Who Grows Our Food…?
And other papers about power, plastic, protein, & who pays the price
A very warm welcome to new subscribers of Thin Ink, for which I have to thank Jessica Fanzo! I was visiting her city last week and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see if she had time to catch up.
As usual, I benefited from her energy and wisdom, but I hadn’t realised this little newsletter would too. So thanks again, Jess, for your time and for the shoutout.
One thing I’m learning as I get older is that no matter how busy we are - and pretty much everyone I know has been operating at 110% since 2020 - there is real value in making time to find your community and stay inspired. That feels especially important when it sometimes seems like we’re living in the end times.
Part of that feeling comes from the relentless stream of bad news, including about the state of the media landscape itself. I wrote about Myanmar media last week, but I also recently learnt that the news service of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, where I was the first non-London journalist hired, and where I worked for nearly 13 years, is shutting down.
As our former CEO wrote, it’s a sad development, especially “at a time when the world is craving unbiased information and human rights are increasingly sidelined”.
This week, news broke that Jeff Bezos has fired nearly a third of employees at Washington Post, including a significant portion of its climate team.
It’s tough out there. Stay safe, stay sane, and don’t give up.
It’s been a while since I did a round-up of interesting studies on food and related issues, so here are five that caught my eye.
Who Grows Our Food… and Who Eats It?
The question of how much food smallholder farmers actually produce is a hotly contested one in food system debates. It sounds technical, but it isn’t. It goes directly to who gets funding, who gets political attention, and whose model of agriculture is treated as inevitable.
A new paper published in Nature Food tackles this debate from a different angle, which made it interesting. Rather than looking at who produces food, the authors ask who that food ultimately feeds and that shift results in an intriguing picture.
The study, led by researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands, used FAOSTAT data to construct a global database estimating how agricultural production by farm size contributes to food consumption across 198 countries and 209 products. Farms are grouped into five categories: very small (≤2 hectares), small (2–20 ha), medium (20–50 ha), large (50–200 ha), and very large (>200 ha).
One of the paper’s core findings is that small- and medium-scale farms contribute about 31% of average food consumption in OECD countries. That should give pause to anyone who still frames “feeding the world” as the exclusive domain of large-scale, industrial farms.
There’s more: In rich, industrialised countries like Australia, Canada, and the United States, small-scale farmers contribute relatively little to domestic production. Yet these same countries rely heavily on imports from regions dominated by small-scale agriculture, particularly for nutritious products like fruits, vegetables, and pulses.
Australia, for example, sources 30.2% of its vegetables from India, 12.2% of its fruit from Iran, and 15.3% of its pulses from Myanmar, according to the paper’s modelling.
Similarly, the USA imports 49.7% of its vegetables and 17.7% of its fruits from Mexico, and an additional 13.3% of its fruits from Guatemala.
“Within this context, the challenge of ‘feeding the world’ is routinely accepted as the preserve of large-scale farms,” the authors wrote.
“Yet, assessments of farm size that address only the perspective of domestic food production without factoring in the realities of a globalized food system do not fully capture the roles of different farmers in meeting national food needs.”
The contribution of smallholders is even more pronounced outside the OECD, where very-small and small-scale farms account for 44.2% of total food consumption on average. That aligns with what many aid agencies and farmer organisations have long argued, but the paper adds something new: smallholders are not only feeding their own communities. They are feeding us.
The paper also documented a less comfortable dynamic: countries dominated by small-scale farming - China and India are key examples - depend heavily on imports of cereals and oil crops produced on large-scale farms elsewhere. As incomes rise and diets change, demand for these commodities is expected to increase, potentially accelerating the expansion of industrial farming in South and Central America.
This is where the politics come in. The authors noted that declining overseas aid from OECD countries will likely hit small-scale farmers hardest, particularly those producing for export markets. The authors also said small-scale production is often poorly captured in national accounts, and their contribution may be even higher than estimated.
There are limitations. The paper acknowledged the lack of data on very-small farms dedicated purely to subsistence, many of which are not engaged in international trade at all. Farms under two hectares range from highly specialised and technologically sophisticated operations to deeply impoverished subsistence plots. Lumping them together isn’t helpful or useful.
In an op-ed for The Conversation, the lead author was more explicit about the costs, writing that export-oriented production of crops like lentils and sweet potatoes from small-scale farms often comes at the expense of food security in low- and middle-income countries. Those same countries then import cereals and oil crops from wealthy nations to compensate for food and nutrition insecurity created by cash cropping and contract farming.
“These dynamics bear the signature of colonial extractivism in the global agri-food system.”
The latest paper drops into a long-running and increasingly heated debate about smallholder farms, one that shows no sign of abating.
In 2021, a research paper estimated that farms smaller than 2 hectares produce roughly 35% of the world’s food (I discussed this in an earlier Think Ink issue).
A wave of papers and analyses followed, including by Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data, which argued hat the contribution of smallholders is significantly lower than often claimed by aid agencies and farmer advocates. They were also taken up by proponents of industrial agriculture to argue that investment and policy support should be redirected accordingly.
I understand some of that critique. Small-scale, subsistence farming is often back-breaking work carried out by people living in deep poverty, and we shouldn’t romanticise it or pretend that hardship is inherently virtuous. But I’m also wary of how productivity-first debates tend to erase questions of power, land, and labour.
I’ve seen, up close, that the transition from subsistence farming to wage labour on large plantations is not always the development success story it’s made out to be. Losing land and autonomy in exchange for precarious work can leave people more, not less, vulnerable.
Yes, subsistence farming can be brutal, and we shouldn’t wish that on anyone. But neither should we assume that farms of thousands of hectares are the only - or inevitable - way to feed ourselves. There are small farms that are profitable, resilient, and thriving, and this paper shows that they matter far beyond their own borders.
Who Governs the Food System?
If the Nature Food paper asks who grows our food, a second paper by researchers from Australia and the UK asks who governs the system that decides how food is grown, traded, and consumed.
The review traces the evolution of Global Food Governance (GFG) from its post–World War II foundations to today’s fragmented, corporate-heavy landscape. The authors argue that the challenges facing food systems - climate change, malnutrition, biodiversity loss - cannot be solved by nation states acting alone. Yet the institutions meant to coordinate global responses have been steadily weakened.
The authors define GFG as “the systems, rules, and institutions that aim to manage and address global food security and related food system issues”.
Traditionally, they are centred around the UN system. Over time, this ecosystem has expanded to include regional bodies, forums like the G7 and G20, and an increasing number of public–private and corporate-led initiatives.
The result, they argued, is a highly complex system with overlapping mandates, blurred accountability, and widening power asymmetries.
The historical tour is worth taking. The paper moves from Bretton Woods and the Green Revolution - where a productionist paradigm took hold - to the 1970s food crisis, and then to the structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF and World Bank that promoted industrial agriculture while hollowing out public institutions in the Global South. They then trace it to the increasing presence - and power - of corporate actors in GFG today.
Four factors have consistently constrained reform efforts, the authors say.
Chronic underfunding that have weakened - often intentionally - multilateral food and nutrition institutions. This has forced them to chase external funding just to fulfil their mandates.
Neoliberal ideology. The legacy of Bretton Woods entrenched US dominance and constrained alternative knowledge systems through control of global financial flows.
Policy incoherence and competing mandates. One review cited found 167 organisations or consortia shaping action in the global food system, with no clear shared direction.
Corporate capture. The reformed Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has seen its authority challenged by a multistakeholder model that, in practice, grants corporations structural power over agenda-setting.
These four factors shaped where the global food governance is now, according to the authors.
GFG has shifted away from multilateralism to a more decentralised multistakeholder system.
It is ideologically and financially constrained.
Corporate actors have reshaped power relations due to the promotion of multistakeholder governance and public-private partnerships.
Recurring food crises not only reflect deep structural inequities but perpetuate them.
The authors are blunt about what’s at stake.
“A high-stakes power struggle is unfolding,” they write, between those pushing market-oriented, technology-driven solutions - often backed by corporations and financial institutions from the Global North - and those calling for a return to democratic multilateral governance rooted in public health, human rights, and environmental sustainability.
They made four recommendations, but I’m going to focus on the fourth one as it feels particularly urgent.
“Governance needs to move beyond reliance on voluntary, industry-driven self-regulation toward more robust legal mechanisms that hold all actors (especially the powerful) accountable for social and environmental harm.”
“There’s No Such Thing as Climate-Friendly Beef”
Speaking of regulation, the lack of accountability is on full display in the debate over beef.
A new report from the World Resources Institute (WRI), aimed at food purchasing organisations, tackles a deceptively simple question: how can institutions source climate-friendly beef? The answer, uncomfortably, is that they largely can’t. At least not right now.
The analysis dismantles a range of industry talking points, including the repeated refrain that cows are reared on land that cannot support crops.
But only 37% of land used globally to graze or feed cattle is unsuitable for crops (see page 19). The rest could either grow food directly or be restored to natural ecosystems.
Which means beef production in the US and Europe requires more than three times as much cropland per kilogram of protein as milk, eggs, pork, or chicken and seven times more than beans, WRI said in an op-ed about the report.
“Food purchasing organizations can make progress toward sustainability goals by serving less beef overall - and serving even less if prioritising organic or grass-fed beef - and engaging with producers and suppliers to adopt practices to reduce emissions,” the report said.
Even under a best-case scenario - implementing every existing and potential mitigation strategies - WRI finds that US beef’s total carbon costs would fall by only 18%, once land-use impacts are included.
This is where carbon opportunity cost matters. Traditional greenhouse gas accounting often excludes the emissions associated with land occupation: “carbon losses from plants and soils that occur when natural ecosystems are converted to agriculture”. When that cost is included, beef looks far worse.
Globally, the carbon opportunity cost of beef is more than four times the emissions from the agricultural supply chain alone. And because alternative systems like organic or grass-fed beef typically require more land, they often have higher total carbon costs per gram of protein, despite other benefits like better animal welfare and reduced antibiotic use.
The report is particularly scathing about labelling schemes. None of the existing US labels reviewed identified beef produced in ways that would result in a lower net climate impact than conventional beef, the report said.
Take Tyson’s “Brazen Beef “ label for example. It was approved by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and claimed a 10% reduction in production emissions compared to conventional beef. “However, apart from a mention of “practice changes associated with grazing management and feed production,” publicly available information about how such reductions were achieved is limited”, WRI said.
In addition, emerging “carbon neutral” labels often rely on offsets or unverifiable claims, with little publicly available data. See Table 4 on Page 35 for more.
It has three clear recommendations for food purchasing organisations.
Serve less beef.
Be explicit about trade-offs when sourcing alternative systems; and serve even less beef if what’s on offer is grass-fed or organic beef.
Engage producers directly to reduce emissions.
Life Is Plastic… and It’s Making Us Sick
If beef exposes the limits of technological fixes, plastics - primarily derived from fossil fuels - expose the cost of ignoring systems entirely.
A major Lancet Planetary Health paper provides “the first global-scale quantitative assessment of disability-adjusted life-years associated with greenhouse gases, air pollutants, and specific chemicals emitted across the lifecycle of the most common, predominantly single-use plastics under six different global scenarios between 2016 and 2040”.
Disability-adjusted life-years is expert-speak on how many healthy years of life are lost due to disease and pollution, and the numbers are sobering.
Under business-as-usual projections, the global plastics system would be responsible for 83 million years of healthy life lost between 2016 and 2040. In 2016 alone, plastics cost humanity 2.1 million years of healthy life, with 82% coming from primary plastics production.
The adverse health effects are associated with the whole life cycle of plastics, but “most crucially from plastics production, including the oil and gas extraction for petrochemical feedstocks, which contributed to the health effects of global warming, air pollution-induced respiratory disease, and toxic effects from waste chemicals”.
Reducing plastic waste helps, but not enough. Scenarios focused solely on recycling or waste management still see rising health burdens over time. The most effective lever is reducing primary plastics production. Even the most optimistic “system change” scenario still leaves the world with 2.6 million fewer years of healthy life in 2040.
“Alternative global scenarios centring on improving plastics waste management or increasing recycling alone were substantially less effective in reducing emissions and associated health burdens than scenarios that incorporated greater reductions in primary plastics production, underscoring the need for a full lifecycle approach to plastics pollution and harmful emissions,” the paper wrote.
The authors are clear that these figures likely underestimate the true harm. The lack of transparency around chemical composition means that health impacts from microplastics and nanoplastics are largely uncounted.
This matters for food systems. As I wrote in an earlier issue, agriculture and food packaging are deeply entangled with plastics, from mulch films to single-use packaging. Any serious food system transformation that ignores plastics is incomplete.
The global plastics treaty negotiations reflect this tension. Fault lines remain between countries pushing upstream production limits and those focused on downstream waste management. Industry resistance to production caps remains fierce. Last August, a sixth round of talks in three years failed to reach an agreement.
The Lancet paper reinforces what many health advocates have been saying: without deep cuts in production, we are simply rearranging the damage.
A Murder Development Banks Helped Fund
All of this - food, governance, beef, plastics - can feel abstract until it isn’t.
I met Berta Cáceres In August 2014 in Bali, at a four-day conference on women and climate change. The coordinator of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) told me about the risks she was facing and colleagues who had already been killed.
“As women, we are exposed to violence from businesses, governments and repressive institutions - but also to patriarchal violence. It is three times worse for an indigenous woman,” she said in rapid Spanish.
“The media criminalises us too. They try to take away our credibility, (they) say we’re armed groups, that we attack private investments, that we don’t exist, we’re from dysfunctional families, we’re bitches and corrupt. It’s systematic.”
Less than two years later, the Honduran indigenous leader was murdered in her home La Esperanza, Intibucá.
A new, explosive report by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), established to investigate her murder, leaves no room for ambiguity about what happened or who bears responsibility.
The full report (nearly 530 pages) is in Spanish but there’s a 14-page English summary.
“The armed break-in that ended Berta Cáceres’s life was neither by chance nor an act of ordinary violence,” it said.
“It was the culmination of a prolonged process of persecution, surveillance, criminalisation, and violence directed at the Indigenous leader who for years spearheaded the defence of Lenca territory against the imposition of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project.”
The hydroelectric project was imposed on the indigenous territory without consent and was enabled by international financing from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI, or BCIE in its Spanish acronym) and the Dutch Entrepreneurial Development Bank (FMO). Despite known risks and sustained opposition, funds flowed.
The GIEI concluded that the murder was foreseeable and preventable, and that state authorities failed in their duty of due diligence, and also found that development funds being diverted to support surveillance, intimidation, and violence.
“The GIEI determined that funds disbursed by international development banks… formally allocated to the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project were diverted from their original purpose and used to finance illicit activities… and ultimately, the murder of Berta Cáceres.”
“The GIEI’s financial investigation established that, out of a total of USD 18,540,325.62 disbursed in the project, approximately 67% - equivalent to USD 12,426,190.53 - was subject to diversion and/or irregular handling.”
“The GIEI identified financial operations carried out immediately after the murder through which checks were cashed for amounts consistent with at least part of the payment offered to the hit squad that executed the crime.”
Their findings also reinforced what she told me over a decade ago.
“Berta Cáceres’s identities as an Indigenous Lenca woman, a community leader, and a public figure who profoundly challenged masculinised and racialised power structures exposed her to differentiated and aggravated forms of stigmatisation and violence.
“The violence against Berta Cáceres must be understood not only as retaliation for her opposition to a specific project, but as part of a broader pattern of structural violence that disproportionately punishes Indigenous and Afro-Honduran women who defend land, territory, and the environment in Honduras.”
The findings are clear: the murder was an organised criminal operation, carefully planned and carried out through a criminal conspiracy. It is the result of a system that privileges investment over rights, scale over consent, and growth over accountability.
What All of This Has in Common
These papers and reports are about different things, but they point to the same fault lines: power, scale, accountability, and whose lives count.
Small farmers feed the world, but they often remain invisible and worse, dismissed. Governance systems are being reshaped to suit those with money and access. Beef isn’t getting greener, no matter how clever the label. Plastics are making us sick long before they become waste. And when communities resist, the consequences can be lethal.
None of this means giving in. But it does mean staying clear-eyed.
Stay safe. Stay sane. And don’t give up.
Thin’s Pickings
What we disagree about when we disagree about meat - Tangle
A thoughtful and personal essay by Matthew Kessler on the knotty issue of meat that laid out all the complexities and why it isn’t such a black and white issue, no matter how some of us think it is.Matt is the host and producer of Fuel to Fork podcast who Thin Ink has interviewed before.
How to eat well and within Earth’s limits - Nature
A commentary by Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.The NYT’s Pro-Big Ag Pundit Gets It Right on Manure, But Misses the Mark on Herbicides - John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future
Four noted academics respond to journalist Michael Grunwald’s September 2025 Times Opinion piece, “Spraying Roundup on Crops is Fine. Really.”Actually, I do know how to do this - Heated
Emily Atkin’s clear-eyed piece on why it’s important keep our sights on polluters and climate change when the increasing authoritarianism in U.S. politics can make us feel overwhelmed and distracted.
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