The Political Economy Of Your Dinner
A call to confront the powers behind our food systems
I’m kicking off this week’s issue with a bit of self-promotion.
I’ll be speaking at this year’s Oslo Freedom Forum, where the theme is “Dismantling Dictatorships”. You can probably guess I’ll be talking about Myanmar and the need to support independent journalists there. If you find yourself in Oslo, or are attending the event, do come and say hello.
I’ll be moderating the webinar on “The New Geopolitics of Food”, a new report by IPES-Food, on Wednesday, May 13, at 1500 CEST. If you want to know how countries can strengthen local food systems and become more resilient, do join us.
Finally, a big congrats to the team at Dawei Watch, a Myanmar newsroom focused on the southernmost Tanintharyi region. Their investigation into the post-coup mining boom published in Mongabay is a finalist at the SOPA Awards. I also wrote about it for Thin Ink.
I remember the first time I heard the term “political economy” (forgive me, economists and Adam Smith fans). It was the summer of 2022. I was in Sacramento, California, for a short fellowship programme on climate and land use.
A veteran of food and agriculture issues was telling us about the challenges faced by smallscale farmers. They were trying to do right by both the people and the planet but struggling to make ends meet because they couldn’t compete with a handful of mega-farms, who were engaging in practices that undermine their livelihoods.
I asked the speaker if they had looked into antitrust policies to even the playing field. Their answer stunned me.
“Oh, that’s a political economy issue. It’s systems change that’s needed. We don’t do this, partly because of capacity. We focus on practices that will lead to (emission reduction).”
Throughout that trip, I heard similar sentiments repeatedly, from powerbrokers in DC to environmentalists in Iowa to farming advocates in California: we know the system is skewed and that political power shapes who wins and who loses, but it’s too complicated, too sensitive, and too hard to tackle.
I should add some caveats: perhaps the quirks of the American political and farming systems make this particularly difficult, perhaps others are working on it and collaborating with them (although none were cited), perhaps the organisation has correctly decided to focus its energy on things its could change. There could be many more reasons.
Nevertheless, I found the point of view both fascinating and flabbergasting.
The jargon fascinated me too. I read up on it and found it to be a useful framing for understanding our food systems.
I also love using it, most recently at the Skoll World Forum a few weeks ago, when a moderator asked us how to achieve a more equitable, peaceful, and just world, and when a facilitator wondered about tensions within philanthropy.
I said all of us - including donors - need to acknowledge, confront, and deal with the political economy. Again, I was struck by how many smart, motivated, and solutions-orientated people in the room found that to be a new concept.
Beyond the pleasure of feeling less of an ignoramus on a personal level, it made me want to urge everyone to be more cognisant of - and to keep banging on about - this issue, which ultimately, is about who has the power, who wields it, and how it affects all of us.
What exactly is political economy?
“The term political economy is derived from the Greek polis, meaning “city” or “state,” and oikonomos, meaning “one who manages a household or estate.” Political economy thus can be understood as the study of how a country - the public’s household - is managed or governed, taking into account both political and economic factors.” - Brittanica
“Political economy is about how politics affects the economy and the economy affects politics.” - Jeffry Frieden, Professor of Government at Harvard
Out of curiosity, I asked two AI chatbots - Claude and Mistral - for their definition. Maybe they veer from the traditional economic lens, but I was impressed.
“Political economy is the study of how power and money interact — specifically, how political decisions shape economic outcomes, and how economic interests shape political decisions. It refuses to treat “the economy” as a neutral, technical system and asks instead: who benefits from the rules as they are, who loses, and who has the power to keep things that way. It sits at the intersection of economics, political science, and sociology.” - Claude
“Political economy is the study of how political institutions, economic systems, and social structures interact to shape the production, distribution, and consumption of resources in a society. It examines the power dynamics between individuals, groups, and institutions (such as governments, corporations, and labour unions) and how these relationships influence economic outcomes.” - Mistral
Why do we need to talk about political economy in food systems?
Because it is a useful lens to understand why our current food systems are the way they are: unsustainable, inequitable, and unhealthy, the unholy trinity I’ve written about many times before, including here.
It helps us identify the interests, the institutions, the policies, the powerbrokers, and the relationships that have shaped - and continue to shape - what we grow, why and how we grow them, and who gets to eat and who doesn’t.
Do we want to reduce climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions from our food systems?
Rein in the destruction of ecosystems brought about by the current methods of large-scale food production?
Ensure food isn’t used as a weapon in times of war (or peace, for that matter)?
Pay our food workers decent wages (in the US, farmers receive less than 6 cents of every food dollar)?
Slash stubbornly high levels of global hunger and malnutrition as well as ridiculous levels of inequality?
Roll back a growing public health crisis from a deluge of unhealthy diets, pollution (air, water, plastics, etc), and agrochemical contamination, including toxic pesticides?
If your answer is ‘yes’ to any of the above, then you need to be talking about the political economy of food systems.
What do we miss when we dismiss or ignore the political economy of food systems?
We miss the bigger picture, like…
Who controls our food production and distribution?
It’s not an accident that so many aspects of farming, agricultural trading, and food retail are dominated by a handful of corporations, whether we’re talking about seeds, animal genetics, agrochemicals, grain trade, or supermarkets.
Meanwhile, our agricultural workers face low wages, terrible working conditions, and labour abuses, and the power structures don’t fully represent smallholder farmers (here and here). The examples are from Europe, but I doubt the situation is radically different elsewhere.
We got here due to policy decisions on things like intellectual property rights, trade liberalisation, and the pressure to increase the ease of doing business (which allowed mergers and acquisitions to be waved through rather than scrutinised properly).
Who decides what we grow and eat?
We produce enough staples and proteins for feed the world, but we’re not producing nearly enough nutrient-dense foods to meet global needs (here and here). The latter is partly due to our farming methods, partly due to surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere.
This didn’t happen in a vacuum either. Policy choices on yields, land use, subsidies, and comparative advantage have shaped what and how food is produced, which in turn shapes our diets, in a never-ending loop.
Case in point: I come from a country (Burma/Myanmar) with a persistent surplus in grain production (at least before the 2021 coup) where a third of the land was used to grow rice, which makes up two-thirds of the country’s diet.
Who decides who gets to eat?
Despite having enough grains to export, Burma/Myanmar also had shockingly high levels of anaemia - 50% of children under 5 and 50% of women of reproductive age - and child stunting (more than 25%).
This was because…
hunger isn’t primarily a production problem, though purveyors of the hunger washing narrative will dispute this,
simply eating a lot is not the same as having a nutritious diet, and,
government policies deliberately make it hard for some communities to eat well.
Who sets the rules?
Governments have the mandate to decide on things like agricultural subsidies, trade and competition policy, land-use regulations, and food safety standards at a national level, but political economy plays a key role in how they are designed, who gets consulted, and where the money goes.
Depending on who has more power, trade agreements tend to penalise local food systems and create dependencies as well as vulnerabilities to market volatility.
It is worth noting that there are agribusinesses, food corporations, and financial interests with as much power as sovereign governments, and they shape food systems narratives through lobbying, pressure, and funding for research.
Who pays the price?
The hidden costs of our current agrifood systems on health, the environment, and society in 2020 was estimated to be at least $10 trillion a year or $35 billion a day. Just to be clear, those numbers represent 12 zeroes and 9 zeroes, respectively.
The costs - illness, deforestation, pollution, water scarcity, poverty, undernourishment - are borne by us, not by the companies producing our food.
These costs are externalities: pushed onto nature, farmers, future generations, and disproportionately onto communities in the global majority world who contribute the least to the problem.
A lot of journalism is about what’s happening right now. What we need to do more is ask who is responsible for what’s happening, what led to it, and who is bearing the costs.
We can’t stop at, “Food prices are rising,” and “There’s a fertiliser shortage”, or even at identifying what is causing these things to happen. We must also ask who’s profiting from this, and what kinds of conditions allow these profiteers to exist, capitalise on the situation, and get away with such behaviour?
That kind of wilful blindness isn’t unique to journalism though.
I get it, people get turned off by “politics”. In fact, I had classmates who liked to say they’re not interested in politics and just want to concentrate on their friends, family, and doing good. To me, this was totally disingenuous because…
Hello, we were in an isolated military dictatorship! Everything is politics! These classmates were able to ignore politics because their families had the political, social, and economic power that allowed them to.
Perhaps those formative years permanently coloured my perspective. These days, when I hear people say they’re not interested in politics, it reminds me of those former classmates. You can “stay above politics” because you can afford to.
A vast majority of people can’t.
Thin’s Pickings
Groundhog Day for Food - José Luis Chicoma
José Luis is a familiar name to readers of Thin Ink. The report on power he co-edited is very relevant to this week’s issue, and so is this piece.
“The transition many of us recommend does not happen because that transition costs the people with the power to stop it. That is the fact the conversation keeps stepping around.”
Fertiliser and Grain Bosses Bank $66 Million Selling Shares During Iran War - DeSmog
“DeSmog found that Kenneth Alvin Seitz, the CEO of the world’s largest fertiliser company, Nutrien, sold shares worth almost $5 million (£3.7 million) in March 2026 after the outbreak of the Iran war, making a $1.8 million (£1.3 million) profit on the transaction.”
“Three senior vice presidents at Archer Daniels Midland also banked nearly $8.5 million (£6.3 million) selling shares.”
Head of Louis Vuitton tannery leads fight to gut EU deforestation law - Global Witness
Fabrizio Nuti, who runs Nuti Ivo, a group of Tuscan tanneries under the luxury conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey (LVMH), has been leading the lobbying effort to remove leather from the EU’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), according to this Global Witness investigation.
Meanwhile, Nuti-owned Paraguayan tannery Lecom/Parpelli sources hides from farms that have deforested large areas of Paraguay’s biodiverse and threatened Gran Chaco, it added.
A week later, when the European Commission published its long-awaited EUDR “Simplification Review”, it turned out leather has been excluded from the new version. Worth reading the comments if you have time, where some supporters of leather exhibit strikingly similar thinking and writing styles.
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