But, on the other hand, matters for the carrying on of a dignified daily life, that life of mutual trust, forbearance, and help, which is the only real life of thinking men - these things the civilized world makes ill, and even increasingly worse and worse.

From The Art of the People

Into this emergency comes a report worth your attention.

Yesterday, the Climate and Community Institute released “Stop Greed, Build Green: A Working Class Climate Agenda,” and it’s a compelling agenda for climate politics. You can find it at stopgreedbuildgreen.org.

Full disclosure: I’m on the advisory board, and deeply respect the Climate and Community team. And I fully approve of their nomenclature. It’s Green Economic Populism. The word “populism” is spot on. Theirs is a political argument about who the economy should serve, and who’s currently in the way — the fossil fuel executives, tech barons, and corporate landlords the report names directly.

The core insight is simple. The climate crisis and the cost-of-living crisis aren’t separate problems. They share causes — an economy organized around extracting short-term returns from housing, energy, and transportation at the expense of the people who depend on them — and they share solutions.

What makes the report particularly compelling is that it’s not a hypothesis in search of evidence. It cites proof that this politics already wins. Zohran Mamdani ran on fast and free buses and green social housing and became mayor of New York City. In Georgia, two new public service commissioners trounced an incumbent by campaigning on lower utility bills and clean energy.

In Independence, Missouri, tenants went on an eight-month rent strike and won electric HVAC systems to replace their gas boilers. In Chicago, the teachers’ union ratified a contract that includes heat pump installations.

Seventy percent of voters — including sixty-five percent of Republicans — believe that economic policy can lower costs while directly reducing emissions. The constituency already exists. What’s been missing is the political framework to activate it.

Read it. It’s excellent. And I have one quarrel with it, which I’ll make through Morris.

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Morris wrote about dignified daily life while his hands were stained blue with indigo. He perfected the indigo discharge printing technique at his Merton Abbey works — careful, handcrafted, worker-centered production, exactly the kind of dignified labor his socialism demanded. One of his most famous textiles, Strawberry Thief, was the first successful result: a pattern of thrushes stealing fruit from a kitchen garden, rendered in deep indigo blue.

Strawberry Thief, 1883, William Morris (1834-1896) V&A Museum no. T.586-1919

Where did the indigo come from? Bengal. Where the British East India Company had built one of the most brutal extraction systems in colonial history. Bengali peasants were forced to grow indigo instead of food crops, paid below market rates, trapped in debt bondage, and beaten if they refused. The Indigo Commission of 1860 heard testimony from a British magistrate that “not a chest of indigo reached England without being stained with human blood”. The revolt against this system — the Nil Bidroha of 1859 — was, at its heart, a food sovereignty movement: peasants refusing to grow a cash crop for export and demanding the right to grow rice.

Morris’s socialism stopped at the waterline. He could see the degradation of dignified daily life in England with deep clarity, and he built an alternative at Merton Abbey that remains genuinely inspiring. But the blue that made it all possible was produced by making dignified daily life impossible for people he never saw. The strawberry thief is empire.

The CCI report is vastly more internationalist than Morris. But it shares a version of this blind spot. Green Economic Populism is strongest on energy, housing, and transportation — the domestic infrastructure of dignified daily life. Food systems get mentioned but don’t get the attention they deserve.

The politics of food — from SNAP cuts to corporate concentration in meatpacking to the climate vulnerability of farmworkers to the global supply chains that connect what Americans eat to how land is used from the Cerrado to the Punjab — is exactly the terrain where the cost-of-living crisis and the climate crisis collide most visibly in people’s daily lives. After all, eight out of the ten lowest paid jobs in the US are in the food system. The effects are horrific, with a spike in deaths from malnutrition since 2008.

Via Adam Tooze/DougHenwood

Dignified daily life has supply chains. A Working Class Climate Agenda will eventually need to follow them. Insufficient attention to my pet issues are a very minor quarrel with an excellent piece of work. My concern is offered in the spirit of Morris’s own insistence: not art for a few, not freedom for a few, not dignified daily life for a few. For now, read the report. Share it, and work to make its agenda better yet.

stopgreedbuildgreen.org

dronepicr/Wikimedia

Today, fifteen thousand steel and concrete pillars have been driven into that limestone to support a railway.

A billion-dollar coastal real estate development called Ciudad Maderas is threatening a thousand hectares of fragile habitat and Indigenous fishing grounds. Sewage and agricultural runoff are poisoning the aquifer. The caves are being punctured, and the water that millions of people depend on is haemorrhaging out.

And the people defending those caves are being dragged into courtrooms.

My friend Sergio Oceransky is the director of the Yansa Foundation, which provides free legal, technical, and organizational support to Maya communities in the Yucatán — in Ixil, Kinchil, Dzitnup, Molas, Sisal — who are fighting to protect their territories. His legal work helped secure a court-ordered suspension of the Ciudad Maderas megaproject. For this, he has received death threats and been the target of a sustained defamation campaign.

On April 6, Sergio traveled voluntarily to a courthouse in Tonalá, Jalisco, to respond to fabricated extortion charges — brought by a person he has never met, in a state where he has never lived. He carried a printed court order, an amparo, that explicitly prohibited his arrest. The prosecutors read the order and arrested him anyway. He was held incommunicado in a cell inside the courthouse. Only after an international outcry was he released that afternoon.

On Sunday April 12, the Jalisco case collapsed. A judge ruled there was insufficient evidence to bind Sergio over for trial. The process, marked by what his legal team describes as numerous violations and irregularities, failed to meet the minimum evidentiary standard.

But the story isn’t over. The risk of extrajudicial action against Sergio has increased since the ruling. Today, Tuesday, April 15, a second hearing begins in Yucatán, this time on a complaint filed by members of the Abimerhi and Millet families against Sergio and members of the Maya community of Ixil. The summons arrived hours after his release from the Jalisco detention. It’s part of a pattern of coordinated legal harassment across state lines, designed to exhaust, isolate, and ultimately remove him from his work.

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There is a Mayan legend about the toh bird — the turquoise-browed motmot — that lives in the cenotes. The toh was once the most beautiful bird in the forest, and it knew it. When the rain god Chaac warned all the birds to build shelters against an approaching storm, every bird got to work — except the toh, which figured its beauty made it invulnerable. The storm came. The toh scrambled for cover and found a burrow, but its magnificent tail was left exposed and was destroyed. When the storm ended, the toh strutted out, still proud, not realizing what it had lost until the other birds started laughing. From that day on, it has lived in hiding, flying through the darkness of underground caves.

Charles Sharp/Wikimedia

The Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz has written a cello concerto about all of this. It is called Dzonot, and it is — apologies — pure cinema. Listen to it and tell me you can’t hear exactly what she’s writing about in each of the four movements: “Luz vertical” (Vertical Light) — the way sunlight penetrates the cenote caves, striking the water; “El ojo del Jaguar” (The Eye of the Jaguar) — the cello becoming the body and voice of the big cat; “Jade” — a meditation on the underground rivers, building toward a passage of mechanical, insistent rhythmic motifs that represent industrial destruction; and “El vuelo de Toh” (Toh’s Flight) — the bird’s free, nimble flight, a hope that it will not lose its home.

The full album, Yanga, is on YouTube here. Start with “Luz vertical” — Track 2 — and give yourself thirty-one minutes.

Ortiz grew up in Mexico City. Her parents were founding members of Los Folkloristas, the legendary Mexican folk ensemble, and she learned charango and guitar playing alongside them before studying composition in Mexico City, Paris, and London. I heard this piece a couple of weeks ago in the studio of Graham Reynolds. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s a fan; they’re both at the frontier of percussion. Dzonot calls for 29 percussion instruments, including waterphones, Tibetan tingsha bells, a small tin can, and a kenong.

The cellist Alisa Weilerstein, who premiered the piece with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel, has called it one of the hardest concertos she has ever played, and has said plainly: “I think she’s a genius.” Ortiz has now won Best Contemporary Classical Composition at the Grammys two years running — the only composer ever to do so.

When Ortiz accepted the Grammy for Dzonot in February, she said:

This piece is also a reflection on a painful contradiction: places of deep historical, sacred, and ecological importance are being severely damaged by pollution and unchecked tourist development. Through music, I wanted to honor their beauty and resilience, and at the same time raise awareness of what is at stake.

She dedicated the award to the protection of the sacred waters. Sergio is one of those doing the protecting.

Listen to Dzonot. Ortiz wrote detailed program notes for the LA Phil here. And then, if you can, follow Yansa on Facebook and join their press conference. As I said when I started writing here, the three things that change the world are art, friendship, and witness. You can enjoy Ortiz’s art, and although Sergio mightn’t be your friend, your witnessing can help keep him, and the communities for which he works, safe.

In general, though, it was unusual for this kind of book to make it to my best-of list in any given season, in part because I tend to be hungry for ideas when I’m reading non-fiction, and so many memoirs seemed to take forever to get to them.

Yet three of the most beautiful books I read last year were Yiyun Li’s Things In Nature Merely Grow, and Lana Lin’s The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam, and Helen Whybrow’s The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life. Each explored a set of ideas that it wouldn’t have been able to do better in any other way, each presenting lives interrogated and weighed, often through the deepest heartbreak, each an exercise in finding the right language and inventing new sets of ideas to match experience. I was wrong not to have really appreciated this before. Better late than never, I’m enjoying the form far more than I used to.

Enter, then, Alicia Kennedy’s memoir.

On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites

There were a good many first person treatments of food and cooking and restaurant-running and eating in our pile last year — I’m sworn by the terms of the awards not to reveal any specifics beyond the ones we made public — but I’m certain none were as wise, humane, and engaging as On Eating.

As with all her writing, Alicia brings a curiosity, and a capacity to ask difficult questions. Under the microscope are family and intimate relationships, the business of food writing itself, cooking, care and the germinal moments that have made her one of the most important voices in food writing today. The subtitle is apt. She picks her scenes exquisitely, each marked by a transformation, and each looping through a food whose meaning will become all the richer the next time you encounter it. I’ll not give anything away, but if you enjoy any of apples, chocolate, lamb, oysters, martinis, mushrooms, plantains, sugar, pumpkin, grapes, beans, bread, water, or coffee, you’ll find something taste-expanding in Alicia’s magnificent memoir.

Preorder it from your local Indie bookshop or Bookshop.org today. It’s on shelves from 14th April.

Find more of Hache’s cartoons at the Green Finance Observatory, including this excellent comic book The New Nature Markets Explained to My Grandmother.

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Three Ways New York’s Public Grocery Experiment Could Fail.

Commissioned By The NYC Policy Forum.

By Errol Schweizer & Raj Patel

As Bloomberg reported in February, the Mamdani administration has begun scouting sites for city-backed grocery stores across all five boroughs. The proposal—five publicly owned stores on city land, exempt from rent and property taxes, with an initial appropriation of $70 million channeled through the Economic Development Corporation (EDC)—is the most ambitious municipal food-provisioning experiment the United States has seen in decades. And given the soaring costs of groceries in New York City, the program cannot come soon enough.

A No Kid Hungry poll conducted in early February 2026 found that 67 percent of New Yorkers had been forced to choose between buying nutritious food and paying for other essential household expenses in the preceding year. That figure rises to 74 percent for families with children. Eighty-six percent of respondents said food prices were increasing faster than their income, and this was before the Trump administration launched a war with Iran, sending food prices higher yet. Given this untenable situation, the case for public intervention in the city’s grocery market is overwhelming.

The road ahead, however, is perilous, and the political stakes are enormous. Already, critics like the Food Industry Alliance trade group, the billionaire supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis, and the editorial board of the New York Post have summoned the ghost of Kansas City’s Sun Fresh—a city-backed grocery store that absorbed roughly $29 million in public investment over a decade before shutting its doors in August 2025—as proof that government has no business in the grocery aisle. Failure in New York would hand opponents of public food provisioning a generational talking point, one that would echo not only in city councils considering their own pilots but also in the federal legislative battles over SNAP, school meals, and public procurement.

What follows is a prospective diagnosis: three structural mistakes that could derail the initiative before it has a chance to prove itself. None of these are inevitable. But given the prevailing incentives and institutional defaults, each is likely to occur unless the administration acts deliberately to avoid them.

3. Outsourcing to Private Operators

The first and most seductive trap is to hand operations to a private grocery company. The logic is understandable: the city has no institutional experience running a supermarket, and private operators can offer turnkey expertise in supply-chain and assortment management, labor scheduling, perishable-goods logistics, and regulatory compliance. Several cities that have attempted public or quasi-public grocery interventions have taken this route. Kansas City’s Sun Fresh was operated first by a for-profit grocer, then by Community Builders of Kansas City, a nonprofit. Similarly, a grocery store in Baldwin, Florida, backed by USDA Community Facilities Program funds, opened in 2022 but was shuttered by 2024, and it too relied on private operators. The Kansas City model forced a nonprofit to bear costs that were properly the city’s, such as police patrols and sewer repair, and then everyone acted surprised when the nonprofit couldn’t bear them.

A private or nonprofit operator, however well-intentioned, faces a set of financial imperatives—covering payroll, maintaining margins, servicing overhead—that are fundamentally different from the imperatives of a public institution. When conditions deteriorate, a private operator’s rational move is to cut losses. A public institution, by contrast, can absorb short-term losses in the service of a longer-term mandate, provided that mandate is politically and fiscally durable. The private-operator model also separates the entity bearing the risk (the operator) from the entity bearing the responsibility (the city), and when the gap between risk and responsibility widens, the operator walks and the city is left with a shuttered building and a betrayed community.

The danger for the Mamdani administration is that the EDC, an entity whose institutional culture is oriented toward public-private partnerships and developer deal-making, will default to a private-operator model because that is what it knows how to do. But a public grocery store operated by a private company is not a public grocery store. It is a subsidized private grocery store, with all the vulnerabilities that arrangement entails: profit-extraction through management fees, opaque cost structures, and contractual exit clauses that leave the city holding an empty building. Worse yet, privately operated stores provide no mechanism for building the institutional knowledge that would allow the city to operate stores at scale in the future. If the pilot succeeds, the city needs to know how it succeeded in sufficient operational detail to replicate it. If it fails, the city needs to know why, in sufficient operational detail to diagnose the problem. This level of information is unlikely to be provided by private operators, as they are bound by confidentiality agreements and proprietary contracts, rather than guided by institutional transparency.

This does not mean that the city must do everything itself from day one. But the operational architecture must be designed so that the knowledge, experience and capacity flows toward the public sector over time, not away from it. The model to study is the Defense Commissary Agency, which operates 236 grocery stores on military installations worldwide with an annual congressional appropriation of roughly $1.4 billion, generating approximately $4 billion in annual sales. DeCA stores are publicly staffed, publicly managed, and sell groceries at cost (plus a congressionally mandated 5 percent surcharge earmarked for construction and modernization). A 2017 GAO analysis found that customer savings ranged from 5 to 25 percent depending on the local cost of living, with a global average of 23.7 percent—a figure Congress has mandated the agency maintain. While DeCA is not a perfect analogy for a municipal grocery system, it demonstrates that public operation of grocery retail is not a fantasy. It is a functioning, auditable, seventy-year-old institution serving millions of families.

2. Assuming the Wholesale Market Will Cooperate

The second mistake is to assume that a five-store pilot can secure wholesale pricing competitive with what major chains pay. It cannot, as the program is simply too small. In the contemporary American grocery supply chain, scale is not merely an advantage; it is the primary determinant of wholesale cost.

The wholesale grocery market is best understood not as a competitive marketplace but as a system of structured price discrimination. In December 2024, the Federal Trade Commission sued Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, the nation’s largest alcohol distributor, alleging that it charged small independent retailers systematically higher prices than large national chains for identical products. In January 2025, the FTC filed a parallel suit against PepsiCo, alleging that the beverage company had constructed a deliberate “price gap” between Walmart and its competitors—raising wholesale prices for non-Walmart retailers, reducing their promotional support, and withdrawing marketing dollars from any competitor that threatened Walmart’s pricing advantage. When the complaint was partially unsealed in December 2025, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance described the newly visible details: PepsiCo had been systematically funding Walmart’s promotional displays and price reductions while cutting identical support to competitors and raising wholesale prices for non-Walmart retailers who tried to close the gap. Meanwhile, a class action filed in February 2025 by independent retailers alleged that PepsiCo sold Frito-Lay snack chips in grocery channels at prices 43 to 46 percent lower than in convenience store channels.

These cases are not outliers. They describe the structural condition of the American grocery supply chain after four decades without Robinson-Patman enforcement. The Act, passed in 1936 to prohibit discriminatory pricing between competing purchasers, went essentially unenforced from the early 1980s until 2024. During that period, independent grocers’ market share fell from over 50 percent to roughly 25 percent. And while there is some renewed bipartisan interest in reviving the enforcement of Robinson-Patman, for the purposes of the Mamdani pilot, the wholesale pricing environment must be taken as it is, not as reformers hope it will become.

For five stores buying in a market structured to reward scale and punish its absence, the wholesale prices available will be substantially higher than what Walmart, Kroger, or Costco pay for identical products. The industry rule of thumb, as the American Prospect reported in its October 2025 analysis of the Mamdani proposal, is that most grocery retailers operate on roughly 40 percent markups from wholesale. But this markup that customers receive as the retail price is itself a function of the wholesale costs the retailer secured, which in turn depends on its purchasing volume. As Claire Kelloway of the Open Markets Institute observed, Walmart’s dominance rested on “bullying, bludgeoning, ruthlessly negotiating with suppliers, because they have access to this market that is so big, and suppliers really can’t afford to not be on Walmart’s shelves.” A new public entrant buying for five stores cannot replicate those terms.

This does not doom the pilot. But it means that the administration cannot treat procurement as a technical detail to be sorted out after the stores are built. Procurement strategy is the strategy. One lesson from the private sector is instructive: at Whole Foods Market, higher sales volumes meant lower wholesale markups on many non-perishable products. Such contracts were negotiated before the Amazon acquisition, when the company was still operating as an independent grocer, and were in turn a key driver of its growth and its ability to achieve net income margins of 2 to 3 percent. If the city is going to pass along meaningful savings to customers as lower shelf prices, it should aim to find specific areas where it can outperform standard wholesale pricing.

The administration should also consider whether the pilot’s procurement architecture could serve as the nucleus of a broader municipal purchasing cooperative—aggregating demand not only across the five stores but across the city’s school meals program, public hospitals, senior centers, summer feeding programs, and corrections facilities. New York City already spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually on institutional food procurement. Consolidating that purchasing power into a single negotiating entity would fundamentally alter the wholesale dynamics. But this infrastructure must be designed for aggregation from the outset, not retrofitted after the pilot is already locked into a procurement model built for five standalone stores.

The wholesale problem must be understood against the backdrop of an intensifying federal assault on the food-assistance programs that sustain demand for groceries in the very neighborhoods the pilot is meant to serve. The reconciliation law signed on July 4, 2025, cut roughly $187 billion from SNAP over ten years—the deepest reduction in the program’s history. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 2.4 million people will lose food assistance in an average month: 800,000 adults aged 55 to 64, 300,000 parents and caregivers with children 14 and older, roughly one million people in areas with scarce employment, and more than 300,000 veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and former foster youth. For the first time, states will be required to share in the cost of SNAP benefits, a structural shift that CBO projects will cause some states to reduce eligibility or benefit levels. When Medicaid cuts in the same legislation—$863 billion over a decade—force patients into choices between medication and food, the compounding effect on household food budgets in low-income neighborhoods will be severe. Public grocery stores that open into a landscape of contracting food-assistance dollars will face a demand environment that no procurement strategy alone can address. The administration will need sustained public pressure to resist the austerity tide—and the stores themselves must be understood as part of that resistance, not as a substitute for it.

1. Demanding Budget Neutrality

The third mistake is the most politically intuitive, as well as the most dangerous: requiring that the public grocery pilot pay for itself. The Mamdani administration faces a $5.4 billion budget gap, which the mayor has largely attributed to the fiscal legacy of the Adams era. The proposed paths to closing it—either pressuring Albany for higher taxes on the wealthiest residents and corporations, or imposing a 9.5 percent property tax—are both politically fraught. In that environment, the temptation to promise that public groceries will be self-sustaining, that they will generate enough revenue through sales to cover operating costs without ongoing appropriations, is enormous. It is also a trap.

Budget neutrality imports a private-sector logic into a public institution and then judges the institution by criteria it was never designed to meet. The correct question is not whether the stores cover their costs through sales revenue, but whether the public expenditure required to operate them is justified by the public goods they produce—measured in lower food costs for residents, improved dietary outcomes, reduced reliance on emergency food systems, neighborhood economic activity, direct employment, and the disciplinary effect on private grocery pricing in the surrounding market.

The DeCA model is again instructive. Military commissaries receive an annual congressional appropriation of approximately $1.4 billion, covering personnel and operations. They then sell groceries at cost plus the 5 percent surcharge. The system generates roughly $4 billion in annual sales and delivers estimated savings of 25 percent to its patrons. No serious person describes DeCA as a “failed” program because it requires an appropriation. The appropriation is the mechanism through which the public benefit—lower food costs for military families—is delivered. It is not a subsidy in the pejorative sense. That simply is the program.

New York’s public grocery stores should be understood in the same terms. An ongoing appropriation is not a sign of failure; it is the instrument of the policy. The relevant comparison is not between the stores’ operating costs and their sales revenue, but between the cost of the appropriation and the cost of the status quo. The city already subsidizes corporate supermarkets through tax abatements, zoning incentives, and the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program. The cost of diet-related chronic disease in the Medicaid system is immense. The economic costs of food deserts—lower property values, reduced commercial activity, the hours that residents in underserved neighborhoods spend traveling to distant stores—are real if diffuse. The city already pays for the absence of affordable groceries. The question is whether it is willing to pay, more transparently and more efficiently, for their presence.

This does not mean the stores should be indifferent to their financial performance. Operational efficiency matters: it determines how far the appropriation stretches and how low prices can go. But the standard should be performance relative to mandate, not performance relative to breakeven. A public grocery store that requires a $2 million annual appropriation but delivers $8 million in consumer savings, provides sixty unionized jobs, and anchors a neighborhood commercial corridor is not a drain on the budget. It is one of the better investments a city can make.

0: The Stakes Beyond the Pilot

By design or circumstance, the Mamdani administration has placed the public grocery imitative at the center of national attention. As a result, the initiative now represents a significant contest over the role of government in American economic life.

The conservative project in food policy, from the Reagan era forward, has been to use food insecurity as a disciplinary instrument against working people. The 1981 omnibus budget act cut food stamps by $2 billion and tightened eligibility; the 1996 welfare reform imposed time limits and work requirements on the program; and the 2025 reconciliation law cut SNAP by roughly 30 percent over a decade while extending trillions in tax benefits to corporations and the wealthiest households. Food banks and emergency food systems—themselves a Reaganite legacy, created to absorb the human consequences of benefit cuts while leaving the structures of inequality intact—have become the default infrastructure of American food assistance. They depend on industrial overproduction, surplus disposal, and private philanthropy rather than on any affirmative vision of what people should eat or how communities should be provisioned.

Public groceries are a departure from both poles of this politics. They are not conservative austerity, which asks the poor to bear the cost of their own deprivation. And they are not liberal philanthropy, which addresses deprivation through private charity while leaving the structures that produce it intact. Public groceries propose something categorically different: that the provisioning of food is a legitimate function of government, that the public sector can operate supply chains oriented toward values—nutrition, affordability, fair labor, ecological sustainability, support for regional producers—rather than toward shareholder return, and that the relationship between government and the food system should be redesigned from the ground up, not merely patched through subsidies to incumbent processors and retailers or rescued through food-waste diversion to charitable pantries.

This is why failure matters so much. If New York’s pilot is undermined by the structural traps described above—if the stores are handed to private operators who cut and run when conditions tighten, if procurement is botched because no one reckoned with wholesale pricing, if the program is strangled by a budget-neutrality requirement that no equivalent public institution, from the commissary system to the public library, is asked to meet—the damage will not be confined to five buildings in five boroughs. It will set back the movement for public food infrastructure across the country by a decade or more, at precisely the moment when federal policy is making that infrastructure most urgently necessary.

Two-thirds of New York City residents told pollsters they support the creation of municipal grocery stores. The question is whether the political will that produced that mandate can be sustained through the grinding, unglamorous work of getting the institutional design right—the procurement contracts, the labor agreements, the site selection, the appropriations framework, and the public accountability mechanisms that will determine whether these stores are built to last or built to be a cautionary tale. The Mamdani administration has $70 million and the attention of the country. The margin for error is narrow. And the cost of getting it wrong will borne by the families who were promised something better.

There’s a lot to love in Hanna Garth’s Food Justice Undone, including the ambiguities of the title:

“Undone” in that these projects did not shift the everyday realities of healthy food access for South Central residents. On a more profound register, justice was undone in the sense that the liberatory potential of this movement was foreclosed, and nascent forms of trust and collaboration that blossomed in some food justice work were inevitably unraveled as outsiders took over within movement spaces that had potential for radical change, instead undermining the desires of residents. Justice was also undone in the sense that it is not a finished project.

Within those three registers of ‘undone’, she relates a rich and engaged history of different folk within the world of food justice, across class and race in Los Angeles.

In the intersection of race and class, I was taken with a particularly heartbreaking story of an activist whose obligations to donors ended up blunting his duties to the community, and betraying a fidelity to emancipatory politics. There’s a book about this too, which Hanna cites, as relevant now as when it was published in 2007: the Revolution will not be Funded.

I know, I know, your inbox is already cluttered. But some Substack subscriptions are worth your while, especially if you’re keen to learn more about the world food system. I always open missives from Thin Ink because Thin Lei Win’s stories aren’t ones I find elsewhere. With her permission, here’s one I particularly enjoyed, on the ways that extreme weather matters for animals in European agriculture.

The Animals Are Not Alright

As floods and heatwaves intensify, farm animals remain invisible in EU disaster planning & response

Thin

Mar 27

Last year, I had the opportunity to mentor two groups of journalists investigating important but often overlooked parts of European food systems.

One looked at how Europe’s farm subsidy scheme fails workers by failing to curb labour exploitation and abuse. It was published in September (see my write-up here) and later won an award at the Voices - European Festival of Journalism and Media Freedom.

The second story, on the near-complete lack of data and planning around the impact of weather-related disasters on farm animals, was published earlier this month on Voxeurop.

It exposes a glaring contradiction: policymakers at both EU and national levels claim to support livestock farmers, yet have done little to protect them from increasingly frequent climate-related disasters.

The lack of support for farmers practising high animal welfare and extensive agriculture (the opposite of intensive farming - fewer animals, more space, lower inputs) is particularly striking.

Please read and share the story. Please also keep a lookout for the national-level articles that will be published in the coming weeks.

In last week’s preamble, I mentioned European policymakers’ fixation on livestock, and the political energy spent debating what names plant-based products can use.

After lawmakers agreed to “ban meaty names such as steak and bacon for vegetarian and vegan foods”, French MEP Céline Imart, who devised the amendment to ban meaty names, hailed the outcome as “an undeniable success for our livestock farmers”, The Guardian reported.

Perhaps I’m being facetious, but it raises an obvious question: what would a real success for livestock farmers look like?

One answer might be concrete plans to protect them and their animals from weather-related disasters that are increasing in frequency and ferocity on the world’s fastest-warming continent.

“As climate change-connected floods intensify across Europe, thousands of farm animals die unseen and uncounted. Farmers bear the losses alone while patchy data, weak planning and narrow compensation expose a blind spot in EU climate policy,” according to Drowned and forgotten: Farm animals are Europe’s silent flood victims.

This was a cross-border investigation looking at the impacts of and responses to floods in five EU member countries: Czechia, France, Germany, Poland and Romania by Leoni Bender, Louisa Bouri-Saouter, Maria Dybcio, Martin Vrba, Raluca Besliu, and Tom Brown, who came together over a shared aim of shining a light on this issue.

Raluca told me she was drawn to the story because farmers are often the first to face the consequences of climate change.

“One of the most significant impacts for farmers is the loss of livestock, which carries not only financial costs but also emotional and ethical ones, and can fundamentally change how they approach animal raising.”

The Losses

Between 1980 and 2023, climate-related disasters caused €738 billion in economic losses across the EU, the journalists wrote. More than 20% of this - €162 billion - occurred in the last three years, underscoring how rapidly risks are escalating.

Those of us who have lived in Europe over the past five years remember the repeated heatwaves, wildfires, floods, and storms.

Agriculture alone loses an average of €28 billion annually due to adverse weather, according to a 2025 European Investment Bank report:

• €17.4 billion in crops (about 6.4% of EU crop production)

• €10.9 billion in livestock (about 5.1% of EU livestock production)

Losses are expected to reach €40 billion by mid-century, yet only 20-30% of these losses are insured, with major disparities between member states, and in some cases no coverage at all.

This insurance gap - as well as the general lack of disaggregated data on livestock losses - has far-reaching repercussions for farmers, as the journalists found out.

There is no comprehensive EU-wide data on livestock losses, either historical or projected. Even the European Investment Bank’s analysis focuses primarily on crop production.

Yet we know the losses are substantial just from the value alone, at nearly €11 billion.

“Europe is home to 132 million pigs, 72 million cattle, 57 million sheep, and 10 million goats. As floods intensify, the continent lacks a systematic way to count, protect, or compensate for the animals that perish in them. Such losses are rarely recorded, often inaccessible, or buried in bureaucratic systems.”

“This structural blindness has tangible consequences: uncounted animals are undervalued, undercompensated, and unprotected, reducing incentives to prevent future losses,” the journalists wrote.

The Reality vs. The Rhetoric

Under the EU Treaty, animals are legally recognised as sentient beings whose welfare must be “fully regarded.” Yet in practice, livestock losses in disasters often fall through the cracks of both insurance systems and public compensation schemes.

Take French organic farmer Edouard Exilard, who lost 35 ewes after floodwaters swept through his meadow in October 2024. His losses came up to at least €12,000 but he received no compensation despite having insurance, because it only covered livestock found dead inside buildings, when organic farming rules require daily outdoor grazing.

In Romania, families affected by floods received two rounds of compensation: one covered housing damage and the other was legally earmarked for four goods: an oven, a television, a refrigerator, and a washing machine. Farmers like Maria received no compensation after losing more than €20,000 worth of livestock.

Germany says it reimburses livestock-related costs if farmers could prove “a direct link” to the flooding. For Sebastian Frey, however, it meant claims for his cows, who survived the evacuation but died of pneumonia days later, were mostly denied.

Some of the cases illustrate just how different the resilience of various farming systems can be, said Martin.

“For example, while small-scale family farms were relatively successful in mitigating the damage from floods and rescuing their animals, large-scale industrial farming easily leads to massive losses due to no realistic options to rescue such large numbers of animals in a short time span. Ironically, it’s these megafarms who afterwards benefit the most from the existing financial compensations, while small farmers’ financial needs were often neglected.”

Perhaps the most telling might be a response from an EU Commission spokesperson when pressed about the bloc’s lacking a system to track and compensate livestock losses from disasters.

“Animal welfare in disasters does not fall within the scope of EU animal welfare legislation.”

Data & Governance Blind Spots

The journalists discovered that governments systematically track human and infrastructure losses, but not livestock mortality. This creates a structural blind spot: animals that are not counted are less likely to be compensated or protected in future planning.

The Ministry of Agriculture in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia did not know how the 2021 catastrophic floods that damaged hundreds of farms affected livestock because it did not collect such data. France’s Direction Générale de l’Alimentation didn’t respond.

Romania is the rare exception, where private veterinarians play a critical role in keeping a count of all the animals in their assigned territory. This is why the authorities reported a detailed inventory following the September 2024 floods in Vaslui and Galați counties: 14,066 birds, 1,888 sheep, 564 pigs, and hundreds of other animals.

Louisa particularly remembered struggling with the lack of data. Often there were no answers or people just ghosted her.

“There are some datasets I could never confirm existed or not. Animals are dying, farmers say, and yet it’s so challenging to access official proof and to produce proper counts,” she said.

Leoni agreed the complete lack of systematic data in Germany was striking.

“Also alarming is the institutional fragmentation: authorities and ministries deflect responsibility, disaster preparedness plans largely exclude livestock and existing specialised animal rescue units are often disregarded or actively sidelined.”

In Germany, animal welfare is considered under the law even in emergencies, yet in reality, none of the 16 states require animals to be considered in disaster planning. Similar gaps exist in Poland and Czechia.

Romania, with a clear legal framework, seems to be an exception again, but interviews with affected farmers show most protocols were not followed in practice.

The Story Repeats Itself

Unfortunately, the challenges for the journalists didn’t stop with a lack of data or cooperation from officials. The story repeats itself when they wanted to get the investigation published.

“After months of failed attempts to find a media outlet willing to publish our piece, it became increasingly obvious that the fate of farming animals during floods wasn’t of interest to most of the media,” said Martin.

I’m glad they finally found a home at Voxeurop.

The same challenges - antipathy, lack of information, etc - also play out in conflict zones where livestock and their sufferings are often overlooked.

In a LinkedIn post, Jackson Zee, a conflict and disaster frameworks expert with animal welfare organisation Four Paws, pointed this out, and called for animals to be integrated into the very beginning of humanitarian planning and evacuation strategies.

“We must acknowledge that no community is truly evacuated until its sentient members are considered,” he wrote. “Protecting these silent victims is also a prerequisite for a community’s recovery. The collapse of animal health infrastructure creates a vacuum that quickly fills with secondary crises, including public health threats that drain already broken resources.”

This personal account by Robert, a 49-year-old Lebanese farmer, who risked his life to find fodder for his cows and then had to leave them behind as Israeli bombardment worsened in late 2024, is also worth reading. It was part of an interactive series about displaced Lebanese people by The New Humanitarian.

Inconvenient Questions

• Why are livestock still absent from disaster planning in one of the world’s most climate-exposed regions?

• Why do we accept systems where farmers bear the full cost of losses that are increasingly predictable and systemic?

• What does it mean to recognise animals as sentient beings in law, if their deaths in disasters are neither counted nor meaningfully compensated?

The contradiction becomes even clearer when placed alongside current concerns about fertiliser shortages triggered by the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran.

Fertiliser is not just about crops. A substantial share is used to grow feed such as maize and soy bean. Europe is particularly exposed:

1. The bloc is highly dependent on imported crops to feed its animals, and

2. Its farming systems are fertiliser intensive.

When fertiliser prices rise or availability goes down ⟶ higher feed costs ⟶ higher livestock production costs.

Yet even as these systemic risks become more visible, policy attention remains selective.

• Why is so much political energy spent on symbolic issues, like naming conventions for plant-based foods, while structural vulnerabilities in livestock systems remain unaddressed?

• Who benefits from this imbalance?

• If meat consumption is framed as cultural heritage or the best source of protein, why do the animals at its centre remain largely invisible when they suffer, and only become visible once they are part of the food system?

There is no shortage of lobbying power in the livestock sector. Investigations — including our own at Lighthouse Reports — have exposed how the meat lobby has successfully stymied animal welfare reforms and how they attempted to undermine making agriculture more sustainable. Many other media outlets have done the same.

A recent analysis by Animal Equality also showed that EU Commissioners responsible for animal welfare and agriculture – Olivér Várhelyi and Christophe Hansen – and their cabinets held at least 46 meetings with representatives of the meat, poultry and dairy industries between December 2024 and March 2026, reported The European. In contrast, the Commissioners met seven times with animal welfare organisations.

So the question is not whether livestock matters politically.

It clearly does.

The question is: why does that attention so rarely translate into protecting animals - or the farmers who depend on them - when it matters most?

Food For Thought

“‘Live…stock’ is, in itself, a term worth questioning. They are stock for our consumption and.. as it happens, they are also alive. It struck me in many conversations that we were talking about beings that somehow seemed devoid of life, and whose suffering was treated as just another parameter to be adjusted, if it served human needs. Our story is yet another reminder that the way we care for farm animals is not right.” - Louisa

AFGE

I’m a proud member of two unions, the National Writers Union and the Texas AFT, affiliated to the American Federation of Teachers. So when I hear that some union leaders don’t think public grocery stores are a good idea, my heart sinks. Luckily, I’m a writer and a teacher, so here’s me doing my unionised work in defence of public grocery.

1. Union members aren’t losing jobs to public grocers, they’re losing them to Walmart self-checkout, Amazon Go, Dollar General expansion into food deserts, and private equity rollups that gut union contracts post-acquisition. Kroger-Albertsons, the spaces in which unions are already fighting for recognition, are the enemy - not those who’d want a public option.

2. Think of grocery like education. Public universities didn’t kill private ones: a public option raised standards. Public groceries with good wages, benefits, and union jobs should become a benchmark. It’s harder for Loblaws or Kroger to race to the bottom when there’s a public comparator showing what decent employment looks like. Unions should want that wage anchor in every market.

3. Public groceries don’t replace existing stores—public options go where capital has already abandoned: zones of food apartheid, rural towns after the last Safeway closed, neighborhoods where the only option is a Dollar Tree. These are new unionized positions in places where there’s currently nothing to organize. Union membership rolls can only grow, they don’t shrink.

There are plenty of forces ranged against the big bets for democratic supply chain transformation - unions shouldn’t be among them.

Even if you haven’t seen Alex Garland's Civil War, you might be familiar - from memes like this - with a scene in which Jesse Plemons, in sunglasses, standing over captives by a mass grave, asks: "What kind of American are you?"

The answer determines whether you live or die. The person asking already knows which answers are acceptable, though the person answering is unsure whether ‘Missouri’ is a better answer than ‘Florida’.

It’s a scene that came to mind unbidden when I was reading about the recent restrictions on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Payments (SNAP) in the US, and the chaos they’ve caused working families here.

In the name of public health, working class people who qualify for state support for food purchases have complex restrictions on what they are and aren’t allowed to buy. Candy and soda are verboten, but the definitions of what counts as candy and soda vary state by state. At a grocery checkout in Iowa, a granola bar is candy if it doesn't contain flour, but a Twix isn't candy because it does contain flour.

The question at the checkout is the same one Plemons is asking: not what food are you buying, but what kind of food buying are you doing? The SNAP benefit card in your hand — the one that may or may not work for the items in your cart — determines whether you’ve chosen wisely or will need to suffer the indignity of returning your purchases.

The checkout isn't the only place where working class families face this kind of sorting. It's been formalized into clinical research.

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JAMA Internal Medicine recently published what I imagine, when the grants were applied for, was going to be the landmark study on Food as Medicine. It was set to answer, definitively, the question of whether doctors can prescribe food and make people healthier.

Over two thousand people with diabetes and at risk of food insecurity were recruited, and the experiment lasted over a year. In the trial, participants got an $80/month debit card that could only be used for certain kinds of food. Their blood A1c was monitored and, after a year, the finding was supposed —finally — to answer the question about whether prescribing food was a good way to reduce the effects of diabetes.

The answer: for patients at risk of food insecurity it’s a little bit worse to prescribe food in addition to providing usual care than merely to offer the current standard of care.

Look closer, and you’ll spot a problem.

The problem is that, for reasons undisclosed in the article, participants didn’t stick with using the restricted debit card:

433 participants (30%) used 80% or more of their subsidy on average for more than 10months, 197 (14%) used 60% to 79% of their subsidy for longer than 10 months, and 516 (36%) used their subsidy to a lesser degree than the previous 2 groups.

To put it differently, the largest group of people did use the debit card at least once, but decided not to after that. One possible reason is the debit card itself. Who knows whether, when you get the checkout, your debit card will work for the stuff in your cart?

If someone gave me a monthly $80 debit card for “eligible fruits, vegetables, and beans (fresh, frozen, or canned without added sugar, salt, and fats)”, they’d not be giving me food; they’d be giving me homework.

For folk holding down multiple jobs, with limited time and money to shop and scratch cook, processed food might be an important way to balance nutrition, income, and health. That’s not to say folk don’t want to eat healthier food. But dignity at the check-out matters, and no-one wants to have to return an ineligible purchase. Beneficiaries already feel shamed by having to split purchases into two batches, one for benefits and another without.

The states that have rushed to impose SNAP restrictions are overwhelmingly, though not entirely, Republican. The Food as Medicine movement comes from the other direction — from progressive public health researchers, from liberal foundations, from people who would be appalled by the cruelty of cutting a family’s benefits because they bought the wrong granola bar. But both begin from the same premise: that the problem with hungry people is the choices they make, and that the solution is to structure their choices for them.

This is a bipartisan consensus. Liberals and conservatives might disagree about whether the poor deserve punishment or treatment, but they do not disagree that the poor are making the wrong decisions about food.

New labelling initiatives for UPF-Free, or California Certified double down on these politics. They don't regulate what's manufactured; they add another checkpoint at the shelf, another moment where the consumer is sorted. If you're faced with local or organic or UPF-free or, better still, two out of three of these, what should you buy? And how much shame should you feel when you're standing in the aisle doing arithmetic that the food industry never has to do?

The food environment in which these choices happen — what's on the shelf, what it costs, how it got there, who engineered it to be cheap and shelf-stable and irresistible — is treated as given. The market that has made ultra-processed food the rational choice for anyone short on time and money is not subject to restriction, not up for clinical intervention, not being asked to present its card for inspection, not itself an acceptable task for homework.

You can regulate what a person on SNAP buys. You cannot, it seems, regulate what a corporation puts on the shelf. And you certainly cannot ask why the person is hungry in the first place.

Below, Daniel Aldana Cohen introduces the logic behind the actions that Mayor Mamdani, and others, are already doing: Green Economic Populism.

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Daniel Aldana Cohen is Strategic Co-Director of CCI. Matt Haugen is CCI’s Research and Editorial Manager.

Matt Haugen: Let’s start with New York. What are you working on?

Daniel Aldana Cohen: I’m finishing work on a book, Street Fight: Climate and Inequality in the 21st Century City. It tracks the evolution of low-carbon politics in New York City and São Paulo over the last 20 years, and it shows how battles over cost-of-living crises, in transportation and especially housing, explain when ambitious low-carbon policies have failed, and when they’ve had success. That book research, and especially my early research in São Paulo on housing movements, taught me to see that climate politics is not just about people who use the words “climate change,” but really everyone whose actions have some significant impact on carbon pollution. In the humanities and social sciences over the last 50 years, we’ve done a lot of important work to show that not just rich or white or famous men are cultural actors and political actors and economic actors.

All actors are climate actors, and there’s some really important climate actors that are traditionally not thought of at all in our analyses. Housing movements are, in particular, a really essential one. A big part of what the book’s research shows—and I think recent events have borne out—that housing-oriented movements are climate protagonists of really significant heft, and they are able to slow down or even block climate policies that they don’t like and that threaten them with gentrification and displacement. These movements also have the ability to hold down coalitions that are broad enough to actually get really potent and powerful climate policies passed.

One straightforward example in New York would be Local Law 97, which is probably the country’s most ambitious low-carbon buildings bill. It never would have been passed if it had not been for really strong support from housing-oriented organizers in New York who put protections for low-income tenants at the core of that bill, and that gave them the political muscle to overcome opposition from real estate.

So it’s an exciting time to be finishing this book. I think there’s a lot that the Mamdani administration can actually learn from the climate politics fights of the last 20 years in New York. Although the phrase “green economic populism” is new, the idea of embedding climate in a broader working class struggle for economic well-being and working class power, that’s a little bit older than the [Zohran] Mamdani campaign. I think we’ve learned a lot from experiences so far, and those experiences give us a lot to be optimistic about.

Mamdani has a strong climate record, but he didn’t really talk about that much in his campaign. What do you think about that, and the potential for climate and environmental action in New York City going forward?

Mamdani has shown himself so far to be a climate champion, and he has continued to be really outspoken in favor of public power in New York and the Build Public Renewables Act, BPRA. And he has been pretty unflinching in his defense of Local Law 97, a really important low-carbon buildings bill. His transit agenda is the low-carbon mobility agenda, and his schools agenda is the green schools agenda.

That being said, these are not the points that he emphasized in his top-line messaging. Politically, I think it is smart to embed climate in economic populism. Indeed, to me, embedding is really the key verb for climate politics right now. Not climate or economy, not climate or affordability, but embedding climate in what feels like a holistic, working class economic agenda. When you do that successfully, you can and should talk about climate, even if it’s not the first word that comes out of the mouth.

By contrast, if I’m being honest, we’re having a lot of really unhelpful debates about whether or not you should talk about climate, when the debate needs to be: how do you talk about climate? I think Mamdani showed the answer to that is that you lead with economic populism and then you embed climate within that. When people ask him about it, he doesn’t run away from it. But as he said, famously, in an interview, the climate agenda and the economic agenda are the same agenda.

That being said, you are not going to transform the biophysical basis of human civilization in like 30 years without talking about it. But that is what is required to stabilize the climate. So, to me, the question is not: should we or should we not talk about climate? Today, the question is: how do we talk about climate? And then, politically, over the next few years, in New York City and beyond, what can we do on the climate left, supporting the affordability agenda in particular ways, to earn the right to make climate a top-tier issue in 2029 when the re-election campaign happens? I think that should be our level of ambition. And that would be my other key verb: earn. We on the climate left have to earn this shift, through coalition building, and through the deep economic and material analysis that we need to substantiate those coalitions, and our proposals for green economic populism.

But static, anti-contextual debates about should we say the word “climate” or not, as a general rule, it’s a waste of time. And in this moment, I think if we’re going to ask: what does it mean to earn climate? Then I think we have to ask: where does climate hit the nexus of the affordability agenda in everyday life?

Look at the NYC mayoral primary. The day that Mamdani won the primary election in June was the hottest day in New York City in 12 years. I have a lot of research in process showing that extreme heat exposure is a cost of living issue, because people either can’t afford to buy an AC or to operate an AC at the desired temperature. Or if they do those things, they’re choosing to cool instead of buy medications, or they cool and go into utility debt or what have you. How is it that you run a campaign on affordability, that everybody is practically dying of dehydration at your election night party, that people in polling stations are sweating their entire liquidity out, and you, Zohran Mamdani, champion of climate and affordability, get up and you don’t even talk about climate during your election victory speech, in a room that everyone has basically described as an oven? That, to me, shows that, as the climate movement, we haven’t done our job of connecting the dots sufficiently. We did not earn a way of talking about climate that connected the dots between extreme heat and the cost of living crisis. We have to own that failure.

To have some grace toward us, we had an extremely high-profile billionaire mayor in New York City, Michael Bloomberg, who ruled for three terms, and he really branded himself and climate into one unified package. And he did not at all make it seem like an affordability agenda for working people. On the contrary, he reinforced this idea of climate as a luxury good, an aspirational good.

So it is going to take some time to recover and rebuild a different “brand identity” for climate, based on what this issue is, in an objective material way. Climate is a working class issue of life or death on the extreme case, but of economic survival day-to-day. And, again, what we have to figure out is: how do we earn that cultural common sense among working class people in New York City and elsewhere? How can we figure out, in dialogue with the Mamdani administration, what the specific policies, campaigns, messages, and literal material interventions are that he can embed climate action in economic populism right now, and earn its place as a prominent working class talking point in a way that feels common sense? I don’t mean asking for a professorial version of Mamdani, in 2029, informing the people of New York City that climate is an economic issue for them. We should think about his reelection campaign in 2029 as a “structure test,” as we say in union organizing. We will find out if we have done enough to make climate resonate as a top-tier, working class political issue that connects to affordability and tangible solutions to everyday problems.

What would be your heatwave political agenda?

There are a lot of parts of the country where it is illegal to cut off the power, and certainly the gas, in the winter so people don’t freeze to death. And I don’t really understand why it would be legal to cut off electricity in the summer; I don’t think that should be legal. At that point, you ask yourself, Well should it ever be legal to cut off power? This is a bit of a spoiler for some policy work that some of us are doing, but I think we need to move toward something like Social Security for safe and affordable housing, and we can start with policies that essentially abolish energy poverty for the most vulnerable tens of millions of households in the US. I think it’s time to treat safe, healthy housing as an entitlement in the same way that we think it is basically illegal to be a senior citizen to live in extreme poverty with no income coming in.

It should be illegal for a person to not have access to housing that is healthy enough to comfortably sleep through the night, basically. And that is only possible if we turn down the heat, and if people aren’t impoverished by cooling their homes. We have to earn the reality in which every American has the right to a full night of sleep—or day if they sleep during the day, if they work at night—and that includes the temperature being sufficient to support that. There’s abundant research showing that people who don’t have access to safe temperatures at home are not even getting the same quality of sleep.

Capitalism and climate change are literally robbing people of their dreams. They’re literally robbing people of the dream time at night, during which the spine and the brain and the rest of the body are cleaning themselves out, because sleep is a metabolic necessity for mammalian life. We’re not even getting into socialist dreams here, but under capitalism, if we have social rights, that should include the right to sleep and to be in a safe temperature home.

Now, we could talk about all kinds of policy measures to implement that, and I think there’s everything from national policy to very specific stuff you can do around appliance rebates. There are solutions ranging from heat pumps to building upgrades to neighborhood cooling, etc. But let’s not start with an abstract debate about technology, let’s start with the imperative of human beings right to a safe and healthy home. There’s going to be a lot of battles, especially around landlords and tenants, and we should look forward to those and we should win them.

I know you’ve done work with CCI about Vienna. It’s well-known as being this great example of social housing and the type of housing we might want to strive for. What are the lessons from Vienna, and what can we learn from Vienna here in the US?

I think the basic facts of Vienna are: it’s frequently ranked the most livable city in the world—and if not number one, number two or number three—it has the lowest rent of any major city in Western Europe, and it is the global capital of social housing.Half the city’s population lives in social housing. You put those three facts together, and they destroy every single myth about how only the private sector can deliver high-quality housing at scale. That cannot be true if a medium-sized capital of a European country houses half of its people in social housing, offers a better quality of life than basically any other city, and, by the way, is the lowest-cost of these cities to live in. And by the way, social housing in Vienna has become one of the city’s primary levers for greening and decarbonizing Vienna, which it’s doing a pretty job of.

So even if we are not going to become Vienna—and we shouldn’t—in the United States, there has to be something we can learn. One is that there’s not a single magic silver bullet of policy. As one New York housing advocate—a good friend of mine, Sam Stein—pointed out, New York City has every single one of the basic policy frameworks that Vienna has. They’re not as well developed, but achieving some version of what Vienna does, that is absolutely feasible here.

Essentially, what you have in Vienna is three sets of actors: motivated experts; organized, working class communities; and political leaders. When all three of them converge on housing as a human right, and they launch a serious social housing development agenda, and you get this broad social consensus, then you build the momentum to just keep at it, year after year. Even, as the political economy and the political context changes, that sort of triangle is strong enough to adapt the policy. So Vienna’s social housing policy has changed quite a bit over the last hundred years, but what’s been consistent is the provision of housing as a human right to a broad swath of people. As a result, the Social Democratic Party associated with this has never lost a free and fair election.

Once you get going, once you build that snowball and that momentum and you build the organized constituency around it, that is what really matters; it’s not the exact policy detail. We could talk more about financing and all that, but we already have spreadsheets that make the numbers work. CCI has its version, other people have theirs. The harder question is: how do you build the political infrastructure that then makes that policy inevitable? So I think in the same way that in the US the right just cannot get rid of Social Security, in Vienna they just cannot get rid of social housing. It’s just a question of: how are you going to operate it? So again, how do we cement a political infrastructure that just gets this going?

The other thing I would say that with Vienna’s social housing, the architecture and the technological innovations are absolutely incredible. I think that helps to demystify the idea in the United States that if you want to max out on technical innovation, you have to put up with a certain amount of Darwinian, savage market competition. Because the myth says, ok, the public sector might deliver the units of housing, but they’re not going to be interesting or pretty or good quality homes. Or we can let the market do it and you’ll get all this dazzling innovation, but it might leave some folks behind. So in the US mythology, you have to choose between social provision and innovation.

What we’ve seen in Vienna is that a public sector-led system delivers spectacular innovation—really interesting technical stuff, with major benefits for everyday life in the housing. In fact, across Western Europe, green social housing architecture is winning global architecture prizes. So what you learn from the Vienna example—and not just Vienna—is that a public-led approach can absolutely deliver you all the innovation and technical wizardry you could ever want, and that that does not depend on savage free market competition.

One of the things I find so compelling about Vienna and some other social housing experiments is not just the public sector and the lower rents and the climate possibilities, but the social aspects of how it’s intentionally designed to foster community and things like that. I feel like that’s really underappreciated, and something that there’s a lot of potential for in the US. It’s increasingly recognized as a problem, the alienation and the decline of third spaces and whatnot.

Yeah, we need to literally build community. Right now smartphones are the suburbs in our pockets. The antidote to that, at some level, is politics. It’s people like Zohran Mamdani. Or in Atlanta, Kelsey Bond, who had a very similar style: they built a whole social life and culture around the campaign. So at that point, the phone becomes the means of social engagement, not the end; digital organizing becomes just a step toward getting people together. And then I think it’s not a coincidence that these candidates’ politics are a politics of literally building communities to facilitate that face-to-face interaction—it’s social housing, it’s public transit. I’d say it’s a much more left-wing version of this “15 minute city” idea, which in and of itself is neither left nor right.

But if most working people can get most of their needs met within a walk in their community, that’s great. Originally, that is a feminist dream that goes back to New England in the 19th century. This became a big banner in Vienna. You don’t want to have a suburban environment where dad goes to work on the train, and then mom’s at home with the kids by herself in the house. You want to have a full community where different kinds of people can live different kinds of lives and people are able to see each other.

I think one of the great betrayals in the American built environment was that the right-wing version of public housing, that was enforced by the real estate industry, led to isolated towers in the park instead of these more integrated forms of community planning. You did have some architects who were very fascinated by this tower in the park, but I think most people have always known that that wasn’t the ideal model. I’m not saying you can’t have towers, but you can do better planning around those. And part of what we’re talking about today is, we do have the opportunity to take some of those public housing complexes and actually reconstruct them to put in buildings of varying heights, to fully interconnect the streets with the paths in that housing.

There are architectural drawings that are all widely available on the internet, circulating in New York City, that could even take some of the most challenging physical setups of public housing communities and make them into beautifully designed spaces with new green investment. And that’s not about displacement, and nothing should happen without extensive consultation and leadership from public housing communities. But certainly, we should reject the idea that public housing has failed, it should be torn down and replaced. No, the project is engagement, uplift, upgrades, building community in some new and ambitious ways with local leadership.

I think something we’re going to be talking about more and more is, to your point, there’s a social goal of building real, interconnected communities that public housing agencies with a bit more governance reform and better investment could be really the leaders in. What does it mean, let’s say, if the power goes out in your community in New York City and you’re like, Where am I going to go plug in my phone? And it’s the community center in the public housing complex. By the way, in a heat wave, if your power went out, that’s where the cooling center is that you love to go to.

Because we’re talking about these public housing complexes, you have the ability—as they do often in Europe—to offer much lower rent to ground floor retail, so it doesn’t have to be just a CVS. If you go to the gentrified neighborhoods of these huge buildings, they always have a CVS on the ground floor, which can afford the rent. But when you do social housing development properly, you have a local florist. You can have cheap, affordable, organic groceries—something AOC talked a lot about in the Green Deal for Public Housing era. You have daycares. You can have non-market or subsidized segments of the built environment to locate essential services that make life better. It’s not just the government office of yoga; it can be a neighborhood yoga studio. There could be public groceries, or it can be a halal cart.

There is just this enormous opportunity to rebuild our literal, physical community fabric to bring in the community. That hasn’t always been the mission of public agencies. We have to understand that’s because those public agencies were fundamentally deformed by real estate interests. We all know how to do better, and I think the movements that elected Mamdani are the working class forces that could unlock new modes of living together in community.

I do think that’s another shift for those of us in “think tank world” to make. I think sometimes, and I say this of myself too, we imagine that we are coming up with the policies to hand over to the working class organizations and people and communities to then get what they want. When I look around the world, I think the greatest success comes from people doing this “knowledge work” in dialogue with communities. We’re trying to develop frameworks that empower working class communities and organizations, that empower these folks to then go out and rebuild the world in truly democratic and egalitarian ways. We are serving that process; we are not providing the answers. We in leftist think tanks are doing work which should always be seen as open-ended. It may be that people in public housing hate this vision that I’ve laid out, so they can have another one. My job isn’t to tell people what to do, but offer them some resources.

Six years ago, I was invited into a room in the Bronx to talk to public housing residents about what a Green New Deal for Public Housing would be. I didn’t talk about carbon pollution, I talked about appliances and upgrades to their units. I basically said the best chefs in the world now, in places like London, are using magnetic induction cooktops to cook food in a fast and clean way. Why don’t you have access to this stuff? It’s an outrage. What the Green New Deal means in these communities is that you have access to the best living environment that is on offer. Folks were enthusiastic, so we got to work together.

Imagine what we could do, and what we will be able to do, when we are really building serious progressive and working class power. Even with those movements just a bit on the rise, you’re seeing these transformations. People deserve to live at a really high quality of life to benefit the most from green technology. I think that’s a vision we’re starting to get in our public institutions and housing. In think tanks, we have a ton of work to do to hammer out policy options, to do economic analysis, to explore the full range of possible solutions and to get those ideas out there to different audiences. And if we’re doing our part, I think that can support working class movements taking more leadership in defining a new climate agenda, embedding that in green economic populism, and making climate a top tier political issue in a new and more effective way than ever before.

At CCI, we are putting forward real, actionable solutions for a greener, fairer future for all. You can find our full reports and other publications on our website or connect with us on Bluesky, X, or Instagram. Stay subscribed to our Substack for the latest on creating climate policy you can touch.

In solidarity, the CCI Team

1. Strike!

   Listen to Reap/Sow’s report on the JBS strike - the first in the US industry in decades - and read Ted Genoways’ excellent reporting at Mother Jones. (If you thought, by Strike!, I was referring to the Los Angeles Teachers’ Strike or the Spanish or Argentinian airport workers’ strike or last month’s big strike in India, those too.)

2. Victory!

   ICE may have disappeared from the headlines, but they’re still brutalising large swaths of the US population. In Vermont, the Milk with Dignity Campaign shows how to fight back.

3. Onward!

   Richard Pithouse has written a brilliant history of Cuba’s internationalism. At a particularly parlous moment for the country, the case for solidarity couldn’t be stronger.

1. On Monday, I got to watch a lovely interview between her and Alicia Kennedy.

2. With SXSW we got asked to open Food Tank’s All Things Food:

3. At the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact’s meeting in Austin, we had a closing conversation about the importance of spaces of gathering. (No video of that, sadly.)

One of the ideas I’m most keen to celebrate in Ashanté’s book is that there are spaces of communal cooking and eating and discussion which can both receive and create the political demand for transformation within cities. Those spaces of gathering are where politics happen in ways that exceed the state, where the infrastructure for care and mutual aid are built, and where solidarities are forged that come to matter when chronic polycrisis becomes acute.

If you’re keen to find out more: adrienne maree brown covers cook, eat, talk in Detroit, I’ll be writing about the Brazilian MTST’s involvement with the PAA in my own book next year, but you definitely want to get your hands on Ashanté’s Gather.

American farmers are in trouble. Spring planting is here, and the inputs they need—urea, phosphate, the nitrogen for corn, wheat, and soy—are mostly imported from the Persian Gulf. In fact, up to 30 percent of the global fertilizer trade passes through the Gulf.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins acknowledged this trouble on Friday, telling reporters the administration is pursuing “every potential avenue” to keep fertilizer prices down. “We are very close to having an announcement on some solutions on what that looks like,” she said.

“We are getting almost all of our urea, almost all of our phosphate, almost all of our nitrogen from other countries around the world,” she said last week, “and that has to stop.”

It may have to stop, but it can’t in time for this season’s planting. Unlike oil, there is no strategic reserve for nitrogen fertilizer. Domestic producers cannot rapidly replace millions of tons of supply.

Unlike some commodity shocks that take months to reach consumers, this one is already moving—through a transmission mechanism that is central to the way we eat today and, if the petrochemical industry has its way, one that we’ll be locked into for the rest of the century.

Fluctuations in food prices closely parallel those of oil prices, with agriculture heavily reliant on fossil fuels.

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Oil, Soil, and the Straight We’re In

When the Strait of Hormuz closes, here’s what happens: Energy prices spike immediately. Fertilizer prices follow. Reduced harvests come a season later. Food price inflation—at the gas station, at the grocery store, at the diner—is brought to you not by fertilizer prices, but the price of oil.

Diesel costs more, so trucking costs more, so everything on every shelf costs more. Cooking fuel prices rise and restaurants pass it on to their consumers. (A thali meal platter in India is up 10 percent this week, Bloomberg reports.) Processing and packaging, which together account for 42 percent of fossil fuel use in the food supply chain, become more expensive before a single field is planted with a gram less fertilizer.

A working-class family in Iowa paying more at the pump and more at the checkout is not in the same position as a smallholder farmer in Kenya facing a 50 percent spike in urea prices, but they have more in common with one another than they do with Iowa-based hog-farming conglomerate. Working families around the world are set to lose, while a few well-placed corporations are set to make a killing.

We have already seen what happens when fertilizer supply is interrupted. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, fertilizer prices tripled from their 2020 baseline. The mechanism was twofold: Russia and Belarus together account for roughly 40 percent of global potash exports, and Russia is also among the world’s largest urea exporters; Western sanctions disrupted that supply.

Simultaneously, Russia restricted natural gas flows to Europe, shutting down European fertilizer plants that depend on cheap gas as feedstock. The price spike came from two directions at once. Brazil’s fertilizer import bill nearly doubled. The FAO Food Price Index hit an all-time high. Millions of people were pushed toward hunger—not because of a shortage of food, but because the inputs required to grow it became unaffordable.

Up to 30 percent of the global fertilizer trade passes through the Persian Gulf, so when the Strait of Hormuz closes, energy prices spike, with fertilizer prices to follow. (Getty Images)

While the narrative was one of shared sacrifice, the reality was a massive transfer of wealth. Farmers faced a 300 percent increase in fertilizer costs. Consumers faced the highest food inflation in 40 years. But the intermediaries—the “Big Four” meatpackers, the global grain giants, the fertilizer oligopoly—banked record-breaking sums.

A Biden-era White House analysis found that the net income of the four largest meat processors surged by 500 percent since the start of the pandemic. The world’s nine largest fertilizer companies nearly doubled their profits to $49 billion in 2022, according to an analysis by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. For CF Industries, profits rose 212 percent in 2022 even as manufacturing costs increased by just 28 percent. This was market power using conflict as an alibi to profit.

The pattern repeated downstream. A 2024 Federal Trade Commission report found that food retail profit margins did not merely rise during the pandemic—they stayed elevated long after supply shocks subsided, with markups reaching 7 percent over total costs by 2023, casting doubt on claims that retail prices were simply tracking retailers’ own rising costs.

Research from the Economic Policy Institute, covered by Civil Eats, found that corporate profits accounted for 54 percent of food price increases between 2020 and 2021—compared to just 11 percent in the four decades prior.

It’s Going To Get Worse This Year

This isn’t likely to change. The Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide at its narrowest. Through it passes roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil. It is also a critical chokepoint for fertilizer. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Iran are among the world’s largest exporters of urea, the white granules that farmers spread to make crops grow.

Urea, a type of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, is made from ammonia, and ammonia is made by superheating natural gas. Virtually all synthetic nitrogen fertilizer—99 percent of the world’s supply—is derived from fossil fuels, on which most of the planet is hooked at some point in the year.

If you look at annual fertilizer flows through the strait, January is the only quiet month. The rest of the year, at least one major importing country is in its peak procurement window. In February and March, it’s Australia and East Africa. From April through June, India, Thailand, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Brazil are all buying.

“Even if the strait opened up and the war ended tomorrow, it would take weeks to reboot the supply chain.”

July through September is Brazil’s peak—the world’s single largest fertilizer importer at $13.6 billion annually—alongside Argentina and Southern Africa. October and November bring India’s second planting season, plus Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Southern Africa again. Even December catches Bangladesh’s late procurement.

Eleven of 12 months carry a major import window. There is no quiet moment in which a disruption would be consequence-free.

The countries most exposed are the ones where food already accounts for the largest share of household spending. Sub-Saharan Africa imports over 90 percent of its fertilizer, mostly from outside the continent. Fewer than a quarter of smallholder farmers have access to formal credit, so they cannot stockpile ahead of a disruption.

These are also the countries most devastated by the collapse of USAID and the collapse of World Food Programme funding from Western donors—the institutions of which I’m a critic, but which would nonetheless offer a short-term buffer for exactly these shocks.

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Even if the strait opened up and the war ended tomorrow, it would take weeks to reboot the supply chain. Behind this, though, is a more pernicious long-term trend, one that will make us more, not less, vulnerable to fossil-fueled disruptions in the food system.

It’s Going To Get Worse Next Year

Fuel to Fork, a report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (I am one of its panelists), lays out the full architecture. Food systems consume at least 15 percent of total global fossil fuel use—a figure that exceeds the steel industry. Roughly 40 percent of all petrochemicals produced worldwide end up in food systems, primarily as synthetic fertilizers on farms and as plastic in food and beverage packaging.

As the clean energy transition reduces fossil fuel demand in transport and power, the oil and gas industry is increasingly turning to petrochemicals—particularly fertilizers and food-grade plastics—as its growth frontier. Petrochemicals are on track to become the single-largest driver of oil demand growth, accounting for nearly half of all growth by 2050. The food system is where Big Oil plans to park its future.

This will worsen the feedback loop. When fossil fuel prices spike, fertilizer and food prices spike in tandem. The corporations that profit from the system—both fossil fuel companies and the agrochemical giants that depend on them—have every incentive to maintain it. And as the 2022 profiteering numbers make plain, they do.

The False Fixes

Industry’s preferred responses—greenwashed alternatives, especially—deserve our skepticism.

“Green” ammonia is produced using hydrogen generated via electrolysis powered by renewable electricity, combined with nitrogen from the air—in principle, a zero-carbon process. “Blue” ammonia uses conventional natural gas production but pairs it with carbon capture and storage, reducing emissions without eliminating fossil fuel use. Both are real technologies.

Neither is remotely at scale: less than one percent of global ammonia is currently produced through either pathway. Of all ammonia projects planned in the United States, 95 percent are based on conventional fossil fuels.

“The corporations that profit from the system—both fossil fuel companies and the agrochemical giants that depend on them—have every incentive to maintain it.”

Converting to green ammonia would require 24 times more electricity than current production—roughly five percent of global electricity—along with 30 times more land and 50 times more water. And even if you cleaned up production entirely, 60 percent of fertilizer-related greenhouse gas emissions occur after the fertilizer is applied to fields, primarily as nitrous oxide—a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The production fix doesn’t touch the application problem.

Precision agriculture and AI-driven farming are similarly oversold. A USDA field study found that autosteered tractors can actually increase fuel use. Algorithms that calibrate fertilizer applications are typically optimized for yield per hectare, not for reducing total fertilizer volumes. The data centers that power AI farm platforms are going to double their energy demands by 2030.

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What Actually Works—and What It Costs

The genuinely transformative alternatives are less glamorous, already proven, and available now—at a cost far lower than that of the war itself, which is running at roughly $1 billion per day for the U.S. military alone, with hundreds of millions more daily imposed on the rest of the world through higher food and energy prices.

Agroecological farming reduces and ultimately eliminates the need for synthetic fertilizers by working with biological nitrogen fixation, composting, crop rotation, intercropping, and the careful integration of livestock. India’s Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming program is transitioning six million farmers.

France has committed to reducing pesticide use by 50 percent. Cuba rebuilt its food system around agroecology after losing access to Soviet petrochemical imports in the 1990s—a historical precedent that should concentrate minds right now.

“Redirecting even a fraction toward agroecological transition, renewable energy on farms, and local food infrastructure would reshape the landscape.”

Rebuilding local food supply chains reduces dependency on the long-distance shipping routes that pass through chokepoints. Reducing ultra-processed food consumption has the dual benefit of cutting the most energy-intensive segment of the food chain and improving public health. (Ultra-processed foods use two to ten times more energy in production than whole foods.)

Redirecting subsidies is the policy lever that makes everything else possible. Fossil fuel subsidies have surged past $1 trillion annually globally, while nearly 90 percent of the $540 billion in annual agricultural support goes to chemical-intensive commodity crop production. Redirecting even a fraction toward agroecological transition, renewable energy on farms, and local food infrastructure would reshape the landscape. It bears repeating: the most direct way to stop hunger is to stop the war.

The suffering in Iran and the Gulf is real and immediate, as are its effects worldwide. Every day that the conflict persists is a day of choked petrochemical flows through the Straight of Hormuz, with cascading effects on food prices, from São Paulo to Nairobi to Dhaka—and on grocery bills and gas prices from Des Moines to Detroit.

The American working class and the African smallholder are not, finally, on opposite sides of this crisis. They are both downstream of a food system that was built around a substance that is running out and now controlled by a handful of states and corporations.

Yet this architecture can be changed—not through green ammonia projects in the planning phase, or algorithms optimized for yield, but through the proven, scalable practices that millions of farmers are using right now. The question is whether we will scale them before the next chokepoint closes.

How Farms Die: One at a time and alone

Suzan Erem

Jan 07, 2026

I drove by the old gal one summer night as she stood in her yard in her nightgown, two white spindles in slippers sticking out below the hem, pale knobby hands clasped in front of her, tousled gray hair blowing in the breeze.

I couldn’t tell if she meant to be there. It was a warm night in front of her simple, well-kept home. No harm in standing in the yard while the sun set, remembering her husband or the kids she raised on the place, the day they planted that tree in the yard and the dog house they kept in the shade of it.

She was one of the last generation of rural folk, like the farmer just a mile north of her I also drive by regularly. His house has been left to fend for itself. Paint hangs in thin strips off bare siding. One window of the ramshackle front porch is busted out, winking at me from under its tipped hat of a roof.

During the season maybe a hundred sheep graze the roadside pastures bordered on the end closest the house by tin-roofed wooden shacks.

One day as I passed by, I saw sheep grazing in the ditch. They were working their way toward the road, so I pulled around to the back of the house where the driveway ended.

I was surrounded on four sides by various farm buildings tilting in different directions – a silo, a barn, an old coop, a grain bin. They were placed efficiently for walking between them – the last generation of such a farmstead.

I banged on the back door. A ragged screen hung on worn wood. I suddenly noticed my remarkably clean hand, the newer Subaru still running behind me, the nicer town clothes I’d worn for my doctor’s appointment.

I now regretted stopping, afraid he’d assume I share the insipid arrogance that others with (comparable) wealth give off. But the sheep were out. That mattered more.

I knocked one last time, then turned to leave. A thin, bent old man emerged from the dark. He was unshaven and half dressed in threadbare coveralls.

Maybe he just woke up. Or maybe he was just as neglected as his house.

He grunted at me as he grudgingly opened the door a few inches. We spoke through the busted screen anyway.

“Your sheep are out,” I said. “I thought you’d want to know.”

“They’re not my sheep,” he grumbled, “but I’ll get ‘em.” He shot me such a look I dared not laugh. On the contrary, I shrank like plastic wrap on a lit match. He disappeared back into the dark. I left.

You see, there’s an old joke about a salesman walking up to a farm fence. A big dog runs up barking ferociously across the fence at the salesman.

“Does your dog bite?” the salesman asks the farmer walking toward him.

“Nope,” the farmer says.

The salesman climbs over the fence and the dog takes a pound of flesh out of the guy’s leg.

“I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite!” he yells at the farmer.

“That’s not my dog,” the farmer says.

But this wasn’t a joke. This was The Grapes of Wrath, 2025 edition.

A younger couple bought that farm recently and moved a large four square farmhouse onto a foundation up the hill. They grow grassfed meat, so maybe this farm gets another chapter.

The old house is still there for now. I don’t know if the old man is. The old woman south of him is another story. Last week, a bulldozer took down her ancient barn. Fire hazard, I figured.

But last Sunday, as Paul and I drove home from church, we saw flames from a mile off shooting up through a downpour.

Then as we got closer, we saw it: The entire house was gone, torn down in one morning. All that was left were basement walls and a burn pile.

The man in the backhoe was steadily clearing the rubbish, burning and burying a lifetime so someone could plant more corn.

It’s a long game, you see. The corporations can wait. So-called family LLCs can wait. That’s what happens when you give corporations that don’t die the same rights as humans who do.

Your kids who moved to a better place to raise their kids will get a reduced price for the land you lived on, sweated into, bled for and worried over for decades because the new owners have no need for yards, homes, dog houses or trees. They are things to burn. They are things to bury. And buyers think that is an expense they shouldn’t have to front.

This generation is one of farm operators, soon to be replaced by robots*. They’re little more than foreman making a wage, middlemen between the government, a market and the bank. They get pennies on the dollar of everything you eat. They use tax deductions and government programs to survive while posting “GET THE GOVERNMENT OFF OUR BACKS” billboards on their road frontage.

And when it’s over, they sell to the highest bidder.

After a lifetime of growing corn, they realize the land is the only commodity worth anything.

For every one of these corporate-scale farms there are maybe 50 family-scale farmers we know still hanging in there, ones with more family members than employees working the land, who care about stewardship, answer to their local communities and do right by their neighbors – values Americans once held dear and guarded closely.

But even I can remember when there was just a smattering of corporate-scale farms. Then a family farm was sold to the neighbor, the next bigger farm or at auction by heirs or the bank that had foreclosed on it. Then another one. And another. Each retired farmer who gleefully cashed out at top dollar to move to Florida or Phoenix helped create this landscape, too.

There’s no one to blame but the system.

We can’t change that system until we recognize it. And even then, we’re a trash fire in a storm that’s been pouring down on us for decades.

But I’ll help keep it lit if you’ll join me.

Because now you know. Now we can get to work.

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*See that story at Barn Raiser, a national publication of rural progressive news.

I’m a proud member of the Iowa Farmers Union. We’re a grassroots organization of farmers and friends that fights ag consolidation, speaks for independent family farmers and demands a cleaner, healthier rural Iowa. Nonfarmers welcome! Join today to amplify your voice in Des Moines and D.C.

In the 1970s, in a newsagent’s in central London, when my family was shorthanded and there wasn’t childcare, I’d sometimes be bundled into the store with my brother at the crack of dawn, wiping the sleep from our eyes, blinded by the sodium streetlight right outside, while my folks opened the shop.

The bundles of newspapers would be dropped off, sometimes still warm, and as I riffled them out on the counter, the ink would smudge my fingers. The smell of fresh newsprint mixed with London air thick with the muck of leaded petrol. From the stockroom wafted the warmth of packaged tobacco. Threading through everything was the thin sweetness of incense from my parents’ morning ceremony — a prayer to the goddess of prosperity that she might attend the store.

Add to that the sugary drift from the confectionery shelf, and you had the smell of Mr Patel’s. Punters read newspapers, people smoked, a family prayed, kids bought sweets. The store smelled like the life that ran through it. Everytime I smell newsprint, I’m yoinked back there, like a petit bourgeois Marcel Proust.

Proust spent seven volumes and 1.2 million words on a problem caused by a biscuit. In In Search of Lost Time, his narrator dips a madeleine into lime-blossom tea and is overwhelmed by a childhood memory so vivid it obliterates the present. What follows is a forensic investigation of consciousness conducted from the inside, by a man who noticed that the senses — smell above all — have access to parts of the self that the thinking mind cannot reach.

Marcel Proust’s would, I think, have a confusing time in the modern grocery aisle, not just because he’d be baffled by the idea of self-service or ultraprocessed food, but because every scent is trying to open up a sense-memory trap-door into which you, and your wallet, are engineered to fall. There’s one thing he would recognise, though: it all begins with baked goods.

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Barney Kroger’s bread

In the beginning, in 1901, Barney Kroger became the first grocer in the United States to establish his own bakery. The economic logic was impeccable. Bread was the most basic of staples and something he sold a lot of. If he could bake it himself, he’d cut out the middleman, lower his costs, and offer customers a fresher loaf at a lower price. It worked. Within a year he’d incorporated the company as the Kroger Grocery and Baking Company, with 40 stores and its own bread operation.

The smell of baking was, for Kroger, a byproduct. It was evidence that production was happening on site — that labour, flour, water, yeast, and heat were being combined in a specific place at a specific time. The aroma indexed the real labour on site.

Over the next six decades, as the American supermarket consolidated from 5,575 Kroger stores in 1929 to the sprawling suburban formats of the postwar era, the in-store bakery became standard equipment. By the 1960s, supermarkets were adding bakery and deli departments partly to compete with the fast-food industry’s promise of immediacy. In 1977, 55% of US stores had an in-house bakery. Today 90% of stores do. The smell of baking bread became part of the store’s self-presentation, its claim to freshness in an environment increasingly dominated by canned goods and frozen dinners.

If you look at the formats of modern grocery stores, the bakery has been migrating — physically and conceptually — from the back of the store to the front. Yes, the nice stores now have a cafe and bakery out front. But the main purpose of the bakery is as a source of smell.

A mechanical Proust

In many supermarkets, the HVAC system doesn’t just regulate temperature. It recirculates air from the bakery into the shopping aisles while extracting air from around the fishmonger’s counter. The infrastructure that keeps the store at a comfortable 68 degrees is also doing curatorial work — amplifying some smells, suppressing others. For as little as $100 - and usually multiples more - an aroma diffuser can pipe in missing smells, and zone them appropriately (so that, for example, you’re not sending the smell of chocolate into the meat department, something that has been tested with the result that fewer people buy meat).

The commercial scent marketing industry - which will soon be a $1bn business - offers hundreds of synthesised aromas designed for retail environments. A Brooklyn grocery chain called Net Cost installed machines that pump artificial chocolate and baking-bread scent into the store; sales in the produce department rose by at least seven percent.

Some retailers have gone further. Albertsons ran a limited-time campaign with Philadelphia Cream Cheese in which scented diffusers pumped the aroma of baked cheesecake through select stores, timed to the Easter sales season. The explicit goal: disrupt typical shopping behaviour and encourage purchase.

As Grocery Nerds already know, CPG companies pay slotting fees to secure eye-level placement for their products. The same companies are now, in effect, purchasing nose-level placement — buying not just the sightline but the airspace of the store. When Kraft pays to pump cheesecake smell through an Albertsons, that’s a slotting fee for your nostrils.

The scent diffusers can be programmed via smartphone to release different aromas at different times of day. Rotisserie chicken in the afternoon, when shoppers are starting to think about dinner. Cinnamon rolls in the morning. The store doesn’t just look different at 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. — it smells different, and that means different fees for different zones and times. You can’t lose.

How to smell like a pretzel

Smell is the only sense that bypasses the thalamus — the brain’s relay station — and travels directly to the limbic system, including the amygdala (which processes emotion) and the hippocampus (which forms memories). A recent study described this pathway as a superhighway from smell to the hippocampus.

This is why researchers call it the Proust effect: odour-cued memories are more emotional, more vivid, and reach further back into autobiography than memories triggered by sight or sound. The smell of baking bread doesn’t just make you hungry. It makes you feel home, childhood, and safety.

The modern grocery store has industrialised the Proust effect. It takes the neural architecture that once bound you to the people who fed you and repurposes it to sell cream cheese. The scent machines in the modern supermarket are prosthetics for a food supply that has had its smell industrially removed and then artificially restored at the point of sale.

The logical conclusion of this trajectory is not merely that the store smells like a product, but that you do. In a move that suggests the marketing industry has finally conquered the atmosphere, Auntie Anne’s pretzel store in 2024 released a fragrance called Knead, a boutique scent designed to make the wearer smell like a buttery soft pretzel.

This is a profound shift in the history of human vanity, and as Virgie Tovar notes, it coincides with the rise of GLP-1s. For centuries, we wore perfumes to smell like flowers or musk—natural scents that signaled health, status, or a certain sophisticated distance from the damp reality of being an animal. Now, for a modest fee, you can signal to the world that you are the carbohydrate-delivery system for which you no longer have any appetite. I checked and, yes, you can buy the smell that inspired À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu - a 2oz spritzer of madeleines is yours for $8.50. Memories not included.

The question for anyone who cares about the future of grocery is whether there’s a way back to a world where smell and labour are reconciled. Public grocery models, community food hubs, cooperatives, farmers’ markets — these spaces tend to smell like their own reality. They smell like weather and soil and the person who brought the eggs in that morning.

My parents’ shop smelled like the truth. Newsprint, tobacco, incense, sweets, and London. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the smell of a world that hadn’t yet learned to lie through your nose.

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Raj Patel is a Research Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs and the author of Stuffed & Starved. He is, like Errol Schweizer, a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.

His book’s title comes from Milton Friedman, who argued that economic theory was an “engine” of enquiry rather than a photographic reproduction of the world. Friedman meant this as a defence of simplification: models don’t need to be realistic, they just need to be useful.

MacKenzie took Friedman’s metaphor and turned it against him. Financial economics, he argued, did more than analyse markets. It altered them. It was an engine “in a sense not intended by Friedman: an active force transforming its environment, not a camera passively recording it.” (p12) The Black-Scholes model didn’t just describe how options were priced. Once traders started using it, options began to be priced the way the model predicted. The model made the world more like itself.

The Black-Scholes equation, published in 1973, offered a formula for calculating the "correct" price of a financial option — essentially, a bet on whether a stock will rise or fall by a certain date. Before the formula existed, options traders priced these contracts by gut feeling, experience, and negotiation. After it was published, traders began using the formula to set their prices — and, as MacKenzie documents, the actual prices in the market converged toward the model's predictions. The equation didn't discover a pre-existing truth about how options were valued. It created the truth it claimed to describe, because enough people used it that the market reorganised itself around its assumptions. When the model eventually failed — spectacularly, in the 1987 crash — the prices diverged from the formula and never fully returned. The camera had been an engine all along, and in a crisis the engine seized up.

MacKenzie borrows the term ‘performativity’ from the philosopher J. L. Austin, who distinguished between utterances that report on reality and utterances that do something. When I say “I apologise,” I’m not describing an apology. I’m performing one. MacKenzie’s argument is that economic models, data sets, and indicators can work the same way. They don’t just measure the economy. They perform it.

This matters for the question I left open in Part 1. There, I suggested that if data is more like raw material than like a tool, then the same soil data collected by a corporation could, under different ownership, serve a cooperative. I still think that’s partly true. But MacKenzie complicates this, and asks whether data is discovered or made. Some data isn’t raw material at all. Some data is an engine from the moment of its construction.

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The invention of GDP

Consider GDP. It’s the most consequential number in modern political life — the figure that determines whether governments are judged to be succeeding or failing, the metric that shapes elections and policy and the allocation of trillions in capital. It is entirely made up, but its calculation drives

In 1934, the economist Simon Kuznets presented his report to the United States Congress, “National Income, 1929–35.” The context was the Great Depression. Policymakers had no reliable measure of how badly the economy had contracted — they were flying blind. Congress commissioned Kuznets, a Russian émigré working at the National Bureau of Economic Research, to develop a system for measuring national economic output.

Kuznets delivered. But he also delivered a warning. In his 1937 report, he wrote that the welfare of a nation “can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.” He understood that what he’d built was a tool with a specific, limited purpose: tracking the aggregate business cycle to prevent another depression. It was a camera pointed at a very particular part of reality.

What happened next is a case study in what MacKenzie would call performativity. During the Second World War, Kuznets’s methodology was adapted — against his explicit objections — to measure not income but total production, including military spending. Kuznets had argued that military expenditure should be excluded in peacetime, since it didn’t contribute to welfare. He lost that argument. By 1944, at the Bretton Woods conference, GDP had become the global standard for comparing national economies. Seven years after Kuznets first warned about its misuse, his camera had become an engine.

And what an engine. Once governments were measured by GDP growth, they began to optimise for it. Policies that increased measurable output — regardless of whether they improved lives — became rational. Activities that GDP doesn’t count — household labour, subsistence farming, ecological services, care work — became invisible to the policymakers whose worlds were organised around the number. As the political theorist Tim Mitchell has argued, GDP didn’t just measure “the economy.” It constructed “the economy” as a statistical object, composed of formally defined aggregates like “demand” and “supply,” and in doing so constituted the position of the macroeconomic policymaker — a new kind of actor, responsible for managing GDP’s statistical artefacts.

For our purposes, this matters centrally. GDP is not a neutral observation of economic reality. It is a designed object, built with specific assumptions about what counts and what doesn’t. Military spending counts. Care work doesn’t. Pollution counts (as production). Clean air doesn’t. Every one of those choices is political, and every one of them shapes the world that organises itself around the number. The data performs the economy it claims only to be measuring.

The Ease of Doing Business

If GDP is the engine that nobody quite intended to build, the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index was an engine from the start.

Launched in 2003, the index ranked 190 countries on how easy it was to start and run a business. The metrics were straightforward: how many procedures to register a company, how long to get a construction permit, how easy to enforce a contract. Fewer regulations meant a better business environment, which meant more growth, which meant more development. The data was an argument disguised as a measurement.

And the argument worked — performatively. Governments didn’t just accept their ranking. They began competing to improve it. India’s Prime Minister Modi made climbing the rankings a central plank of his economic agenda, coordinating across agencies and creating sub-national rankings to pressure bureaucrats. Russia’s President Putin decreed that Russia would improve its rank by a hundred places, and created a new agency to make it happen. Russia climbed from 125th to 28th — even as the actual number of new businesses being created in Russia was falling and enterprise failures were rising.

The index didn’t describe reality. It produced a reality in which governments dismantled labour protections, cut environmental safeguards, and slashed corporate taxes — not because these reforms would necessarily improve the lives of their citizens, but because they would improve their score.

And then, like MacKenzie’s counterperformativity — where the use of a model makes reality less like its own predictions — the whole thing collapsed. In 2018, the World Bank’s own chief economist, Paul Romer, revealed that the index’s data had been manipulated to penalise Chile during the presidency of the left-wing Michelle Bachelet. An independent investigation later found that senior Bank leadership — including the then-president Jim Yong Kim and the then-CEO Kristalina Georgieva (now head of the IMF) — had pressured staff to alter China’s ranking while the Bank was seeking a $13 billion capital increase from Beijing. Saudi Arabia’s and Azerbaijan’s scores were also manipulated.

In September 2021, the World Bank discontinued the index entirely.

An index designed to reward deregulation, funded by the institution that advised governments on how to improve their scores (a conflict of interest that Bank employees themselves flagged), inevitably became a site of political manipulation. When Georgieva thanked one of the inventors of the index for doing his “bit for multilateralism,” the irony was almost too neat. The data had been designed as an engine from the start.

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Cameras that become engines

MacKenzie distinguishes three levels of performativity. At the weakest level, economic models simply get used — traders adopt a pricing formula, governments adopt a metric. At a stronger level, that use has effects — it changes how markets behave, how governments allocate resources. At the strongest level — what he calls “Barnesian performativity,” after the sociologist Barry Barnes — the use of the model makes reality more like the model’s predictions. The model validates itself. As Barnes observed, a metal disc is “money” if, collectively, we treat it as money. A country is “business-friendly” if, collectively, we organise around the index that says so.

When I argued that data is raw material — that soil data collected by Bayer could serve a cooperative if you changed the ownership — I was thinking about data as a camera. And some data is a camera: a soil moisture reading is a soil moisture reading whether a corporation or a cooperative collects it.

But GDP isn’t a soil moisture reading. The Ease of Doing Business Index isn’t a soil moisture reading. These are engines. They are data systems designed — consciously or not — to move the world in a particular direction. GDP was designed to measure aggregate output, and the world reorganised itself around maximising aggregate output. The Ease of Doing Business Index was designed to reward deregulation, and governments around the world deregulated.

So the question from Part 1 — “is data the master’s tool?” — needs refining. Some data is already an engine by the time it reaches you. It has assumptions built into its architecture, politics embedded in what it counts and what it ignores, a direction it wants the world to move. You can change the ownership of that data. You can put it in the hands of a cooperative instead of a corporation. But if the data itself was built to optimise for extraction — if the metric rewards deregulation, or equates welfare with output, or treats care work as invisible — then changing who holds it doesn’t change what it does.

Lorde would been unsurprised. The master builds the measurement systems that tell you what counts as progress. If you adopt those measurements uncritically — if you take GDP or “ease of doing business” as neutral descriptions of reality rather than as engines designed to produce particular outcomes — then you are using the master’s tools even when you think you’re just reading the data.

Next time: is there any data that is just ‘waiting to be discovered’, neutral in ways that might be repurposed by the people in the house that needs dismantling?

This is Part 2 of “Is Data the Master’s Tool?” Part 1 explored whether agricultural data can serve liberation, through the story of a railway in Gujarat and a dairy cooperative that ran milk on the master’s tracks. Part 3 will ask what counter-hegemonic data systems might look like in practice.

Andor’s Luthen Rael is almost an anagram of Audre Lorde.

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde wrote in 1979. Whether that’s true is a permanent question (and, friends, I’m on Substack asking it, in a glass house throwing stones).

Last week, IPES-Food launched a report on digital agriculture. I’m an IPES-Food member and this is a report in which I had a hand. The cover of Head In The Cloud is magnificent:

The report covers the convergence of Big Tech and Big Agriculture around AI, proprietary algorithms, and data platforms. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba have joined forces with the old agribusiness giants, and the result is a quiet revolution in who controls the decisions that shape how food gets grown.

Note how seamless the links are between the providers of compute, agribusiness, and the state and international organisations.

You can read the full report here, and the press release captures the headlines. The Guardian covered it all nicely.

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The case for alarm is plain enough. Farming decisions are increasingly mediated by proprietary algorithms; companies are harvesting data from farms for profit while farmers lose control of their own information; capital costs push smaller producers to the margins; and data-intensive systems consume vast energy and resources while locking agriculture deeper into the input-intensive monocultures that got us here.

But I want to sit with a question the report raises without fully resolving it, because I haven’t resolved it either. The data that these platforms collect — soil moisture, pest pressure, microclimatic variation, crop performance under stress — is it the master’s tool? Is it so thoroughly shaped by the system that built it that it can never serve liberation? Or is data something else: raw material that could, under different ownership, answer different questions entirely?

Here’s the first of at least two ways of looking at it.

The Master’s Railway

My family has land in Dharmaj, a village in Gujarat’s Charotar region. Under the British, Charotar was part of the Kaira district in the Bombay Presidency. Tobacco was the cash crop that made the Charotar plain worth administering. The region earned the name “the Golden Leaf area.” Tobacco cultivation expanded rapidly in the Charotar talukas through the late nineteenth century — roughly doubling in acreage between 1876 and 1887 — because it served twin colonial demands: a cash crop that generated tax revenue, and a commodity the British wanted for the international market.

There’s still a railway station in Dharmaj — station code DMJ, Western Railway zone. The line connects through Anand to Ahmedabad and onward to Bombay. Under colonial administration, that’s the route the high-quality kalia tobacco travelled: by rail from Charotar to the markets of Ahmedabad, Broach, Surat, and Bombay, and from there to the world.

The extraction was not subtle. When famine and drought destroyed crops across Kaira district in 1918, the British insisted on collecting full land revenue anyway. The farming families faced confiscation of property and livestock for failing to pay taxes on harvests that didn’t exist. It took Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel organising the Kheda Satyagraha to force even partial tax suspension. The railway had no trouble running when there was tobacco to ship.

Had Lorde been writing about colonial India, the railway would have been exhibit A. The railway was the master’s tool. You couldn’t easily reroute the track from Dharmaj to connect Charotar’s villages to each other. The tool was shaped by the master’s hand, and it shaped the landscape in his image.

Head In The Cloud makes a version of the case. The platforms are built to sell inputs. The algorithms optimize for yield within systems that depend on purchased seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides. The data flows one way: from the farm to the corporation. The farmer gets a recommendation; the company gets a market.

But here’s where I start to argue with myself. And, gently, with Lorde.

Milk on the Master’s Tracks

The same Patidar farming community that the British taxed into famine later built something very different from the same soil. In 1946, dairy farmers in the neighbouring town formed the Anand Milk Union Limited — what became Amul. The cooperative’s infrastructure — collection centres in every village, processing plants, cold chains, distribution networks — was designed by and for the people who actually produced the milk.

The milk went to Bombay on the same railway lines the tobacco had.

The tracks built for extraction carried a cooperative’s products to market. The master’s tool — the colonial railway — turned out to be usable for purposes the master never intended. Amul grew into one of the largest food brands in the world. It is now itself a behemoth, with all the complications that entails. But the conceptual case holds: the master’s tool could carry milk as well as tobacco. The colonial infrastructure could be repurposed for collective benefit.

Data swords could become data ploughshares — even if the ploughshares eventually get very, very large.

The information that a precision agriculture platform collects about soil moisture, pest pressure, crop performance under stress — that information doesn’t intrinsically serve only one master. A dataset on soil carbon levels collected to sell you more fertilizer could, in principle, also tell you that you don’t need fertilizer at all. A satellite image processed to recommend herbicide application could reveal that a farmer’s neighbour, using agroecological methods on the adjacent plot, is building soil health without it. Data is not steel. It doesn’t have a fixed gauge or a permanent gradient. It can answer different questions if different people are asking.

Could. In principle.

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Building Your Own House

Head In The Cloud documents what happens in practice, not in principle. And in practice, the farmer-led innovations that are already working don’t come from repurposed corporate data. They come from entirely different systems of knowledge production.

The report highlights participatory crop breeding programmes where farmers and researchers collaborate to develop climate-adapted varieties — integrating scientific and local knowledge rather than replacing one with the other. It documents open-source tools and ecological pest management approaches pioneered by communities who’ve been innovating for generations without waiting for Microsoft to show up. Farmer-led seed systems in China, soil restoration in West Africa, decentralised innovation networks across Latin America — these aren’t parasites feeding off corporate data infrastructure. They’re parallel systems with their own logics, their own epistemologies, and their own track record of results.

This is the part that vindicates Lorde. These bottom-up innovations prioritise autonomy. They’re not asking Big Tech for better algorithms. They’re not trying to repurpose the master’s data. They’re building their own house with their own tools — and the house works. As Nettie Wiebe, one of our panellists, put it: real innovation doesn’t come from Silicon Valley. It comes from farmers, farmworkers, Indigenous Peoples who’ve been adapting agriculture to local conditions for millennia.

Pat Mooney, another panellist, sharpened the point further: Big Tech and Big Ag are jointly advancing technologies that “narrow diversity when we need more of it, lengthen supply chains that should be shortened, and concentrate information that ought to be shared among farmers.” The problem isn’t just the direction of data flow. It’s the concentration itself — and concentration is exactly what the master’s tools are designed to produce.

Both Things Are True

So where does this leave the question? I think both things are true, and the tension between them is productive rather than paralyzing.

Lorde is right that the master’s tools — in their current configuration, under their current ownership — will not dismantle the master’s house. A Microsoft platform optimised to sell inputs will not spontaneously begin serving agroecology. A data pipeline built by Bayer to lock farmers into proprietary seed-and-chemical bundles will not liberate anyone. The design encodes the politics, and the politics of Big Tech agriculture is extraction.

But the Amul story suggests that infrastructure built for extraction can be repurposed — that the railway from Dharmaj could carry milk as well as tobacco — if the political conditions change. The data itself is not the master’s tool in the way the railway was. Data is raw material. The tool is the platform, the algorithm, the ownership structure that determines what questions the data is asked to answer. Change the ownership, and you change the tool. Change the tool, and the same data can serve different ends.

And the farmer-led innovations in our report suggest something even more important: you don’t have to wait for the repurposing. You can build your own systems. The most effective agricultural innovations documented in Head In The Cloud don’t depend on corporate data at all. They depend on communities controlling their own knowledge.

The report’s recommendations point the way:

1. Strengthen public policy for just and responsible innovation. Data governance frameworks that treat agricultural data as a commons, not a commodity.

2. Redirect research and funding to bottom-up, sustainable initiatives. The open-source tools and farmer-led networks documented in the report receive a fraction of the funding that goes to Big Tech platforms. This is a political choice, not an inevitability.

3. Break up the power of Big Tech and Big Ag. As long as a handful of corporations control the platforms, the hardware, the seed supply, and the data, no amount of wishful thinking about repurposing will change the direction the trains run.

4. Recognise innovation. The word “innovation” has been captured — it now means whatever Amazon and Bayer say it means. Reclaiming it requires showing that the most effective innovations in agriculture are already happening, in farmers’ fields, without the cloud.

Where I Land

I’m still not sure. One of the best engagements I’ve had on this has been with Morgan Ody, the General Coordinator of La Via Campesina, a peasant leader and a small-scale vegetable farmer from Brittany, France. She brought up one of the most important and impossible systems thinkers, Alexander Grothendieck, in defence of the argument that such data might irredeemably be the master’s tool.

Next week, I’m going to make a fool of myself by trying to explain how peasant leaders can find these arguments in Grothendieck’s politics. If you haven’t yet read it, When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut has a beautiful chapter on Grothendieck. I’ll have a crack next week at using Inception to explain his mathematics, and how that in turn might explain his suspicion of technology. So, watch Inception, read When We Cease To Understand the World, and I’ll see you here next week.

Head In The Cloud was published on 25 February 2026 by IPES-Food. I served as a member of the expert panel. You can read the full report, the summary, and the press release. Social media graphics from the report are available to share here.

The history of tobacco cultivation and the colonial railway trade in Kaira district draws on Ashish Kumar Mishra, “Commercial Agriculture in Gujarat During the Colonial Period: Tobacco and Sugar Experiments,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 73 (2012): 799–808; and Crispin Bates, “The Nature of Social Change in Rural Gujarat: The Kheda District, 1818–1918,” Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 4 (1981): 771–821.

Urea is the world’s most common nitrogen fertilizer — the white granules that farmers spread on fields to make crops grow. It’s the chemical feedstock for nearly half the world’s food. It’s made from ammonia, and ammonia is made by superheating natural gas.

IPES

That fuel passes through a 21-mile wide choke point.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65504

Gulf states export a lot of fertilizer

FAO

Asia is particularly vulnerable to being cut off

2024, Global dependency on Gulf fertiliser exports by regions Kpler

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The Ukraine war resulted in fertilizer price spikes, which accompanied food price spikes

USDA

DTN

The US Farm Bureau is worried

Farm Bureau

Global Consumers should be too

FAO

This weekend, five children died in a shack fire in South Africa. As the members of Abahlali baseMjondolo note, “Being poor means living close to death. The structural violence of impoverishment and abandonment eats at our lives.” This impoverishment generates trauma. In the piece below, Richard Pithouse recently compared organisers on the shores of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, drawing on his own original research and a terrific piece in the New Left Review. If you find this useful, please do consider supporting his work with a subscription, as I do.

At the age of 19, Guilherme Boulos moved from the youth wing of the Brazilian Communist Party into the occupations run by the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST). Trained as a philosopher at the University of São Paulo, he brought political theory into direct and productive encounter with both the materiality of struggles over land, debt and eviction, and with the lived experience and thinking of people in struggle.

Bruno Spada/Câmara dos Deputados

The MTST identifies unused urban property — often land held by indebted speculators or abandoned buildings — and organises collective occupations that can involve hundreds or thousands of families. These occupations establish their own democratic structures for decision-making and the distribution of resources while negotiating with municipal and state authorities for regularisation of tenure or access to public housing programmes. Boulos became the movement’s national co-ordinator and primary spokesperson. From that position he framed the struggle not only as a demand for shelter, but as a claim to the city itself — for those whose labour sustains urban economies yet who are pushed to their margins. For Boulos, electoral politics must emerge from organised popular power and remain accountable to it.

In 2020, Boulos ran for mayor of São Paulo as the candidate of the Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL), reaching the second round with over two million votes before losing to the incumbent, Bruno Covas. He ran again in 2024, securing a similar number of votes. Both campaigns drew directly on the MTST’s organised base in the city’s peripheries. Housing, urban space and the material conditions of life in the peripheries were treated not as technical policy matters but as political questions at the centre of democratic life.

This interview in New Left Review, published in 2022, is paywalled. But here’s an important moment in which he discusses forms of solidarity and care that go beyond the material aspects of struggle.

I spent a month [in Argentina], during the upsurge of the piqueteros—a movement of the unemployed, organized territorially, a bit like the MTST. Their slogan was, ‘The barrio is the new factory.’ The piqueteros were among those responsible for the overthrow of three Argentine presidents and two interim ones within the space of a few months. I was in Argentina just after the Pueyrredón Bridge massacre in Buenos Aires, where two militants were murdered at a blockade. I went to a neighbourhood on the periphery of Buenos Aires where there was a meeting they called a ‘reflection group’. It was coordinated by two psychoanalysts who brought people together in a circle and created an environment for listening—listening to people who had never been listened to before. They had just lived through traumatic situations, like being made redundant and evicted from their homes; or they had lost their partners, or seen their families destroyed. I will never forget that: for the power, for the strength that was present there. It was a catharsis that brought forth all the experience of suffering, of humiliation, of every sort of oppression and violence that people had lived through. I left convinced of the potential of psychoanalysis for the transformation of people, of their bodies. And of the need for procedures like this to reach the base of society, the excluded, to help them take their destiny into their own hands, with the support of the community. It was a tool for those who couldn’t afford to pay for psychological treatment. I came back from Argentina and started studying psychoanalysis.

Another thing that intrigued me, when I went to live in an MTST occupation, was something that I heard said again and again, in different ways. I remember the first time, listening to a comrade who was coordinating a community kitchen. She said that this was a space for sharing, for coexistence, for taking root. It was the type of space that had been lost in the overwhelming dynamics of urban capitalism. In the occupation people talked, recounted their cases, their stories, explained how they had ended up there, took steps of their own. She said that, before coming to the occupation, she had been living with relatives, dependent on their hospitality. She was diagnosed with severe depression and ended up taking several psychiatric medications—she couldn’t even get out of bed. She was driven to the MTST occupation by economic conditions, the precarious situation in which she lived. But once there, she told me, ‘I threw the medicines away because I didn’t need them anymore.’ That might sound naive. But, no—at different occupations, from different people, I heard the same narrative.

Through study and research, I tried to understand what this meant. My master’s thesis in psychiatry is about the correlation between mental suffering, poverty and collective organizations. I could begin to understand, with psychoanalysis, how far situations of humiliation, of material and social deprivation, helplessness, unemployment, family breakdown, an environment of violence or loneliness, how all of this is linked to psychological suffering, especially depression. Depression does not only affect the middle class, far from it. It hits the dispossessed. Yet on the other hand, when these people feel part of a group, when they are no longer alone, when they feel important to others, acts of solidarity serve equally as acts of healing. Commitment and collective projects are good for people on a psychological level. There is no doubt that unemployment, homelessness, violence and humiliation are causes of psychological and subjective breakdown. And coexistence, bonds of community, can help rebuild subjectivities that have been ravaged by barbarism, by the urban dynamics in which people are isolated and lost in the middle of an anonymous crowd.

There are some striking resonances with a point made by S’bu Zikode in an interview published in the Boston Review in 2024.

The fact that your bones are those of a biological human only means that you have the skeleton of a person. It does not confirm your humanity. You may be a skeleton that is still in the process of building, that still needs ubuntu toward yourself, to others, to nature. A human being is incomplete if it is defined in isolation to others.

There is no emancipatory politics without listening to others. Some people will say it’s a skill. But listening is much deeper than that. It’s about being human, being human together. It’s an acknowledgement, an embrace of others. And it’s not just an embrace of others as you see them, but an embrace of how they come through the world to this moment, their suffering, their hopes, their views, how they breathe, and how they express themselves.

As a leader, you have to listen to people very carefully. You have to learn from them. Every time you listen to another person you have the opportunity to learn from them. Every person is a world on their own. You can’t say that you are on the side of the people, that you are with the people, if you don’t take them seriously as people with ideas of their own. We build our humanity through listening.

Most of the attempts to build movements in South Africa over the last thirty years have been dismal failures. There are a variety of reasons for this, including the fact that a range of actors effectively see oppressed people as bodies to be mobilised rather than as people.

What Boulos encountered in Argentina, and what he later recognised in the occupations of the MTST, speaks to something that is also central in Zikode’s thinking: that people must be met in the fullness of their humanity and not only as people suffering material and political lack.

For both Boulos and Zikode, both of whom have built and led movements of the urban poor of planetary significance, listening – listening as recognition - is fundamental to politics. When people are invited to speak, to narrate, to interpret their own suffering and to do so in solidarity with others, something shifts.

They both understand that collective organisation is not only a vehicle for material redistribution. It is also a space in which wounded subjectivities can be healed and reconstituted.

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A still from the 1970s early Tom Baker era Dr Who title sequence. What does this sound like?

If you came of age in Britain when there were three channels, you also know that the most terrifying sound is an air raid siren. It portended nuclear holocaust, certain death for those within the blast radius, and the slower agonies of radiation sickness for those of us living in the zone 4.

r/damnthatsinteresting

The two sounds are linked.

The BBC Radiophonic workshop was a place where women turned the sounds of war into the sounds of the future. Delia Derbyshire realized and arranged the Doctor Who soundtrack using musique concrète. She was able to do that because the BBC Radiophonic Workshop had been co-founded in 1958 by a composer named Daphne Oram.

Oram’s entire relationship to electronic sound began with the air raid siren.

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Oram joined the BBC in 1942, at seventeen. She’d been offered a place at the Royal College of Music but turned it down for a job as a junior studio engineer — a “music balancer.” One of her duties was to shadow live concerts with a pre-recorded backup, so that the broadcast could continue uninterrupted if the building was hit. Daphne Oram sat in a studio, ready to swap the living for the recorded, while sirens sounded overhead.

The siren isn’t music, but it behaves like it. Oram heard it differently. She started experimenting with tape recorders after hours, cutting, splicing, looping, slowing, reversing. She metabolised the raw material of emergency into something else.

I started drafting this post before the bombs started to fall in the Middle East.

I grew up in London in the 1970s and 1980s, and I knew the siren as the end of days, an augur of nuclear holocaust. We had plenty of ways to die as children. There were the I.R.A. bombings, though the Irish Republican Army usually called ahead with warnings — a practice that, whatever its limits, acknowledged the existence of civilians.As the bombs drop on Iran, it’s worth contrasting the IRA with the US and Israeli militaries, who are racking up the death of children across the Middle East.

Oram has an Iranian-born artistic heir. Shiva Feshareki is a British-Iranian composer and turntablist, who spent years inside Oram’s legacy as part of her doctoral research. In 2016, she performed Oram’s Still Point — a piece for turntables and double orchestra, written in the 1940s, rejected by the BBC, lost in Oram’s notes, and unheard for seventy years. Two years later, Feshareki performed the revised version at the BBC Proms, hosted by the same institution that had once refused to play Oram’s music.

Feshareki’s Turning Worlds, her EP, contains a live track that grows from the same soil as Oram’s wartime experiments. It begins with a siren, and transmutes it. The rising tone, the sense of a frequency testing for the edge of what a room can hold. In Feshareki’s hands, the annihilation becomes exploration. It is neither pretty nor reassuring. But it is unmistakably an act of making, not destroying.

Feshareki didn’t set out to heal a Cold War child’s nightmares. She set out to find what was inside the sound. But the effect is the same. The siren is no longer only the siren.

Oram wrote a book in 1971 called An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics.

I’ll write more about the book, and about my listening session with Graham Reynolds, next month. For now, one observation: she wrote in 1971 that music was capable of growing into unpredictable forms. She was right. But seeds cannot grow in scorched earth.

The siren is still rising. The wailing—the literal, physical destruction of bodies and heritage—has to stop. We cannot keep asking artists to transmute imperial wreckage. It is time to end the wars that provide the sirens, so we can finally hear what lies on the other side of the silence.

The echo isn’t enough. We need the air to stay still.