Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
While Europe has banned hazardous pesticides, the same chemicals are exported to African countries such as Uganda, where farmers often apply them with minimal protection and without legal recourse. ESAFF Uganda and its partners are challenging the EU and demanding change.
Understanding how food is produced can help consumers make choices that support healthier soil, water, pollinators, and communities.
Industrial agriculture relies on more than tractors and diesel. From synthetic fertilizers to depleted soils, the modern food system is deeply tied to fossil fuels, leaving farmers, ecosystems and food security increasingly vulnerable. Amid the polycrisis, we must rebuild food systems by valuing the natural world and supporting human communities.
Industrial agriculture transformed how the world eats after the Second World War. The gains were enormous, but so were the costs: depleted soils, monocultures, plastic pollution and growing dependence on fragile global supply chains.
The impression that we can eat what we want fits neatly with a neoliberal story that treats capitalism as democratic, where people “vote with their wallets”. But this is an illusion. Rather than putting our faith in green consumerism to rebuild food systems, we should strive to de‑commodify food.
Asking if the world grows enough food is the wrong kind of question. It leads to the wrong kind of answer. We don’t need to produce more food. We need to produce more farms: places where communities of living beings can thrive.
Farmer organisations should stop selling agriculture as just another industry and instead reclaim it as a mission rooted in land stewardship and care for animals and ecosystems. But with many farmers locked into debt and infrastructure that bind them to the current model, meaningful change can’t rest on farmers alone, the responsibility rests with society at large.
So much talk about the importance of ‘care’ in agroecology, but what does it mean? Anouk Dijkman’s ‘Matrix of Care’ offers a clear way to see how domestic, community and more‑than‑human care practices connect, and why they matter for agroecological change.
Resilient, self-reliant food systems. A new IPES-Food report says they’re key to addressing food price volatility amid rising geopolitical tensions.
Small farms rarely make a decent living in commodity markets. It’s time to stop chasing scale and start building resilient, relationship-based food systems instead.
Architect and farmer Caitlin Taylor says communities need regional infrastructure for food security. As global agribusiness corporations contribute to ecological degradation and threaten the viability of local farms, she’s working to build a different system.
In the remote Tughgoz village in Tajikistan, agriculture is the foundation of daily life. Local seed varieties that once thrived have become rare, so residents launched a community-supported seed initiative to preserve and share traditional seeds before they disappear.
