuel Charry, who has represented a producer of sweets and chocolates, and

• Miguel Uribe Turbay, a Centro Democrático senator and former presidential candidate who was assassinated last year, and who had received campaign donations from the Nutresa Foundation.

After analysing more than 900 pages of lawsuits, such traces with the UPF industry were found in half of the them, including filings where industry talking points and data were used to criticise the laws, Cuestión Pública said.

So far, all the lawsuits have been unsuccessful. Colombia’s Constitutional Court has ruled the taxes to be valid and constitutional.

The strategy has since moved to overturning the taxes or asking for exemptions for certain products. Cuestión Pública has identified members of the Congress from Centro Democrático being part of these efforts.

The History & The Future

The latest article focused on the lobbying and pressure around these laws, but Colombia also has a documented history of threats and harassment against human rights and public health advocates.

Take the case of Dr. Esperanza Cerón, whose group Educar Consumidores was censored and legally threatened in 2016 after Colombia’s largest beverage company Postobón filed a complaint with the government’s consumer protection agency.

In an article, The New York Times documented menacing phone calls, strange malfunctions of the office computers, and men pounding on her car door telling her to “keep her mouth shut”. Although no direct links with the food industry were made at that time, public health advocates in Colombia later reported feeling unsafe on a daily basis during this same period.

A decade later, Colombia’s elections could determine whether the country cements its status as a pioneer in improving our food environments, or if an incoming conservative administration that has the ear and funding of the industry will attempt to dismantle those policies in the name of economic growth.

The Constitutional Court has provided some protection for the taxes, but Sunday’s vote could determine the trajectory of future policymaking.

Further Reading

• Cuestión Pública’s story (in Spanish, get your browser translation extension ready!)

• Instagram Reel about the findings (in Spanish)

• Lighthouse Reports project page

Thin’s Pickings

1. Carlo Petrini Obituaries
   There were plenty of fitting eulogies to mark the passing of the founder of the Slow Food Movement. But it was the pieces by Rachel Roddy (in The Guardian), by Pete Wells (former NYT restaurant critic) and Raj Patel that stayed with me: vivid, colourful, and enjoyable, just like Carlo’s life and vision.
   ”An environmentalist who isn’t a gastronome is sad; a gastronome who isn’t an environmentalist is foolish, he would say.” Aye! Aye!

2. The Processing Gap: Why Ultra-Processed Foods Are the Real Driver of the US-Italy Obesity Divide - The Food Archive
   A post from one of my favourite food systems experts - Jessica Fanzo - that combines personal musings with scientific evidence to unpack the differing levels of obesity between her current (Italy) and former (U.S.) homes.
   As a fellow northern-Italy-dweller who has also lived in Rome, I couldn’t agree more with her observations, particularly on standards, food environments, and walking.

3. What ‘ultraprocessed’ actually means (and why it matters) - Unjunked
   A new substack from two scientists who study ultraprocessed foods for a living. Lindsey Smith Taillie has done numerous studies on food environments and UPFs and how to regulate them, and Ashley Gearhardt was an author on the UPF and tobacco study I cited in an earlier issue.
   This post is great for those wanting to dip their toes into the UPF debate.

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’m still recovering from the myriad of meetings and side events (someone told me over 200 were planned, see here for a taste), the small bout of food poisoning (hello, cafeteria salad?), the crush of people and the lack of power outlets at the grand Palais des Nations, and the aggressive French immigration police at the border. In that order.

So apologies in advance for any typos. This week’s issue was prompted by the dominant chatter at the WHA and a worrying trend I noticed over the past few months.

Also, full transparency - I asked Gemini and Mistral for specific examples of corporate partnerships and then verified them.

Finally, very sad to hear Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, has passed away. He did much to bring the concept of fair food for all to a wide audience. Full bio here.

Imagine a tobacco company assisting the health ministry. Or a fossil fuels giant partnering with an environmental agency. Or an alcohol conglomerate shaping curriculum with education providers.

If you think these scenarios are too far-fetched, I have some cryptocurrency with a guaranteed 150% return to sell you.

History is littered with close parallels:

• Philip Morris International establishing the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World;

• Public Health England working with an alcohol-funded charity (also here);

• BP, Shell, and Japan Tobacco International funding museums;

• the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria’s brief dalliance with Heineken to “fight infectious diseases in Africa”; and

• Monash University linking arms with Woodside Energy (also here).

In many ways, it is a tale as old as time: a match between a suitor with deep pockets but no legitimacy, and a cash-strapped noble in desperate need of a large dowry.

But the stakes are rising. We’re now seeing more and more institutional alliances between companies whose products harm our health and the United Nations itself, a body at the highest echelon of global governance.

The Context

A few days before the opening of the 79^th World Health Assembly, the WHO published its annual compilation of health and health-related indicators, known as the World health statistics report.

It has chapters dedicated to health-related SDGs, COVID-19, and the availability and quality of data, but I want to zero in on some sobering numbers related to funding and food systems.

• More children under five were overweight in 2024 than in 2012 (5.5% versus 5.3%).

• More women (both pregnant and non-pregnant) were anaemic in 2023 than in 2012 (30.7% versus 27.6%). That’s 605 million women between 15 to 49 years of age suffering from anaemia compared to 506 million before.

• 2.1 billion people faced financial hardship due to health spending in 2022.

• Premature deaths from the four main noncommunicable diseases (cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic respiratory disease, and diabetes) has declined by over 20% since 2000 but progress has slowed since 2015.

  • As a result, no WHO region is on track to meet the 2030 SDG target (indicator 3.4) to reduce this by a third through prevention and treatment.

• Official development assistance for health was estimated to be 30% to 40% less in 2025 than in 2023, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO Director-General, noted in his foreword.

These numbers matter because they’re the backdrop against which the general funding crisis at the UN, and the corporate partnerships it’s spawning, need to be understood.

Let’s also not forget:

• Obesity and overweight are associated with increased risk of disease or death from noncommunicable diseases (NCDs).

• Anaemia can be a result of several factors - nutrient deficiencies and inadequate diets are two main causes.

• Consuming foods that harm your health is a key driver of NCDs, which, by the way, are the world’s largest killers, responsible for an estimate 41 million deaths every year.

• Ultraprocessed foods, high intakes of red and processed meat, and insufficient consumption of fruits, vegetables, and beans are associated with the development of NCDs. Don’t take my word for it, see The Lancet, the WHO, World Cancer Research Fund International, and the NCD Alliance.

The Chatter at WHA

As befits the difficult times for anyone wanting a healthier, fairer, and greener world, the WHO is facing a major funding shortfall.

Part of it is that the whole humanitarian and development sector is struggling as donors tighten their purse strings, but a major cause is Trump 2.0’s withdrawal of the United States from the WHO, which was the organisation’s single biggest funder.

So unsurprisingly, a lot of the discussions at the WHA was around what this means, not just for the WHO but also for countries that rely on the WHO for technical assistance and other support.

There was also a lot of concerns about the outbreaks of various infectious diseases, not surprising given news of hantavirus, norovirus, and Ebola just over the past few weeks.

The other buzzwords I heard repeatedly: health sovereignty, domestic resource mobilisation, and public-private partnerships. All three deserve space, but it’s the last one I want to dwell on, because the most recent examples are genuinely alarming.

The Unholy Alliances?

Given resource constraints and the urgency needed to improve health and nutrition outcomes, I understand the appeal of private sector money.

I’m not naive either - it’s hard to find private sector partners that are 100% clean, and the needs are so great we have to find a way to work together. I’m also well aware that the U.N. system is bloated and imperfect.

But… and there’s always a ‘but’… the most recent examples of said public-private partnerships leave many of us extremely worried.

1. United Nations Capital Development Fund and Bayer Foundation

An August 2025 press release announced the partnership and launch of “an initiative aimed at addressing global food security challenges and promoting sustainable agricultural practices through innovative, high-impact food systems enterprises operating in underserved markets across developing countries”.

“Bayer Foundation, as Bayer’s corporate foundation, generates impact by supporting breakthroughs in social innovation and science for a world with Health for all, Hunger for none,” it added.

This is the same Bayer that bought Monsanto, is one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical and agricultural companies, and whose exploits, including lobbying against attempts to make agriculture more sustainable, are well-documented.

It is also the same Bayer that has been embroiled in multi-billion dollar legal battles over whether Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller causes cancer, and has asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a ruling that will bar - or at least limit - state-level lawsuits.

The Trump administration has sided with the German agrochemical giant, “aided by officials who came from Bayer’s law firms”, according to U.S. Right to Know.

In a recent open letter, academics, public health advocates, and food systems experts said they oppose the partnership “because it risks further entrenching corporate power in food systems and undermining the independence, credibility, and public-interest mandate of the UN system”.

The collaboration “raises serious concerns about conflicts of interest, institutional integrity, and the governance and legitimacy of the UN system itself”, they added, and called the UNCDF to reconsider and suspend it pending an independent corporate accountability and conflict-of-interest assessment.

“The framing of declining official development assistance as justification for expanding blended finance and corporate investment reflects a wider shift toward the financialisation and privatisation of development governance.”

2. United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) and Nestlé

This “strategic partnership” will establish the World Food Academy 4 Sustainable Food Systems to support university students and early career professionals in food and nutrition, host Nestlé’s free Science & Technology Seminars, and “complement university education by connecting scientific theory with real‑life application”, a March 2026 news release claimed.

“The partnership will grow to include global career opportunities, collaborative projects, and a joint symposium on Sustainable Food Systems later this year,” it added.

Setting aside the cringe-y use of 4 instead of “for” and the shockingly tone-deaf release, where do I even start with Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage company?

It is known for aggressively marketing breast-milk substitutes in developing countries that undermined breastfeeding and caused infant deaths, and has been shown to add sugar or honey to baby-food products sold in poor countries already struggling with obesity (which they don’t do to products sold in rich countries).

In addition, they’ve extracted millions of gallons of water without legal permits in California and been accused of using child labour in cocoa production in Ivory Coast (together with Cargill and others).

The partnership announcement prompted an open letter signed by over 700 experts.

In an article for Health Policy Watch, Dr. Unni Karunakara wrote:

“When UNU lends its name to a company whose practices the UN has spent decades regulating against, the exchange is clear: the corporation gains legitimacy and access to the next generation of food and nutrition professionals. The UN loses its legitimacy as the arbiter of the standards it exists to uphold.”

He also highlighted other worrying, new Nestlé-UN partnerships including with the UNFPA and the ILO.

“None of these partnerships, nor their concentration in a single four-month window, has been the subject of any published UN-system review.”

The current partnership contravenes the UN’s provisions on engaging with businesses, including UNU’s own due diligence policy, he added.

3. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and Ferrero

This three-year partnership was to “support public health initiatives across the Americas, with a focus on improving the health and wellbeing of children, adolescents, and families living in vulnerable conditions”, according to a January 2026 news release.

Perhaps anticipating the furore that would follow, it added: “This collaboration builds on a shared commitment to advancing public health through ethical, science-based partnerships that respect the independence of health institutions.”

The partnership was dissolved following significant pushback, according to an article for the BMJ by three experts in three different continents who criticised the agreement.

“While strengthening vaccination coverage is an undeniable health priority, achieving this through an institutional partnership with a transnational ultraprocessed food corporation is highly inappropriate,” they wrote.

“It is deeply concerning that PAHO even considered formalising a partnership with a multinational company whose corporate object to maximise profit from the sale of unhealthy food runs contrary to national efforts aimed at improving population health.”

The letter also highlighted Ferrero’s actions in countries such as Chile, Colombia, and Mexico to counter policies designed to improve the nutritional outcomes of their populations. The company’s products such as Kinder Eggs, Nutella, and Ferrero Rocher chocolates are widely considered to be high in added sugar, saturated fat, and calories.

Also, farms providing hazelnuts to Ferrero have been linked to widespread use of child labour and the company opposes the NutriScore nutrition labelling in the EU (here and here). In November 2020, a year after child labour accusations emerged, Ferrero teamed up with the International Labour Organization (ILO) on a programme to eliminate child labour in hazelnut harvesting in Turkey.

These are just three of the most recent examples that came across my desk. There are many more and equally worrying examples and the pattern is hard to ignore.

Some have quietly ended.

Like the partnership between the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) with CropLife International, an industry group for producers of pesticides and other agrochemicals. Announced with fanfare at the height of COVID-19, it led to fierce criticism from civil society groups, including food and farm organisations. The partnership wasn’t renewed, according to Pesticide Action Network.

Some are ongoing. The World Food Programme lists BASF Stiftung, Cargill, and Mars as corporate partners on their website. UN Women has a long-running partnership with Unilever which seems to still be going on. FAO works with Danone and Mars.

It’s not like guidelines don’t exist.

The WHO’s Framework of Engagement with Non-State Actors (FENSA) is a landmark document with strict provisions preventing engagements with tobacco and arms. However, as the BMJ authors noted, it “still falls short in addressing engagement with the ultraprocessed food or alcohol industry”.

The Takeaway

I may be an eternal optimist - how can I do my job otherwise? - and Georgette Heyer, queen of the Regency romance, will remain one of my all-time favourite authors, but I don’t believe the age-old tale of marriages of convenience was truly equal.

I don’t want to say “never”, but in a vast majority of cases, the one holding the purse strings will be holding the power, and therein lies the problem. One has much to lose and the other much to gain from these partnerships.

So what’s the answer at a time of scarcity for the vast majority of us and excess for a few? I don’t have an easy solution, because what we need is structural change of a system that allowed a few to amass so much power and so many of us to have so little.

But I do know that the three partnerships highlighted above aren’t it.

If we must have public-private partnerships because of the dumpster fire we’re in, there’s enough academic literature out there suggesting steps to take: having conflict of interest assessments, establishing independent review bodies, and setting out clear exclusion criteria for harmful industries.

Why not support the WHO framework, strengthen it, and make it consistent across the whole of the U.N.?

We can also start off by voting with our wallets against companies whose products harm people, do our part to make the world a little fairer, and exercise our civic duty to elect leaders who can face up to corporate power rather than dismantle the multilateral system.

Too idealistic? I told you I’m an eternal optimist.

“(The UN’s) authority rests on the premise that it represents collective public interest, not the interests of particular donors or sectors. Each partnership of this kind erodes public trust in the multilateral system itself, at a moment of declining public confidence in international institutions.” - Dr. Karunakara

Thin’s Pickings I - The Other Unholy Alliance

Speaking of the World Health Assembly, a group of women scholars and advocates is raising alarm bells that “language on gender is being removed, sexual and reproductive health rights contested and even denied by Member States”.

This seems to be linked to the concerted effort to erase gains on women and LGBTQI rights. A report last year identified over $1 billion in funding from 275 actors in Europe alone, including private foundations with Catholic roots, investment firms managing the wealth of Catholic Church, groups linked to former Hungarian ruling party Fidesz, and Russia.

Thin’s Pickings II - The Usual Fare

1. ‘I couldn’t breathe’: the sinister spread of France’s killer seaweed - The Guardian

   Great long-read from Marta Zaraska about the terrible and terrifying consequences of industrial farming in what used to be a beautiful corner of France.
   

2. Words that dehumanise: The language behind anti-Rohingya hatred in Myanmar - Myanmar Now

   Brave piece - Nyein Chan Aye for writing it and Myanmar Now for publishing it in both languages despite the potential backlash - on the need to confront my home country’s deep-rooted xenophobia.
   

3. The Intrepid Humanitarian | Into the heart of dankness, part 2: Brave Hearts - The New Humanitarian

   End the weekend - and this depressing issue - with a brilliantly funny piece from Patrick Gathara of his travels to parts of the UK, “a flavour-starved island nation strategically located off the coast of sub-Scandinavian Europe”.

   This Guardian interview with Patrick is also worth a read.

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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It’s been a hectic week, so I’m keeping the preamble short and skipping Thin’s Pickings because the whole issue feels like an extended edition of Thin’s Pickings. Happy reading!

The four reports and papers I’m highlighting this week are an eclectic bunch, but together they give a taste of the fascinating and varied nature of our food systems.

One looks at the bigger, structural issues, another is at the intersection of food and climate, and two touch on the topic du jour - ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) - but through two distinct angles.

They are all worth reading in full, but if you don’t have time, well… that’s why I’m here.

How To Feed Your Citizens Amid Perpetual Shocks

I don’t know about you, but a strong sense of déjà vu seems to follow me almost everywhere these days. Perhaps it’s a sign of old age, but I rather think we’re living through a particularly painful learning phase in which the world needs to be hit on the head repeatedly before realising it’s time to change course.

There have been a lot of good analyses on why we’re bracing for yet another food price crisis. Here’s a new, pithy report from IPES-Food on what countries can do now to shore up resilience, drawing on real-world examples from India, West Africa, Canada, and Norway.

“The world is entering a new geopolitics of food. Conflicts, trade wars, climate shocks, aid cuts, and the breakdown of international institutions are destabilising global food markets,” it said.

“Governments must respond by building resilient self-reliance – strengthening domestic food systems, and reclaiming policy tools that can stabilise markets and protect food access in an increasingly unstable world. This means prioritising food systems that ensure fair livelihoods for farmers and stable access to food for consumers even in times of disruption.”

The concept of “resilient self-reliance” differs from isolationism, protectionism, anti-trade and even food sovereignty, according to Jennifer Clapp, food systems expert and lead author. She said this at the webinar launching the report, which I moderated.

It will “involve some trade”, but it will be trade that is cooperative, fair, and embeds norms like sustainability, agency, equity, and justice. The self reliant part will be built on sustainable agriculture, agroecological methods, and territorial markets that support local producers and ensure food access for consumers, she said.

“If states just want to suddenly be more self sufficient, and do so at all costs, this can have huge ecological consequences, but it can have enormous social consequences as well if it’s not built on the principles of equity and ensuring distribution for everyone.”

And while there are overlaps with food sovereignty principles, the report is responding to state involvement, she added.

There are a number of available interventions, but the report zeroes in on what’s called “market management measures” - specifically public stockholding and supply management - to reduce food price fluctuations that could really wreck people’s ability to feed themselves and farmers’ ability to enjoy a stable income.

These aren’t novel policies. They used to be widespread, until they were criticised as inefficient and countries were pressured to dismantle them as part of trade liberalisation and deregulation agendas.

• In India, the public food stockholding and distribution system, which purchases wheat and rice from domestic farmers at minimum support prices set before harvest, serves two in three people and played an important buffer role in previous crises.

• For example, as global rice prices soared by 230% between 2005 and 2006 and by 75% between October 2007 and March 2008, wholesale rice prices in India increased by just 16% and 14% over the same periods.

• A similar programme exists in West Africa, albeit as regional reserves. It was set up in 2012 to deal with growing climatic threats, pest infestations, and ongoing regional food security challenges, and has since provided over 55,000 metric tonnes of cereals to six countries in the region.

• The report also pointed to Canada where dairy, poultry, and egg industries have measures to negotiate minimum farm-gate prices and prevent cheaper imports from undercutting domestic production.

• During both the 2007-2008 food price crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2023, unprocessed milk prices were highly volatile in both the US and Germany, but remained relatively stable in Canada’s supply-managed market.

• Similarly, egg prices spiked in the U.S. when the 2024-2025 bird flu outbreak in North America paralysed large, centralised production systems. Canada, with a distributed and smaller-scale production model, was much less affected.

These programmes aren’t silver bullets - they can be costly, vulnerable to corruption, and contribute to higher prices for consumers - and cannot be developed in isolation.

Still, “when designed with equity, sustainability, and democratic participation in mind, market management tools can contribute to the stability and resilience of food systems – forming part of a broader shift towards building resilient self-reliance”, the report said.

These policies could particularly be helpful for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, whose reliance on global markets make them particularly vulnerable to the latest geopolitical shifts. Already struggling with some of the world’s highest rates of hunger and undernutrition, it is now costing them more to feed their citizens.

For example, the food import bill for the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) was $59.4 billion in 2024, a sharp rise from $41 billion in 2020. Also, food price inflation exceeded 5% in approximately half of all low-income countries, compared to only one in five high-income countries.

“This is a historic moment to rethink how food systems are governed – and to strengthen local food systems against geopolitical shocks.”

If you don’t want to read the 40-page report, ARC2020 has a detailed article.

When Greenwashing Is The Norm

Remember when JBS and Tyson agreed to stop making claims about their meat being “net zero” and “climate-smart”?

We know greenwashing is common in some industries, and livestock is one of them. But it is another thing entirely to have an academic paper that drills into the environmental claims of 33 of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies, and comes up with receipts.

• The authors looked at publicly available materials from the companies that are related to sustainability - reports and websites - between 2021 and 2024.

• A total of 1,233 environmental claims were identified, of which 98% could be considered greenwashing. Only 20 were verifiable and those tended to describe broad industry trends rather than specific initiatives.

• Nearly 70% of claims directly or indirectly addressed greenhouse gas emissions or the impact of climate change.

• More than two-thirds of the claims did not offer any supporting evidence.

• More than a third of the claims (38%) were promises about the future, with dairy-based companies Nestlé and Danone leading the way. However, “the companies almost never laid out plans for implementation” of these future promises.

• Of 33 companies, half (17) has made commitments to achieve net zero, including JBS and Tyson. Both have caveats, and both continue to expand their operations.

• An interesting aside: BlackRock owns shares in nine of the 17 meat and dairy companies with net-zero commitments in the study’s sample.

• Companies are often short on detail on how they intend to achieve these environmental claims and targets. When they do describe them, they were “generally small-scale, confined to local sites, or existed only in pilot form.”

  • For example, Arla Foods, the world’s fourth-largest dairy company and a cooperative of over 12,700 farmers, launched a “regenerative agriculture pilot” on 24 farms, representing just 0.0019% of its total global operations, and reported “installing solar panels on the roof of a cheese packaging site”.

Why is this a problem?

“Sustainability reporting strengthens public perception and can boost a company’s image, making it more attractive to investors. JBS, for example, raised $1 billion through sustainability-linked bonds linked to its net-zero pledge.”

How The Industry Engineered Addictions

If you’ve ever wondered how accurate are the comparisons between Big Food and Big Tobacco, this fascinating analysis is for you. Even if you are already convinced, I’d urge you to read it anyway because it uses addiction science to understand UPFs.

“(UPFs) are not simply modified foods - they are carefully engineered to maximise hedonic impact, consumption, and profitability through industrial processing,” according to the authors from University of Michigan, Duke University, and Harvard University.

“Both industries have used similar strategies to increase product appeal, evade regulation, and shape public perception, including adding sensory additives, accelerating reward delivery, expanding contextual access, and deploying health-washing claims,” they write.

They also have a closely intertwined history, given that tobacco companies R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris owned food companies such as Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco and were top manufacturers and marketers of UPFs from the 1980s through the mid-2000s.

But the similarities extend far beyond historical ownership, and the authors say their analysis show many UPFs share more characteristics with cigarettes than with minimally processed fruits or vegetables.

The Origin Stories

Tobacco leaves, corn, sugarcane, grains, and oil seeds started out as natural, plant-based substances that have been consumed for centuries.

“What transformed these materials into major drivers of disease was not their inherent properties but the way they were industrially reengineered to enhance reinforcement, maximise both want and need, increase accessibility, and maximise profit.”

The Transformation

“Modern cigarettes are not simply dried tobacco rolled into paper. Rather, they are chemically engineered products, optimised for appeal, convenience, and profitability.”

This includes grinding tobacco leaf scraps into a pulp, combining them with additives and binders, and forming them into sheets that are rolled and cut like paper. These reconstituted tobacco sheets are known as “recon”.

Similarly, UPFs undergo extensive processing that strips away fibre, protein, and water - elements that normally slow digestion.

This goes way beyond traditional processing methods like stone grinding grains, fermenting milk, cold pressing oil, or boiling sugarcane juice to make crystals, which, in addition to being labour- and time-intensive, also retained much of the food’s original structure and nutrient complexity.

Dopamine Hit

We know that fats and carbohydrates are important calorie and energy sources and appear in whole foods, in the same way you can find trace nicotine in eggplants and tomatoes. All three also release dopamine, but eating whole foods that have them “do not typically lead to compulsive overconsumption”.

“Ultraprocessing transforms natural ingredients (e.g., tobacco leaves or corn) into products like cigarettes or UPFs, optimised for maximum palatability, reinforcement, and profitability. These products hijack ancient reward systems in ways that evolution could not have anticipated.”

Crucially, the carbohydrate-fat combination that drives this response is almost non-existent in nature, yet it produces dopamine responses up to 300% above baseline, compared to 120-150% for each alone.

More-ishness

Both cigarettes and UPFs are optimised to deliver “a rapid sensory peak followed by a swift decline, which, in turn, triggers renewed craving”.

“This cycle of craving, brief stimulation, subsequent crash, and repeated use is a hallmark of addictive intake patterns.”

Plain M&Ms illustrate this well: engineered to shatter quickly and melt immediately, releasing a brief burst of reward… then nothing, prompting you to reach for another.

Right Dose

“Both cigarettes and UPFs are engineered with remarkable precision to deliver a “just right” dose of reinforcing substances: nicotine in the case of cigarettes, and refined carbohydrates and fats in the case of UPFs.”

For example, most modern cigarettes contain between 1.0% and 2.0% nicotine by weight. Similar for UPFs, refined carbohydrates and fats are blended in a precise manner to elicit the maximally pleasurable response without sensory overload.

Brand Loyalty

“Both cigarettes and UPFs exploit the human brain’s sensitivity to sensory cues (e.g., taste, smell, mouthfeel, visual presentation) to create products that are not only pleasurable but also deeply reinforcing.”

This is also linked to consumers forming strong attachments to specific combinations of flavour, texture, and aroma, even when the core ingredients (e.g., sugar, fat) are chemically similar across brands.

UPFs also take advantage of humans’ tendency to be attracted to - and equate - colours with beneficial properties, which is why so many of them have bright, artificial colours, particularly for products targeted at youth.

Convenience

The infrastructure built around cigarettes and UPFs - for example, the use of chemical additives and packaging innovations that have increased their shelf lives and durability - has contributed to their widespread use.

“Convenience, in this context, is not incidental but engineered to minimise friction at every point from product formulation to environmental availability.”

“Smokers no longer must roll their own cigarettes or consume them before they go stale. They can carry packs in their pockets, keep them in desk drawers, and light up almost anywhere with minimal effort. Similarly, UPFs are easy to store, portion, and consume on demand, transforming them from occasional treats to daily fixtures in car consoles, office drawers, and kitchen cabinets.”

These similarities warrant regulation commensurate with the significant public-health risks they pose because tobacco’s history also showed the industry exporting addiction and disease worldwide, the authors warn.

In the U.S., taxation, litigation that exposed internal documents, and marketing restrictions contributed to a massive drop in smoking rates - 73% among adults and 86% among youth - but “required decades of scientific advance, advocacy, policy change, and litigation against a powerful industry determined to evade accountability and protect its profits”, they write.

“In the decades between known harm and meaningful action, millions more became addicted, and rates of preventable disease soared. These patterns are now echoed in the proliferation of UPFs.”

What To Consider When Regulating UPFs

This is an interesting and timely commentary from Madhura Rao et al, touching on an aspect that hasn’t received much attention in the UPF debate: that regulatory strategies to control consumption could inadvertently encumber women. They also cite a book - Milli Hill’s Ultra-Processed Women - that I now want to read.

“Domestic food preparation, procurement, and planning… are activities whose burden disproportionately falls on women and thus, reducing UPF consumption could inadvertently increase the time, energy, and resources women spend on food provisioning at home,” the authors warned.

These activities, referred to as “foodwork” in the commentary, range from meal planning and weighing nutritional and food safety risks, to interpreting conflicting dietary advice and managing family members’ preferences and health concerns.

“Although these tasks are often perceived as private, mundane acts, feminist scholars have shown that they are deeply social and political, reflecting and reinforcing existing gender, class, and racial hierarchies.”

I was raised in a household where meals were cooked from scratch, but it was also quite unconventional by Burmese standards: we had a male cook for many years, it was my widowed grandfather who did the weekly grocery runs instead of the single, married, and widowed women at home, my father was more adept in the kitchen than my mother, and my sister and I weren’t taught how to cook.

Despite this, I distinctly remember our great-aunts reinforcing strict gender hierarchy when it comes to preparing, serving, and consuming food. I witnessed the same in other homes. That formative experience left me with an eternal appreciation for men who can cook and are willing to do so, and for women who don’t pressure women into performing it.

In traditional households, the arrival of UPFs, together with technological advances and a sharp rise in women’s participation in the workforce, “profoundly transformed” domestic kitchens by minimising the time, effort, and skill required to prepare meals.

But the gendered nature of grocery shopping, prepping, and planning for meals continue to this day. In the US, women spend twice as much time on foodwork as men. In Brazil - home to the scientists who coined the term UPF - 95.6% of women perform daily meal preparation, versus 59.8% of men. The pattern holds across Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

The utilisation and consumption of UPFs have also become an issue highlighting class and wealth disparities.

“Women from low income and racialised backgrounds in high incomes countries often contend with food deserts, precarious employment, and financial constraints that limit their ability to access fresh or minimally processed foods, leading to the inclusion of industrially prepared foods including UPF.”

“Women with class privilege, on the other hand, are able to outsource at least a part of the domestic foodwork that is societally expected from them to less privileged people (often women and other marginalised people), thereby being able provide their families with a healthier diet but also reproducing hierarchies of gender, race, and class within and beyond the household.”

The authors argue that UPF-reduction strategies that rely on increased home cooking or meal preparation effectively externalise labour costs onto women, without acknowledgement, compensation, or structural support.

They call for creating supportive food environments in schools, universities, workplaces, hospitals, and health and wellness centres so that reducing reliance on UPFs should not depend solely on individual household capacity or effort, which will end up shifting the burden onto women at home.

The suggest cooking classes at school, community kitchens and shared cooking spaces, and advertising and public campaigns that show fathers and sons cooking or meal prepping.

“Rather than positioning healthier eating as an additional responsibility to be absorbed within existing domestic structures, policies should actively engage with and seek to transform these structures to promote equity and shared responsibility.”

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