How to Eat an Elephant
In big chomps...
I spent part of last week in Vienna attending the IPI World Congress and not withstanding the 4am start, I had a lovely time catching up with old friends and making new ones.
Journalism conferences can feel like a bit of a bubble where you’re preaching to the converted, but I came away energised, thanks to a great discussion at this workshop I co-facilitated.
I did my best to spread the gospel about why this is such a critical time to cover food systems, not only as part of the climate and biodiversity crises but also as public health and inequality crises. It was great to see so much interest on this topic.
Of course it is also a sobering time: funding for climate journalism is in a state of flux, coverage is still very uneven, and our political rulers are either engaging in outright climate denial or rolling back much-needed policies.
Yet the world around us show we should be doubling our efforts: see Hurricane Melissa and the devastation it has already wrought, the latest Lancet Countdown report, or on a minute, personal level, the fact that mosquitos have finally arrived in Iceland. So I’m hoping to harness the energy boost for the tasks ahead.
“Food systems will not be transformed unless power is confronted - not as an abstract concept, but as concrete control over land and water, markets and labor, taste and narratives.”
How about that for an opening line? Or the below as the rest of the paragraph?
“The stakes could not be higher: food systems must feed everyone, regenerate ecosystems, and provide decent livelihoods, yet we are failing on all fronts. This failure is not due to lack of knowledge or productive capacity, but to entrenched power inequities that stem from long-standing historical structures, are actively reinforced by today’s policies and incentives, and drive hunger, malnutrition, ecological collapse, and social injustice.”
The bold emphasis are mine because well, we very rarely see such words at the front and centre of reports on food systems, and regular readers know that anything that looks at food systems through the lens of power is catnip for Thin Ink.
It is one of the most important drivers of why we are where we are today, whether we’re talking about the public health impacts of our increasingly unhealthy diets, the environmental fallout from our production and consumption patterns, or the yawning structural inequities between the vast majority of us and a handful of powerful entities.
It is also the hardest to tackle, because, as the authors of the above sentences put it, “it is both historically entrenched and actively reinforced by today’s economic and political systems”.
The Report
“The Elephant At The Table: Policy Pathways to Confront Power in Food Systems” was published by Hamburg-based The New Institute and written by experts who have been involved in the debates around food systems for years.
“I recognise there’s been a lot of progress on agroecology, on the systemic vision of food, and on many other fronts… But at the same time, power has been absent (in these debates),” said Jose Luis Chicoma, 2024-2025 Program Chair for the Future of Food at The New Institute and co-editor and an author of this report.
Jose Luis is also a former Minister of Production of Peru and has previously written for Thin Ink.
“The irony… is that if we work on food systems, we are all experts on power in some ways, because we all deal with power on a day-to-day basis. We know that we have to do something about it, but we find ways to avoid the discussion,” he told me.
“The usual way is, “let’s make marginal changes, let’s put everything in technical terms”, which is one legitimate strategy to deal with power. But what we are saying is this is not enough. What we should do is name, address, and confront the elephant at the table that is power, and recommend specific proposals on how to deal with it.”
The report also used the term “inequities”, instead of “inequalities” or “asymmetries” to explain the gap in political agency, economic strength, market influence, and other resources.
The authors explained this is because corporations and powerful states already command disproportionate resources, which means the power differentials are “not neutral gaps to be filled equally”.
The Topics
At 130 pages, this is a slim, highly-accessible report. I personally think it should be read by ordinary people as well as journalists, because it shows both the problems and the possible solutions.
It is broken into eight chapters, with one overarching one and seven that focused on different domains: agroecology, fisheries and aquaculture, supply chains, neglected and underutilised species, diets, governance, and seeds.
All are brief and worth reading, but I want to pick out a few specific chapters.
Food systems reporting often neglect fisheries - I’ve been guilty of this myself - so it’s nice to see that included here, and this is partly because Jose Luis, coming from the biggest anchovy fishery in the world, wanted to change this dynamic.
“It has so many problems that are invisible… from slavery conditions on some shipping fleets to what’s extracted and what happens with what’s extracted,” he said.
There’s also the paradox of how more than half of the population of Peru is food insecure, yet few eat the country’s anchovies, which are transformed into fish meal and fish oil to feed animals in distant places.
I also learned some sobering new statistics.
Did you know that the top 10 seafood companies capture nearly 40% of global revenues and 13 firms account for 11–16% of total fish catches, while payments to access the fishing grounds are often minimal, in some cases as low as 1:20 ratio of market value?
The chapter on neglected and underutilised species is also fascinating by illustrating their “paradox” today: these crops have fed under-resourced populations for generations because they thrive in harsh environments and require little inputs, but positioning them as “superfoods” in luxury food markets have made them less available and affordable to traditional consumers while export-focused supply chains proliferate.
In addition, focusing on things like improving the yields of these crops encourage plant breeders to incorporate them in existing systems of seed research and marketing. This in turn lock the new varieties under strict intellectual property regimes and undermines traditional seed-saving and exchange institutions.
In fact, The globalisation of industrial agriculture has led to farming systems in which seeds saved and reused by generations of farmers have been replaced by crop varieties bred by commercial companies using standardised breeding techniques developed in laboratories and tested under optimal field conditions.
This aspect is further explored in the chapter on seed, written by Sayed Azam-Ali, who said seeds are “now treated as commodities that can be traded for profit”, within “an increasingly enclosed proprietary rights system”.
“By transferring plant breeding into laboratories and experimental stations, scientists and breeders have developed new crop varieties using techniques in controlled conditions that are beyond the scale, technical skills, or resources of farmers. As a consequence, farmers have lost sovereignty over the genetic resources of their own crops.”
The chapter on governance doesn’t pull punches either.
“Fragmentation is a defining feature of global food governance,” wrote Jessica Duncan, pointing to multistakeholder governance, which lack clear rules and mechanisms of accountability, as a driver.
“Claims to knowledge are also claims to power. At a moment where truth and fact are being actively reimagined, it can be tempting to reinforce the primacy of science. But analyses of the politics of knowledge make visible that scientific knowledge is not neutral, but rather is shaped by power relations, historical contexts, and institutional biases.”
The Recommendations
Each chapter of the report has concrete, structural, and actionable recommendations and Jose Luis said the authors have learnt from social movements that have been in existence and fighting this issue now for decades.
However, there are four overarching recommendations:
Redistribute access, control, and ownership of resources such as land, water, forests, seeds, finance, technology, and infrastructure.
Rebalance power between actors, and this includes competition reforms, labor protections, investment in social movements, and a far stronger state role for governments that also comes with greater accountability.
Guarantee food access through market, public, and community mechanisms.
Confront power inequities in policy discourse and narratives.
The final recommendation is striking and one you don’t see very often. Perhaps because it points to something deeper and more uncomfortable, and it’s about challenging who gets to shape the story, set the agenda, and define what “progress” means in our food systems.
You see, food systems transformation isn’t only about policy or economics, but also about ideology, framing, and legitimacy, and those with power usually set the discourse and narratives.
I suggest to Jose Luis that the obsession with productivism is perhaps one such example, because the idea that we need to keep producing more and more food, whatever the cost, continues to be an extremely powerful narrative.
“Sometimes when you’re too embedded in these debates, we think, “Of course, the productivist narratives have been discarded.” Amartya Sen has been mentioning (since the late 1970s) that it is not about production, but about food access. But it keeps coming back,” he said.
Both powerful industries and experts are pushing this narrative, he added, pointing to an expert letter calling for “substantial, not just incremental, leaps in food production”.
I know that letter. I was so annoyed I decided to put my head above the parapet and wrote about its glaring omission: there was not a single mention of power dynamics, let alone anything about confronting them.
The Hope
Jose Luis said he hopes the recommendations would create more discussion and generate further insights. He’s planning a series of webinars focusing on different sectors and there will also be a book on food and power next year.
“What we’re trying to do is influence all of the stakeholders to talk more about power. There’s a lot of frustration… but there’s also inspiration from the social movements, from different actors that are leading the way to promote a real transformation.”
The Quotable Quotes
“While some actors are pushing for real change, too many efforts remain stuck - trapped by institutional caution, political risk, or an unwillingness to disrupt entrenched power…
And the results speak for themselves: we were promised transformation but instead we got pilot projects.”
“Failing to address and confront power reproduces the very conditions that food systems transformation work is meant to undo: inequality, ecological degradation, and malnutrition. It leaves intact the forces that create these outcomes and continues to push alternative voices to the margins.”
““Innovation” is not lacking; the issue is who defines it and whose approaches are legitimized and funded. Today’s tech palette - genetically engineered seeds, lab-grown and industrial “alternative proteins,” controlled-environment agriculture, and AI - joins a long lineage of technologies (precision agriculture, Green Revolution hybrids, synthetic inputs, motorization, the plow) that can raise productivity yet carry social and ecological costs.”
“Treating food primarily as a tradable good serves market demand rather than human or ecological needs, and it sidelines spaces where food circulates outside for-profit logics.”
“The concept of “broken food systems” is now a common refrain, yet the structures that keep them broken remain largely intact. Technocratic fixes - delivering at best marginal change - and multi-stakeholder initiatives, often dominated by powerful interests, create the appearance of change without shifting who decides, who benefits, and who bears the costs.”
Thin’s Pickings
They Grow the Food. So Why Are So Many Going Hungry? - The Border Chronicle
The fertile Rio Grande Valley contributes 70% of the produce in Texas, yet more than half of all the neighbourhoods are food deserts, one in four children are food insecure, and it has some of the highest rates of diet-related illnesses in the country, writes Pablo De La Rosa.
In fact, many people facing food insecurity in the Rio Grande Valley today are the children and grandchildren of the farm workers who marched and went on strike in the 1960s and 1970s, demanding fair wages, water, shade and basic protections in the fields, he says, and speaks to people who are trying to change this power imbalance.
Visual Summary of The Lancet Countdown 2025 Report - The Lancet
“Delays in taking climate change action are resulting in millions of avoidable deaths every year,” said this comprehensive report on the health impacts of climate change. This includes deaths from heatwaves and exposures to wildfire smokes and 123.7 million more people having to cut back on what and how much they eat or going without food as a result of droughts and heatwaves.
This visual piece does a stunning job of summarising the key findings if you don’t have time to go through the full paper.
Dr Debal Deb and the last harvest
Beautiful, inspiring, poignant and incredibly sad video on the amazing work of Dr Debal Deb, a pioneering scientist, conservationist and ecologist also known as “India’s Seed Warrior”. If you want to learn more about his work, this piece he wrote six years ago is a great starting point.
Thanks to Raj Patel for the recommendation. The video seems to have came out six months ago but it\s timeless piece.
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