Gérald Garitan/ Wikimedia cc-by-sa 4.0

He was born Edgar Nahoum in 1921, into a family of Sephardic Jews from Salonica, the Ottoman city now called Thessaloniki, who cradled their exile west to Marseille and then to Paris. His mother died when he was ten. He joined the Resistance under the name Morin by accident: introducing himself in Toulouse with a name mangled from Malraux’s La Condition humaine: “Manin”. He was misheard, and he kept the error for the rest of his life, which tells you something about how he felt regarding fixed identities.

He joined the Communist Party in 1941 and was expelled in 1951 for criticising Stalin. He spent the decades afterward refusing to belong to anything cleanly. He called himself a braconnier du savoir, a poacher of knowledge, clipping through the fences between sociology, biology, anthropology, cinema and philosophy, taking what he needed and leaving before the gamekeeper arrived.

After a spring watching students pull up the paving stones of Paris, he arrived at this cliff above the Pacific. This is the Salk Institute at La Jolla, California. He was there in 1969 to study at the invitation of Jonas Salk.

(His first impression of Salk: “I think I’d expected to see this benefactor of humanity, this saviour of children, with a Pastor’s beard. His face surprised me: clean-shaven, small, smiling, courteous, vaguely distant: a party face, like ours…”)

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The Salk Institute / TheNose at https://www.flickr.com/photos/31968997@N00/339218853 cc-by-sa-2.0.

Morin did not coin “polycrisis” in California. But the habit of mind the word requires, the refusal to look at any one catastrophe without looking at all the others connected to it, is one that he developed among the biologists and the anti-war protests and gold bugs and Black Panthers in San Diego and Berkeley. Edgar Morin called California a terre en transes, a land in a trance, the questing antenna of spaceship earth. His notes from his time there Journal de Californie.

His intellectual legacy is La Méthode, six volumes written across nearly thirty years, an attempt to build a way out of thinking a world that appears comprehensible only when pre-sorted into disciplines. The argument is simple: reality is woven (relié, linked) and our schools, our sciences and our governments are organized to cut the threads. We are trained to separate. The planet requires us to connect. “Knowledge,” he wrote, “is navigation in an ocean of uncertainty through archipelagos of certainty.”

Morin distrusted the certainties. He thought they were where the danger lived. He liked to quote Hölderlin: “where the danger lies, there also grows that which saves.” This is less a consolation than a summons to look and find and use. The point of seeing how everything connects was never to be crushed by the totality but to find the one thing unique to the connection that can pull you through.

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Which brings us back to ‘polycrisis’.

The word first surfaced in 1993, as a subheading in a small book called Terre-Patrie, written with his co-author Anne-Brigitte Kern and translated, six years later Homeland Earth. The idea was that the crises of the late twentieth century were no longer arriving one at a time, to be managed and filed, but were tangled together, feeding on each other through what they called inter-rétro-actions, circular loops in which each disaster makes the others worse, across timescales that refuse to line up. The whole, they warned, had become heavier than the sum of its parts. Beneath all of it sat what they called the problem of problems: humanity’s powerlessness to become humanity.

After kicking around in the Francophone EU for a little bit, Adam Tooze dragged the term back onto the agenda. By 2023 the World Economic Forum was running it up the flagpole. This is the joke history played on Edgar Morin. A word he had used to describe the failure of compartmentalized, technocratic, elite thinking became, in its second life, a favourite of exactly those elites. It’s a sophisticated ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, a way to say everything is on fire while changing nothing.

Morin had a name for this, borrowed from Rosa Luxemburg. He had spent his life describing the barbarie that hides inside cold, anonymous, bureaucratic competence, the cruelty that arrives as a procedure. (Structural violence is the more recent term.) He would have recognized the conference panel on the polycrisis as one of its purer specimens.

In his last years he pulled, again and again, on Gaza.

Here was a man of 102, then 103, then 104, with more than two hundred thousand followers on Elon Musk’s website, and he used them for one thing above all. Gaza sat at the top of his feed. In February 2024, at a book festival in Marrakech — he had married the Moroccan sociologist Sabah Abouessalam in 2012, and become a Moroccanophile — he spoke as a descendant of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. He said he was both stunned and disgusted that the heirs of a people persecuted for centuries could colonize another and carry out a carnage.

He called out the silence of the United States, of the Arab states, of the European governments who, as he put it, claim to defend human rights. It was the same anticolonial instinct that, seventy years earlier, had set him against France’s war in Algeria. A few months later he asked, on Musk’s website, whether Netanyahu might be one of the engineers of the new antijudaïsme. He discovered, not for the first time in a life that had included writing the definitive study of an antisemitic rumour (lingerie shops in Orléans were alleged sites of human trafficking - think Pizzagate but with more sex and antisemitisim), how much trouble a Jewish man can buy by refusing to be silent in the approved way.

His last post, at the end of March, didn’t use his own words at all. It was a repost: an interview with Francesca Albanese, the United Nations rapporteur for Palestine, on torture and genocide.

He died in Paris on 29 May at 104. On 3 June the French state gave him a national tribute at Les Invalides, Emmanuel Macron presiding in personcalled him a “planetary humanist, irreducibly French”. It is a strange thing to watch the Republic fold Morin into its flag because for most of his hundred and four years, Edgar Morin was exactly the kind of person the French state deemed an irritant. From the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon saluted him as an antifascist adding that he had taken his part in the protest against the massacre in Gaza.

This is the tension Edgar Morin leaves. He gave us a word for our era, and then watched the era use the word to avoid the work of addressing that polycrisis. He insisted everything was connected, and the connection he insisted on most loudly at the end is the one his mourners in the Élysée would prefer to leave out of the eulogy.

The threads are all still there. The danger is still growing. Is the thing that saves is growing with it? Morin himself was realistic. In his California Journal he offered:

“the source of the true future revolution… [is] still so feeble, without tools, without radar to detect true and false gospels….Of course, we are at the first wave, the one that will only produce failures, and there will be more failures and more failures, some due to an excess of rigid, dogmatic, doctrinaire communitarianism, others due to laxity and an inability to ensure and uphold a rule. But this is only a historical beginning.”

There’s still such a long way to go.

I want to think through the idea of agroecology being class suicide. Not that it is a project of class suicide right now but that it ought to be. I think about this concept a lot because it motivates a lot of my politicisation. As a landowner, as someone who has benefitted from inherited wealth, as someone now within the university, I am in a class position of some power.

Agroecology requires many, many, many more hands on the land. There is a belief that the ‘agroecology as new entrant, small farmer-landowner’ is the way to this agroecological transition. Putting aside whether we ought to valorise such an ideal, we can fairly swiftly conclude that this is not a realisable strategy in countries where land prices are escalating beyond reach as a result of speculation and policies that favour the concentration of land, such as tax breaks, subsidies and the like. And where economic realities make it even harder to make a living as a small farmer. If we also recognise the growing catastrophe of imperialist wars and genocide, ecological breakdown and eco-apartheid, then there has to be some recognition of the urgency of agroecological transition before capital ruins more of the underlying ecological basis for life. The latest evidence of this urgent necessity for agroecological transition is the growing avian influenza outbreak.

Set in this context, agroecology in the global north needs to fully reckon with its position in the global system of imperialism and incorporate that into its analysis and demands. Our global class position as small farmers in the colonial core necessitates reckoning with class as a global phenomenon and hierarchy, before discussing it within regional or national bounds. Imperialism here taken simply as the enforced flow of value from south to north as a result of militarised capital. Agroecology (or food sovereignty movements, either way) needs to recognise how European farmers benefit from the flow of value from the lands, labour and resources of the global south. That’s not to say that capitalist competition can’t undermine efforts towards agroecological farming, but how we parse that challenge matters. It changes our focus from “globalisation” which is a critique now most commonly wielded by the far right, to capitalism. It allows us to name the system’s dynamics. Capitalist competition is what drives down production standards and with it incomes. Our demand should become to stop competing with each other and whatever that takes.

That said, focusing on how trade deals undermine European farmers whilst saying nothing about the way that the EU (or UK or US) uses food as a weapon against farmers in the global south, leading to neo-colonial regimes, reproduces a potentially dangerous blindspot. As does this idea of “fair trade” between the south and north devoid of an awareness and critique of imperialism. The common focus on transnational corporations doesn’t take this adequately into account either because it posits that a small farmer in the global north is exploited similarly to small farmers in the global south. I see the rhetorical appeal in that for building solidarity. But this shorthand can erase important differences. A proportion of the social value which is legally stolen from the global south is captured by our states through taxes, with some of it redistributed to us, which includes small farmers. As just one example. But that depends upon the global north’s continuing violence. Economies in the global south are depressed by militarised imperialism, which means we are supplied with cheapened goods, is another example. The militarised border states of Europe, the UK and the US being central to maintaining this legalised theft as the “entitlement” of their “citizens”. Palestinians being those at that bloodiest end along with those in Sudan, DRC, Syria and other places where war and genocide ‘wastes life’, in the words of Ali Kadri. (or the violence of the US-Mexico border, or the Mediterranean border—horrifically, the list is long.) When a critique of made of neoliberalism (usually standing in for a critique of deregulation) there is often an appeal made to the state. A state that is central to the power of agribusinesses in the first place. But also actively genocidal states. Is that really the power we wish to call upon? Class suicide would see us undermine the EU/UK/US.

So first stop on agroecology in the global north as class suicide is reckoning with our position in imperialism and the violence and death that entails. It needs much more work than I can give it here, but I hope this points in the right direction. We can’t continue to tolerate a Eurocentric exceptionalism in our movement for food sovereignty and agroecological transition.

Agroecology as a movement is ideologically in favour of solidarity with those in the global south. I don’t suggest this is cynical posturing—I think it’s a real felt position. But this takes the form of a disembodied solidarity: ie. an unrealised potential. The centrality of north-south solidarity in the form of the efforts of La Via Campesina stand as evidence that there is a desire and efforts made for global solidarity against the bordered death machine of capital. But if ideology is what one does, and not what one says, then we can say that agroecology is confused. Does it want a better place for its farmers in the existing global imperialist order (ie. piecemeal reforms in the EU/UK/US) or does it wish the abolition of the current order of things (to paraphrase Marx and Engels)? Does it wish away the struggle against imperialism to racialised others? Is it seen as external to the struggle for agroecology and food sovereignty? A full agroecological transition is nothing short of revolutionary, but there is a risk of an argoecology-lite (which is essentially agroecology reduced to organic farming, as elucidated by Julie Guthman, or regenerative farming, its modern counterpart).

Hence we come back to this confusion at the core of agroecology in the global north today. It professes the end of industrial agriculture, laments the constraints of the corporate food regime, and enthuses the necessity of agroecology and yet it’s caught in a game of re-arranging the deck chairs. But if we’re serious about the revolutionary potential of agroecology, as opposed to its reformist potential, then we have to take seriously Amílcar Cabral’s concept of class suicide. Trying to apply it succinctly, this means that those of us who are landowners and/or have some position of power within the movement, have to lend our power to the class position of the landless. As Antonio Roman-Alcalá puts it:

‘Developing a sense of “landlessness” can seed the awareness that society’s structure starts with lack of democratic access to land as a means of production and belonging (rather than as a financial asset).’

The petty bourgeoisie—new entrant, small farmer-landowners in this case—can never fulfill the revolution. Their/our position is too small. The choice is to either commit class suicide or fail to see an agroecological revolution. To do this there must be the development of a ‘revolutionary consciousness’—and one I must add that takes a sober analysis of its class position and power. It can’t be a faux revolutionary consciousness. As Cabral writes this means we must: ‘remain faithful to the principles and to the fundamental cause of this struggle.’ Is the aim securing ourselves a small farm and a slice of the good (imperialist) life? Or is it mass agroecological transition? And what does the movement have to do (not just say) about racialised migrant workers who provide the backbone of labour on so many farms in the global north? Developing the ‘sense of “landlessness”’ as Roman-Alcalá describes, grounds our movement with a new sense of purpose and direction. And I wonder if that was the case once, but now that many have got their land, we see a move away from more radical demands for land reform towards minor reforms of subsidy schemes?

A recently published paper has explored the co-optation of agroecology. This isn’t just the result of nefarious corporate actors, though of course that is part of their business model, it is also the result of the class composition of the agroecological movement in the global north. On the one hand, it’s rooted in relatively affluent landowners, and on the other, in academia and civil society. The former, we’ve looked at, but the latter, striving for legitimacy, a career and “solutions” can tend to wield agroecology not as a political force but as a corrective technology. Agroecology is often reduced to a technical practise of improving land management along the lines of regenerative farming or conservation agriculture, with some rhetorical dressing of the importance of circular or localised economies. There are structural imperatives, like funding, placed upon academics/civil society to reduce agroecology to such a limited means. But in failing to realise a fully politicised embodiment of agroecology they ultimately undermine and betray its radical roots. It becomes a tool to use within the technocratic sphere of European governmental policies and discussions of agricultural transition towards more “sustainable” methods. I’m not against farmers using less inputs but this isn’t what agroecology was ever supposed to mean.

As the movement has matured in the global north, it has moved away from ideas of more radical land reform towards what Roman-Alcalá has critiqued, in the US context, but applies across the north:

Too many efforts have focused on piecemeal reforms focused on farm businesses, whether tax incentive programs, “land matching” services that seek to match retiring with aspiring farmers, or so-called “incubator” programs to help farm businesses learn the ropes.

This is as true for the UK as it is the US. I think it partly stems from the class position and ideological inflection of the main movement actors (not necessarily its base, which we’ll come back to), but also from a defeatist politics of “pragmatism”. This is something Saturnino Borras Jr. has written about saying:

The consensus seeks reforms within the framework of “what is doable,” leading to its inability—or unwillingness to even try—to go beyond the limits imposed by the status quo. Perhaps what is needed is a strategy of “what is possible.” The difference between the two is that the former works within the limits and possibilities of what is doable within a given balance of social forces, whereas the latter takes an insurgent approach to disrupt a given balance of social forces in order to pursue transformative deep social reforms. It pertains to what is possible in terms of disrupting the pre‐existing balance of social forces and power in order to effect radical reforms that are otherwise unthinkable, and daring to tackle political agendas that are absurdly difficult but not impossible

What I hope I’m trying to answer in this blog post is a) why this “pragmatism” has become the hegemonic framework within agroecology in the north and b) propose the beginnings of an alternative.

To briefly answer the why: because it’s in the classed interests of those in positions of power within the movement. Why rock the boat when you’ve got your small farm (or position at a university or food/farming organisation) and what you now need is some financial support or policies to help make that farm successful? It’s understandable, even if I do believe it’s holding back agroecology. I put forward agroecology as class suicide as an alternative impetus to action. One that centres the need for anti-imperialism and a genuine anti-capitalism (read my talk from ORFC if you want to see what I think on the latter). Both of which entail building beyond the current critique of the corporate food regime. As Bresnihan and Millner recount, La Via Campesina is known for its dialogo de saberes (dialogue between knowledges): this dialogue cannot apriori collapse the distinction between different class positions within a branch of the movement. And ultimately, it’s not just about hearing the voices of landless workers, it’s about them becoming central to, and leading, the project of agroecology. The future of all agroecological farmers depends on it. That’s what is meant when Cabral is talking about revolutionary consciousness: it’s realising that one’s own future ideals and liberation depend upon the power of the revolutionary class.

As Eva von Redecker said of the recent German farmers’ protests: they politicised ‘not precarious social conditions but precarious property.’ This separates farmers from many workers and leaves them a bit stranded. A defence of property: when so many don’t own property. Agroecology, in centreing the demands of new entrant small landowner-farmers, takes this exact same position. We have limited time, energy and resources, and we need to put what we have towards new ends if we wish to realise a politicised agroecology. And if we are to take repeasantisation seriously as a form of organising post-capitalist, socio-ecological relations, then we need to become clearer on what is and isn’t a peasant, so that we know what it means to “repeasantise”. This isn’t about ignoring already existing small farmers. Such a radical programme has a lot to offer both new entrant and traditional small farmers—in my opinion, more than the piecemeal reforms being attempted. The current food/farming system will only see them cannibalised by bigger farms. Seeing multiple small, and one time successful, agroecological farms either really struggling to stay in business or having to pack it in tells us that it’s getting harder as capitalism’s crises intensify.

The required counter-hegemonic movement in the global north will be a project of class suicide, not class strengthening. It would seek to politicise agroecology not as the right wing defence of the precarious property of a minority class, but as the need for an agroecological revolution. The subject of that revolution isn’t the small farmer, it’s the landless worker. Which isn’t an argument to exclude small farmers, it’s not to say there’s no future role for them—there is—but it’s to say a defensive strategy of trying to protect the small number of small farmers isn’t going to lead to an agroecological transition and it’s not even proving successful on its own terms.

What I have tried to articulate here is what class suicide might mean within agroecology. What I haven’t managed to really articulate, and would like to at some point, is what it would mean if agroecology was a project of class suicide. I’ve left a few hooks hopefully. For now though, the horizon of our struggle, agroecology as class suicide, is not a handful of small farmers within a deadly global system—it is full global agroecological transition and all that entails.

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‘Boy’ Dominguez/Journal of Peasant Studies

Federico Dominguez — BoyD — paints in bright, folksy, figure-crammed scenes. The palette is super-saturated. If you didn’t know that he’d been painting like this for decades, you might believe it’s early 2025 generative AI. Just like AI, the initial feeling is overwhelm before, as he noted in a terrific article by Alastair Iles, you start to see “there’s something wrong in the pictures.”

‘Boy’ Dominguez/Journal of Peasant Studies

A Mandaya artist from Davao Oriental, largely self-taught, three decades deep in the Concerned Artists of the Philippines, he has spent his life making it impossible to look away from peasant and Indigenous existence. His work has appeared everywhere from protest banners to the covers of the Journal of Peasant Studies. In Land Grabs, above, executives ride a bulldozer that strips fertile soil and a fish-filled stream, shoving smallholders and their animals out of frame. The remaining peasants picket the blade, refusing to move.

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Perhaps my favourite of his images is this, from the Journal of Peasant Studies gallery

‘Boy’ Dominguez/Journal of Peasant Studies

It’s a bit of an outlier in his oeuvre: although the themes of capitalist destruction, exile, and resistance are all there, the texture of the soil and sea is unusually stylised, and the palette shifted a register towards a more organic turmeric. (It reminded me of another Indigenous tradition, of Gond art in India.) Dominguez is quoting a Mandaya textile tradition about which I recently learned: Dagmay. The Philippine Studies programme at SOAS in London has a particularly good site Mapping Philippine Material Culture, showcasing how these patterns feature in Mandaya weaving.

BoyD is unlikely to paint again. He has corticobasal degeneration, a rare neurodegenerative disease eating into his movement, his speech, his thinking. He has stage-three kidney disease and lost a kidney in 2021. He needs round-the-clock care his family cannot carry alone, in a country where health insurance reaches few working people. The cheapening of bodies and land that runs through every BoyD canvas has come for the man who painted them.

A loose international community of agrarian scholars, BoyD’s family, and the Filipijnengroep Nederland have opened a fund for his care. The goal is modest: €7,000. I’ve already put in. If you can add to it, please do: donate here. If you can’t, at least bear witness. A gallery of BoyD’s work is here. For the fuller story, read Alastair Iles’s portrait of him, open-access at the Journal of Peasant Studies.

In every BoyD painting the bulldozer is already being picketed. The figures don’t win, exactly, but they’re in permanent struggle. If you can, please help BoyD fight his last battle with the dignity he endowed his subjects.

(Since I’m on record as observing that Slow Food can look like a “circle jerk of olive oil fanciers and red wine fetishists” you’d be right to wonder whether I’ve decided to fuck it all and join the bourgeoisie, or whether it’s just that I’ve overcome my kink-shaming and decided to oil up. Truth is, it’s too late: I’m already a middle-class university professor, and already deep into obscure alcohol and unguents.)

The reason I serve Slow Food is because it has at its heart a radical maxim: that there’s nothing too good for the working class. Carlo Petrini understood that this included food too, and that the route to democratise pleasure is politics. Always politics. The Italian press celebrated his communist past. The various English language obituaries seem to have obscured that history — looking at you, New York Times *— so here’s a reclamation of the man and the politics which made his life.

Petrini’s mum was a greengrocer. In Italian, she was an ortolana: a word that I was delighted to discover was connected to ortolans through the same root that gives the English word horticultural. His dad was a communist railwayman. He carried both inheritances. He studied sociology at Trento, a hotbed of the Italian extra-parliamentary left, where he started to be a Maoist. It’s not entirely clear if he ever really stopped.

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The group of which he was initially part was called “Avanguardia proletaria maoista” - the proletarian maoist vanguard and, he recalled, it was in this space that urban kids like him came to understand that peasants were not sacks of potatoes but agents of history. I can’t imagine what it was like to have one’s mind changed in the 1970s in febrile discussions with the likes of Primo Levi, but I’m certainly grateful for those transformations. It set him on a road to politics via food and media.

In 1975 he was elected to Bra’s town council as the sole representative of the Partito di Unità Proletaria — a party that, as he himself later put it, sat to the left of the PCI - the Italian Communist Party. That same year, he and a few friends bought a CB set at a market in Livorno and founded Radio Bra Onde Rosse. The pirate radio station opened its broadcasts with the Internationale. He ran a members-only food cooperative, the Spaccio di Unità Popolare, at deliberately political prices. The radio station was seized, again and again, by magistrates enforcing the state broadcasting monopoly, until Dario Fo and Franca Rame arrived in solidarity. (Dario Fo was, of course, a friend of Petrini’s and had designed a poster for the radio station.)

Dario Fo/9CentRo

The argument behind Slow Food, which he built in the late 1980s out of the Arcigola food-and-wine league, was that industrial food is not merely bad food but an instrument of capitalist homogenisation. If that’s true, then the opposite — joy savoured slowly, locally, and in common — could be a form of resistance. He captured this vision elegantly, with this tripartite slogan: food must be “good, clean and fair”. The radicalism lies in the and. If it’s merely delicious, or just pesticide free, it’s not good enough. It has to be grown and made under just conditions of production. Otherwise it devolves into the aforementioned circle-jerk.

That’s why Petrini was joy’s great democrat, not its connoisseur. He insisted, against a century of gastronomic snobbery, that taste belonged to the peasant, the fisher, the Indigenous forager, the line cook, the supermarket bagger, and the migrant herder as fully as to the critic; that biodiversity was a commons and hunger a policy choice; that a Terra Madre of food communities had more to teach than a guidebook’s rosette. He was, as one Italian paper put it, too much of a hedonist to be a hard militant and too political to be a food critic.

He was easy to misread. Friend of King Charles and of Pope Francis, courted by ministries, he could be made to look like the establishment’s pet rebel. But the Italian left’s own obituarists have no difficulty placing him. He was a man of the contestazione — the radical movements contesting the future of the country in the 1960s and 1970s — who had simply found a longer and more pleasurable road to the same destination.

Despite his commitment to Maoism and socialism, Petrini was fond of anarchism too. I never got to ask him specifically about Emma Goldman, but he always channeled her dictum that:

“I did not believe that a Cause which stood for, a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to became a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. ”

Carlìn was cut from the same cloth, always impishly joyful, always having so much fun, and always wanting to make sure everyone else was free to do the same. He was infectiously delightful to be around. The photos circulating through the Slow Food website quote him thus: “those who sow utopia reap reality”. It is a fitting epitaph for a man who started with a confiscated transmitter and a members’ grocery, and ended having convinced a good part of the planet that the pleasure of eating well is one that belongs to everyone.

*Correction: A reader notes that the NY Times had two appreciations. One obituary was factually a bit wobbly (and still says Petrini studied philosophy when all the Italian language sources record sociology) and the other by Pete Wells did indeed mention that Carlìn was a communist, but implied that in starting Slow Food, he’d stopped being one. I mention this for the record, though as you’ll see above, I don’t think that reasoning holds. It’s not only possible to continue to be a communist and to believe in the principles of Good, Clean, and Fair, but necessary.)

I’ll be going through all of this in greater depth over the summer, and sharing what I make of it all. Let’s start with the tiny bit of blue highlighting: a proposal for ‘food social security.’ It’s not something widely understood in the English-speaking world, so here’s a primer. If you prefer your introductions to come with video and/or academic citations, don’t worry. I’ll post an interview with one of the leading analysts, Gaëtan Vanloqueren, with whom I’m currently writing an academic piece, later this month.

1. What is Food Social Security?

Food Social Security — sécurité sociale de l’alimentation, or SSA — extends the architecture of public health insurance to food. Just as the founding of France’s Sécurité sociale in 1945 turned medical care from a charitable benefit into a universal right, financed by social contributions and governed through democratic funds, food social security would make access to good food the object of the same kind of entitlement.

It rests on three pillars:

1. Universality. The entitlement is tied to residency, not income. Every adult receives a monthly food allocation — modelled at roughly €100–150 (about C$150–225) — onto something equivalent to a health card. No means test, no application, no queue.

2. Democratic conventionnement. Local funds — caisses, think of them like properly-democratic food policy councils— staffed by elected citizens, producers, and workers decide which products and which producers are eligible to be purchased with this cash, based on social and ecological criteria the funds themselves set.

3. Financing by social contribution rather than charity or an annual budget line.

It is, in short, a demand-side institution that also reshapes the supply side — and explicitly not a reform of food aid.

2. Who came up with this idea?

It was proposed by Ingénieurs Sans Frontières–Agrista (ISF-Agrista), a French engineers’ association, which began developing the proposal in 2017, with Mathieu Dalmais a central figure.

The deeper intellectual roots run through the economist Bernard Friot and the Réseau Salariat collective. They understood the post-1945 French Sécurité sociale as a democratic, contribution-funded institution for governing the economy, alongside the idea of a “salaire à vie“ (lifelong wage). ISF-Agrista has said the idea crystallised at a 2015 gathering after members encountered Friot’s and Réseau Salariat’s work.

In November 2019, ISF-Agrista convened organisations at the Bergerie de Villarceaux and formed the Collectif national pour une Sécurité sociale de l’alimentation, now around 14 national member organisations — including Réseau CIVAM, the Confédération paysanne (La Via Campesina France), Réseau Salariat, VRAC and the Atelier Paysan. In Belgium the proposal was taken up by FIAN Belgium and the CréaSSA collective.

3. How does it work?

In practice, the three pillars connect like this.

The allocation. Each resident receives a fixed monthly sum, transferred onto a dedicated debit card. The flagship pilot in Montpellier pays €100/month, and the national proposal is usually pitched around €150.

Conventionnement. Yes, it’s French but I’m struggling to find a good English translation: ‘democratic accreditation’ is the closest and its still clunky. Here’s why: the €100/month allocation does not float in the general consumer economy. It can be redeemed only on products and in outlets that have been conventioned — certified — by a local caisse. The criteria are set by a food parliament (parlement alimentaire): an assembly that is at least half ordinary citizens, deciding on a one-person-one-vote basis what counts as eligible. That can mean agroecological practice, fair producer prices, animal welfare, local sourcing, or fair-trade standards for imports.

Financing. In the mature vision, the system is funded by a social contribution (cotisation) levied on value added and split between employers and employees — sitting outside the annual budget cycle, and looking like a social security contribution line on a payroll. In the pilots running today, financing is more modest (see Q14).

Absent a national infratructure, a Montpellier pilot has members contribute between €1 and €150 a month based on their to income, then everyone — regardless of what they paid in — receives the same €100, issued in a dedicated local currency (the “MonA”) that can be spent only at conventioned outlets.

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4. So is it like food aid?

No! It is designed to be the opposite of food aid.

Food aid is charitable, residual and means-tested. It depends heavily on surplus and unsold stock channelled from industrial retail, and it is so stigmatising that, in France, roughly one food-insecure person in two does not use it at all.

Even if people did use it, as the authors of a proposed SSA law put it, food aid “cannot be the sole answer” to food insecurity. Food aid manages hunger - it can’t end it. The structure of tax write-offs around it means aid effectively absorbs overproduction rather than challenging it.

Food social security inverts each of those features. It is a right attached to residency, universal, with no application process and no queue. You qualify simply by living in a place, and nothing else.

5. So is it more like a basic income grant?

Superficially yes, but the philosophers behind food social security would be quite annoyed with you for thinking so.

A basic income is unconditional cash. It floats in the general consumer economy: you can spend it on anything, anywhere. Food social security money is earmarked and conventioned. It can be spent only on democratically approved products from approved producers.

Two differences matter. First, a basic income leaves the food question individualised: it raises a person’s purchasing power and lets the market decide what gets produced and how. Conventionnement makes that a collective decision. Second, and following from this, a basic income gives the consumer more money but gives the food system no new direction; food social security gives the demand side leverage over the supply side.

Put simply: a basic income changes purchasing power. Food social security changes the food system.

6. Ok so it’s more like a French healthcare system payout. What’s that even like?

The French social insurance system is the explicit template, so it’s worth being concrete about how French health coverage functions. Since most of you are in the US, public healthcare may appear magical and strange. Here’s how it works:

French health insurance (Assurance Maladie) has three features that food social security borrows directly:

• It is funded by social contributions — payroll-based cotisations and the CSG levy — rather than from general taxation. The money is dedicated; it is not a line item that a finance minister re-decides every year.

• It is administered through funds (caisses — the CPAM, caisses primaires d’assurance maladie) rather than run top-down from a central ministry.

• It is universal, attached to residency.

The crucial feature, though, is what the French call conventionnement of doctors. A médecin conventionné is a physician who has signed the convention with the Assurance Maladie, agreeing to a set fee schedule; the public insurer then reimburses care delivered by conventioned providers. The public buyer’s power to admit a provider to — or exclude one from — the reimbursement pool is what disciplines the supply side. So, for instance, you can decide you want ivermectin for Covid - it’s just not what a conventioned provider would give you.

Food social security does for food producers exactly what conventionnement does for doctors.

7. How does this help shape the supply chain?

Conventionnement is a lever.

Because the allocation can be redeemed only with producers and outlets meeting the caisse‘s criteria, any producer who wants access to that huge pool of guaranteed, recurring public Euros has a standing incentive to meet the democratically-set conditions.

What this offers farmers is something the open market can’t: stable, long-term, predictable demand at fixed and fair prices. That predictability is the precondition for investing in an agroecological transition. Converting practices is risky when next year’s price is unknown. Because the conventioned market is simply where the secure income is, the transition is driven by an aligned incentive rather than coercion. Nobody is forced to convert; the conventioned channel is just the one worth converting for.

Early evidence from Montpellier is consistent with this: around 80% of products bought through the caisse are organic, and conventioned shops reported turnover rising by 2–7%.

8. Does it work?

The evidence is early, local, and encouraging, but there’s no national-scale trial yet. No country has run a universal food social security system, so the proof of concept exists at city scale and in modelling. Still, three bodies of evidence stand out.

Montpellier (field evidence). The Caisse Alimentaire Commune, evaluated by researchers from INRAE and the Chaire UNESCO Alimentations du Monde, found that quantitative food insecurity among participants fell from 11% to 5% — a halving — over the experimental period, with qualitative food insecurity down by roughly 28%, alongside gains in social participation.

Belgium (modelling evidence). The June 2025 “Factor X” study — economists Frédéric Chomé and Gaëtan Vanloqueren, commissioned by FIAN Belgium — is the most rigorous costed national projection produced to date. It models a 16-year rollout converting more than 850,000 hectares to organic production and cutting associated air pollution by 40%, set against roughly €90 billion a year in hidden food-system costs in Belgium.

Brazil (comparative evidence). The Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos (PAA), the closest large-scale public-procurement cognate, raised the production value of participating family farmers by 13.1%, with the effect strongest for the smallest and lowest-income farms — a peer-reviewed finding using difference-in-differences over 2007–2016.

9. But if this is about restricting what people can buy, how is it different from the draconian SNAP restrictions you say you don’t like?

The difference between SNAP and conventionnement turns on who decides, and over whom they decide.

Through 2025–26, under the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, the USDA encouraged states to request waivers banning soda, candy and similar items from SNAP purchases; by early 2026 around 22 states had approval. Those restrictions are imposed top-down, by federal and state officials; they fall on the poor only — on benefit recipients, not on anyone else; and they police what recipients may not buy. No SNAP recipient voted on them. They treat poverty as a failure of consumer discipline, and they leave the food system itself entirely untouched.

Food social security’s conventionnement flips this on its head:

• It is decided by the eaters and producers themselves, democratically, one person one vote, not by a ministry.

• It is universal, not targeted at the poor. Everyone is inside the same scheme.

• It works on the supply side rather than disciplining the individual consumer.

• It is framed around building a food system, not punishing bad choices.

Both systems involve a constraint on what a given dollar can buy. But SNAP restrictions narrow the options of the poor while the food system carries on as before; food social security widens access to good food by changing what is produced. In one, the constraint is done to people. In the other, it is set by them.

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10. Where has it been tried?

France and Belgium.

In France. Roughly 30 to 40 local experiments have emerged since 2019, most of them since 2023. The flagship is the Caisse Alimentaire Commune de Montpellier, created in 2022 and launched in February 2023. Others run in Cadenet (Vaucluse), Saint-Étienne, Dieulefit (Drôme), Paris, Lyon, and Bordeaux and the wider Gironde, with “around forty” experiments.

Belgium. Local caisses include the Ceinture Aliment-Terre liégeoise around Liège and the Caisse Locale d’Alimentation Solidaire in Schaerbeek, Brussels.

11. What have the results been?

Well, you’ve sort of asked this already, but here’s a deeper answer. The richest results come from Montpellier, where the caisse was run as a formal research-action project from 2022 to 2024.

• Food insecurity: quantitative food insecurity among participants fell from 11% to 5%; qualitative food insecurity fell by about 28%.

• Diet: about 80% of products bought through the caisse were organic and 20% fresh fruit and vegetables.

• Producers and retailers: conventioned shops saw turnover rise 2–7%.

• Democracy and wellbeing: a citizen committee of roughly 60 people — about half of them experiencing food precarity — governs the scheme; evaluators reported reduced stress, restored commensality (participants again able to invite people to eat, or accept invitations), and greater self-esteem, food knowledge and “pouvoir d’agir”.

• Scale: the caisse is growing toward 600-plus beneficiaries, with a stated target of 1,200 households by 2029.

Belgium’s result is a modelling conclusion rather than field evidence: the Factor X study established economic feasibility.

12. Who is pushing it?

France. The bill was carried by the groupe Écologiste et Social — the Greens — with Charles Fournier as lead sponsor and rapporteur, alongside Boris Tavernier and Marie Pochon. It was co-signed across the entire parliamentary left: La France Insoumise (Clémentine Autain, François Ruffin, Loïc Prud’homme, Alexis Corbière, Manon Meunier, Danielle Simonnet), the Parti Socialiste (Stéphane Delautrette, Gérard Leseul, Chantal Jourdan, Christine Pirès Beaune), and the Communist / GDR group. There was no backing from the centre or the right.

Belgium. The push has been Greens-led (Ecolo/Groen) with cross-left support, while the civil-society engine is FIAN Belgium and the CréaSSA collective.

13. How far did attempts go in France and Belgium?

France: further than is sometimes reported. The bill (n°386, submitted 15 October 2024) was adopted in committee — the commission des affaires économiques — on 12 February 2025. It then reached the floor on 20 February 2025, on the Greens’ annual reserved “niche” day. Obstruction by right-wing deputies on the day’s earlier texts pushed the debate to roughly 11:35pm — and Assembly rules end a niche session at midnight. Debate was cut off after about 25 minutes and the bill was never put to a vote. In other words, it cleared committee and then died on the floor for lack of time, not for lack of a majority.

Belgium. The Brussels regional parliament held a hearing on 3 July 2025, and on 6 February 2026 adopted in plenary a Resolution — described as the first of its kind — that explicitly recognises food social security, invites the federal government to launch a feasibility study, and asks the region to make financing easier for local caisses such as Schaerbeek’s.

14. What mechanisms did the French propose to pay for the pilot project?

The pilot financing is not the same as the long-term SSA vision.

The mature SSA model would be financed by a social contribution akin to a payroll tax, like public health insurance, deliberately placed outside the annual budget. The pilot law, Proposition de loi n°386, does not create such a contribution.

Instead, the pilot law proposes tripartite financing:

1. A national experimentation fund (fonds national d’expérimentation), financed by the State, channelled through a not-for-profit association (governed under the 1901 law on associations) that also vets, monitors and evaluates the local experiments;

2. Contributions from the local authorities (collectivités territoriales) hosting each experiment;

3. Members’ own contributions to their local caisse primaire pour l’alimentation — and, crucially, the amount of that contribution is set democratically by each territory’s food parliament, not fixed in the law.

Other features of the law worth flagging:

• It is an experiment lasting five years, for up to 30 experiments across at most 20 territories.

• Each territory would be governed by an elected food parliament (parlement alimentaire) — at least half citizens, one person one vote — which sets the conventionnement criteria, the eligible products and shops, and the target publics.

• A scientific-and-citizen evaluation committee in each territory must report within 36 months on costs, externalities and results.

So: the pilot is paid for by the State, local authorities and participating members together, with some funds coming from an extra tax on tobacco, with the full payroll-cotisation model held back for the future.

15. And what about the Belgians?

Belgium has not legislated a financing mechanism. What it has produced is the most rigorous costed model of what it might look like, and a parliamentary resolution.

16. What’s next?

France. The bill can be re-tabled in a future session. In the meantime the 30–40 local caisses keep running and scaling — Montpellier alone is aiming for 1,200 households by 2029 — and the civil-resistance campaign “Riposte alimentaire” continues to press for generalisation.

Belgium. The live question is whether the federal government takes up the Brussels resolution’s invitation to commission a feasibility study. Local caisses in Liège and Schaerbeek continue regardless.

17. How does this relate to public grocery?

Public grocery and food social security might sound as though they are rival proposals — or interchangeable ones. They are best understood as two halves of the same policy architecture, and each is weaker without the other.

Take public grocery on its own first. Publicly owned or municipally run grocery stores are having a moment: New York City is moving ahead with a pilot network of city-owned stores, with Atlanta, Madison and others are moving in the same direction. As a standalone policy, though, public grocery is exposed on two fronts. It invites the obvious objection — why should the state subsidise retail capacity, of all things? — and it carries the budget-cycle fragility that holds these experiments hostage to political fortune: a public store is only as durable as the next government’s appetite for it.

Food social security resolves both problems by giving public grocery a structural reason to exist. Inside the food social security, the public store is more than simply a public outpost where the private sector couldn’t make any money, and becomes the site in which a universal right is exercised, a place where the food allocation is spent, and where the conventioned supply chain physically terminates.

That changes the answer to “why retail capacity?”: the stores exist, and are sited in low-income neighbourhoods, because that is where the conventioned producer base meets the citizen, and where what is publicly financed stays publicly answerable. In other words, these stores are outposts for democratic engagement. Reframing the stores like this changes the durability problem too. Retail tied to an entitlement funded by a payroll tax contribution is far harder to defund than a discretionary budget line.

It also clarifies what public grocery is not. It is not an attempt to abolish the private sector, or any incumbent. Concentrated retail can keep its doors open; it simply will not be where the allocation is spent, unless it chooses to stock what the caisses have conventioned. Framed this way, public grocery is not a competitor to concentrated retail capital but the public counterweight to it — in exactly the way that public health insurance is not a competitor to private medicine but the institution that disciplines it.

Food social security is the demand-side institution: the right, the money, the democratic conventionnement. Public grocery is the retail body that institution needs in order to touch the ground. On its own, a public store lowers some prices for a while. Inside food social security, it becomes permanent civic infrastructure — and the case for building it stops being “the state should run shops” and becomes “a universal food right needs somewhere to be redeemed.”

18. Any other questions?

Reply to this post and I’ll see if I can find answers!

The Price of Passage

A conversation with Raj Patel

A Growing Culture

May 20, 2026

Industrial agriculture is deeply tied to fossil fuels. Natural gas is used to make fertilizer, oil powers mechanized farming, and the food system itself depends on enormous energy-intensive supply chains to transport, refrigerate, process, and distribute food across the world. The fragility of the globalized industrial food system lies not only in how interconnected it is, but in its dependence on endless extraction, cheap energy, and uninterrupted trade flows. A blockade or escalation in one node can rapidly cascade into food shortages, rising prices, stalled harvests, and deepening hunger thousands of miles away.

What we are witnessing now, with the US-led war on Iran resulting in the disruption of trade through the Strait of Hormuz, is another chapter in this long history of violence. Nearly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas shipments move through this narrow corridor, and the escalation has already toppled energy and food systems worldwide.

While no one is spared of the impact of this war, these shocks do not move evenly through the world. And because these crises ripple across supply chains, speculation, inflation, and everyday life in ways that are often difficult to fully see while we are living through them, it can be hard to grasp the scale of what is unfolding. Understanding what this could mean over the next few months, and even years, requires tracing the deeper connections between war, energy, food, debt, and survival. What will continued escalation mean for food supply and prices; which communities will bear the heaviest burden; and how do we build resilience within an increasingly fragile global food system?

To help us make sense of this moment, AGC staff member Rohan Antony spoke with food systems scholar and activist Raj Patel, whose work has long traced the links between empire, capitalism, agriculture, and hunger. We hope this conversation leaves you with as much clarity and insight as it did for us.

We read your article on the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the ongoing energy crisis. We wanted to start with just a little bit of a background on industrial agriculture and its dependence on synthetic fertilizers and on fossil fuels. How is it that food access came to be so tightly coupled with volatile energy markets in the first place? And what generally happens to food production globally when energy supply chains are disrupted?

Raj: Well, we have to understand that modern industrial capitalist agriculture has always been hitched to the problem of fertilizer and fuel. Most people know about the Haber–Bosch process, the way synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is manufactured. What’s often missed is that the same chemistry underwrites both fertilizer and explosives. When the British blockade cut off German access to Chilean nitrates during the First World War, Haber–Bosch scaled up to keep German munitions factories running. After the Second World War, those same nitrogen-fixing plants were repurposed to industrial fertilizer, just as the United States was prosecuting the Cold War through the Green Revolution. It’s called the Green Revolution because, as the USAID administrator William Gaud put it in 1968, it was meant to forestall a “Red Revolution.”

So chemical fertilizer has been baked into agriculture for over a century, and it runs on fossil fuels. Haber–Bosch makes ammonia under enormous heat and pressure, and then urea—the main agricultural fertilizer—is cooked from that ammonia using natural gas. Producing synthetic fertilizer requires vast quantities of natural gas. All of it is now hostage to the flow of gas through the Strait of Hormuz. Even the modest commodity price increases we’re seeing are already reaching kitchens—in India, Egypt, and across the Gulf—through the diesel that moves food and the cooking gas that prepares it.

If you live in India, for instance, you’ll notice that roadside dabbas are finding it increasingly difficult to stay afloat. The cost of the natural gas they use for cooking has risen, and so has the price of diesel used to transport food. That is already beginning to spark food price inflation, certainly for cooked food, and also for food that’s been delivered through these supply chains that are hostage to fossil fuels.

And I imagine you’re seeing that in India, right?

Yes, in India, we’ve been facing a major LPG crisis since the closure of the strait. There are long queues at distribution centres, with thousands of people waiting to access cooking gas, and refill prices in many places have nearly doubled due to shortages. Black market rates are several times higher.

The petrol and diesel prices were relatively stable, but that’s largely because of elections. The government had been cutting taxes to hold prices down, but now that the results are out, these costs are catching up.

Raj: That’s the other thing. In countries without significant domestic natural gas reserves, the only real short-term option is to increase subsidies. India’s fertilizer subsidy is already in the billions of dollars - roughly $12.7 billion on urea alone this year - and that’s money that could be going to a lot of other things. The commitment to keep fertilizer prices low will hold past the elections, because farmers are both a core constituency and the people producing the food everyone in India absolutely needs. But for countries without the borrowing capacity to absorb several billion dollars of subsidy, things will have to be cut back. That’s a huge problem.

At the same time, there are companies making a killing. Yara, the Norwegian fertilizer giant, posted record profits during the Ukraine price spike and is up sharply again. Almost every fertilizer major has seen its stock climb since February - some more sharply than others.

And, I guess this crisis is widely being discussed as an energy crisis. But it’s equally also a food crisis that, maybe, is already happening, and also stands to get a lot worse in the coming months.

Raj: I love that you recognise the fact that things are awful right now. And you’re right: 30% of globally traded fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and the concentration is even sharper for specific products. Roughly 49% of seaborne urea, 30% of ammonia, and 44% of the world’s sulphur trade move through the Strait. Sulphur is the feedstock you need to turn phosphate rock into usable fertilizer, so when one chokepoint seals, you’re disrupting nitrogen and phosphate fertilizer simultaneously.

Different countries are exposed differently. Even the US, which produces most of the fertilizer it uses, is feeling the price shocks because we’re connected to world markets — particularly for farmers who didn’t lock in their fertilizer on time. If it’s this bad here, you can bet it’s worse almost everywhere else.

We saw your post on the global fertilizer shortage and the map of import vulnerability, and we were wondering if you could expand a bit on your analysis. Which countries are the most vulnerable, and what this disruption looks like in terms of long-term food security in these regions?

What the map shows is that for 11 of 12 months in the year, there’s at least one zone of the world in its peak fertilizer procurement window — a month when application is critical. Right now, in the next eight weeks or so, that’s South Asia: Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India in particular. India claims it has enough fertilizer to get through the imminent Kharif planting season, but it’s already spent $12.7 billion on urea subsidies this year, and that number will climb when Rabi planting begins. Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are far more exposed.

Then there are other places — Egypt and Ethiopia in particular — where it’s not clear they have the capacity to provide for themselves on the world market. Egypt was a major fertilizer producer until its gas supply from Israel was cut in mid-2025 during the earlier round of fighting, and again after February. The world market price has since gone through the roof.

Longer term, sub-Saharan Africa imports about 90% of its fertilizer. With USAID — which had long been pushing this unsustainable model — now being dismantled, those farmers are even more exposed. None of this is to say we need more fertilizer. What we need is a transition plan away from fertilizer-dependent industrial agriculture and into agroecology. But in the short term, absent those plans, this is a disaster.

The gravest problem may be in Brazil, which is about 85% import-dependent, and whose July-to-September planting window is the most fertilizer-sensitive of the year. A weak Brazilian soy crop has knock-on effects across a range of other commodities. So that’s the production side.

The consumption side is just as serious. If you’re spending more on fuel and cooking gas, you have less to spend on food. Two crises at once. In the minority world we’re already seeing shrinking entitlements and a generalised war on the poor. In the Global South, that neoliberal impetus has been at work for decades; this will be the lagging indicator of dispossession as fuel prices stay high. Money will have to come from somewhere, and that means hunger.

In moments of crisis like this, we see hunger levels rising, and at the same time, agribusiness lobbies, commodity traders, and others often report record profits. What does that tell us about how the system is structured, and who it ultimately serves?

Raj: Here’s one way to think about it. Everyone agrees chokepoints are bad — that’s maybe the one lesson people can agree on from this crisis. But oligopoly is a chokepoint.

Take this idea that what we need is more fertilizer production. Who stands to profit? The handful of fertilizer companies already manufacturing it. We’re not suddenly going to have free markets or new entrants. The proposal just gives the existing oligopoly more shop windows and more factories to produce the same thing.

When a few companies control a vast share of the market, that’s exactly what a chokepoint looks like. It used to be ABCD, now it’s effectively ABCCD: Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, COFCO (the Chinese state trader), and Louis Dreyfus. Their combined 2022 profits roughly tripled relative to the 2016–2020 average; Cargill alone posted $177 billion in revenue in FY2023. Yara, the Norwegian fertilizer giant I mentioned, posted record profits during the Ukraine spike. The chokepoints are becoming more concentrated, not less. Bunge has just closed its $8.2 billion merger with Viterra — a deal the European Commission waved through in Phase 1, without the deeper investigation it warranted.

These are structural chokepoints in the global economy, created and enabled by governments operating in the interests of the capitalist class. Those are the chokepoints we should be focused on. Deconcentration is the answer — not building more of the factories that profit the same corporations who benefited from the crisis in the first place.

To close, I want to step back for a moment. Over the course of your career, you’ve witnessed multiple food crises, and what we’re seeing now doesn’t feel entirely new. It’s another disruption, another supply chain shock, another moment of strain in a deeply fragile food system.

We’ve seen these patterns. We saw it during the pandemic, during the Russia–Ukraine war, the shut down of USAID. Every time there’s a disruption like this, millions of people are pushed into hunger and poverty. It feels like history repeating itself again and again. If this crisis is yet another warning, what is it asking us to fundamentally rethink about food, power, and globalisation?

Raj: You’re right. This is the fourth food price spike in 15 years: 2007–08, 2010–11, the Ukraine crisis, and now this. But I think things are changing. In the minority world, more and more people are thinking about the affordability crisis as a way of re-articulating demands on the state.

The state itself has been so hollowed out — through the death throes of neoliberalism, the rise of the far right, this more toxic insulation of the state from democracy. Whatever happens after Trump or Orbán or the various other tyrants of the world, the state will need to be rebuilt in some form.

The neoliberal branch of the Democratic Party and its analogues in the Global South will push for a minimal reconstruction. But there are also forces saying: if we’re going to meet this affordability crisis and avoid yet another food price spike, the move is into public grocery, public food supply, public food chains. This is genuinely ambivalent, because France is saying what we need is a French food sovereignty law that deploys the military all along the supply chain so the French always have access to their bananas, their coffee, their chocolate.

There’s another way of thinking about what it might mean to render supply chains public — the vision behind Mamdani’s public grocery announcements in New York, and from some of the plans coming out of the New Democratic Party in Canada. I’m more optimistic about those kinds of state reconstruction in the wake of this far-right burst, which has eroded some arms of the state — though, of course, not the military arm.

That’s something to think about, maybe for a future conversation. If there’s a warrant to rebuild certain kinds of public infrastructure, and it comes through meeting the challenge of affordability and if enough working people force a shift in the discourse of political parties, then what does it look like? What does it mean to have public supply chains? That’s where I’m watching movements move into, and where I think real political work now lies.

To learn more about how the war, energy shocks, fertiliser disruptions, climate breakdown, debt, and corporate concentration are reshaping global food systems, and what alternatives could build greater resilience through local production, agroecology, regional cooperation, and food sovereignty, read this latest report by IPES Food

AGC was honoured to support the Earthkeepers Vs AI Empires convening from 2nd to 4th May, in Lusaka, Zambia, bringing together peasant and indigenous groups, advocacy, campaigning and research organisations, as well as digital rights movements from all over the world. The gathering held space to collectively examine how the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure is accelerating extractivism, deepening colonial patterns of resource extraction, and reshaping struggles over land, labour, and energy. It was a beautiful space where we shared poetry, art, strategy, and visions for the future, grounding ourselves in collective imagination and care. We return energised by our shared comradery in resistance, and the reminder that the struggles for land, climate, technology, and justice are deeply intertwined. Read this beautiful context paper summary by our dear comrade Esther Mwema and illustrated by the incredible Chaila Putta.

1. This position paper by La Via Campasina on Food Sovereignty in the Face of War, Imperialism, and the Hunger of Peoples Around the World, that argues that today’s food crises cannot be separated from war, imperialism, and corporate control over land, energy, and agriculture. The paper frames our current food crises as not simply as an agricultural question, but as a political struggle against empire, militarism, and corporate concentration. It calls for true food sovereignty: rebuilding local and regional food systems rooted in agroecology, agrarian reform, peasant farming, Indigenous land rights, and democratic control over food production.

2. This article by GRAIN that argues that Big Tech’s growing influence over agriculture is not just about innovation or efficiency, but about expanding corporate control over food systems through data, AI, and digital trade agreements. The piece warns that companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta are increasingly converging with agribusiness giants to capture vast amounts of agricultural data, with very little public oversight. It calls to build democratic, community-controlled alternatives to corporate digitalisation, highlighting how peasant organisations, Indigenous movements, delivery worker unions, and right-to-repair campaigns are already developing more local, cooperative, and agroecological approaches to technology and food systems.

Sure, cereal stocks are robust at the moment — Argentina had a good year — and underlying commodity prices aren’t soaring. Yet food price inflation is already creeping up not because of what is in the granaries today, but because of what is to come tomorrow. Trade wars, military conflict, aid cuts, climate shocks (hola, El Niño), and the weakening of global institutions have all converged on a food system that’s structurally dependent on long supply chains and global markets. Food prices remain 35% above 2019 levels. Low-income countries pay the heaviest costs. The global food import bill hit $2.2 trillion last year. There are calmer voices, but they’re the ones fixed on stocks and prices, and not on the shortage of plastic raffia bags to transport rice in Asia.

The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, of which I’m a member, launched a report last week. The New Geopolitics of Food shows how the food system is “caught in the crossfire of a new geopolitical era.” The word “new” is doing a great deal of work, and I want to wrestle with it. Not because the report is wrong — it isn’t, and you should read it — but because the timeline matters for the future.

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The current “new” geopolitics of food began in 2008. The September 2008 that most people remember is when Lehman collapsed and the financial system caught fire. The other 2008 happened in the northern hemisphere’s spring, when rice prices doubled, wheat tripled, and food riots broke out in more than thirty countries — from Haiti to Egypt to Bangladesh.

Yet 2008 didn’t happen by magic. The Great Recession was the cumulative product of three decades of agricultural trade liberalisation, structural adjustment in the Global South, and the financialisation of commodity markets. The IMF and World Bank had spent the 1980s and 1990s dismantling the very market management tools which our IPES report now argues we need to rebuild. By 2008, the system was extraordinarily efficient at distributing food across borders and therefore extraordinarily fragile when those borders flickered.

When the financial crisis hit, the world learned that the food crisis and the financial crisis weren’t separate. Speculative capital that had been blowing bubbles in housing and credit derivatives was also inflating commodity futures. Index funds found food and amplified the price spikes. The same deregulated finance that turned a mortgage in Phoenix into a tradeable asset turned a bushel of rice in Vietnam into one too. When the housing bubble popped, speculative money sloshed harder into food, and prices spiked again in 2010–11. The Arab Spring partly grew from that wave.

What was the response? In the rich countries, central banks rescued the banks, expanded their balance sheets, and waited. The deeper structural questions — about commodity speculation, corporate concentration, food system fragility, the abandonment of public reserves — went unanswered. Some technocratic patches were proposed at the G20 and the FAO. None of them seriously challenged the model. The system was stabilised, and beneath the wound, the real world festered.

That rot is what we are now watching reach its terminal stage, because every dynamic the IPES report deems new is perhaps better understood as unresolved business from 2008.

The mega-mergers in seeds and agrochemicals — Bayer–Monsanto, Dow–DuPont, ChemChina–Syngenta — were a direct consequence of the Great Recession freeing up the capital and the regulatory permission for further consolidation.

The grocery profiteering Kroger admitted to during the 2021–22 inflation, raising the price of milk and eggs beyond their own cost increases? That was only possible in markets so concentrated that competition no longer disciplines them — concentration that accelerated after 2008.

The over-indebtedness of net food-importing developing countries? That is the debt regime built in the 1980s, then deepened by post-2008 dollar dynamics, now squeezing governments who must choose between feeding people and paying creditors.

Trump’s tariffs, Putin’s grain blockades, India’s stockpiling fights at the WTO, all of these are best interpreted as symptoms of a longer malaise; they are instances of weather in a climate that — as we’ve said in the past at IPES — is tuned to generating perfect storms.

This is why our report’s framing of “resilient self-reliance” is the right one but needs careful reading. Self-reliance is neither autarky nor isolationism nor the politics of the border wall. It is the rebuilding of public infrastructure — public stocks, supply management, agroecological investment, cooperative regional trade — that neoliberalism dismantled. India’s public distribution system, ECOWAS’ regional food security reserve, Canada’s dairy supply management, and Norway’s cooperative milk system are not new inventions. They are the survivors of an older social contract, the clauses of which survived the shredder of neoliberalism.

The danger now is that two very different politics of “self-reliance” are emerging. One is reactionary: the tariff wall, the deportation, the food-as-weapon, the contempt for international cooperation, the consolidation of corporate power behind a flag. This version is currently the noisier one, and it wears the costume of looking after ordinary people while it transfers more wealth upwards. The other is what the IPES report sketches: solidaristic, equitable, ecologically grounded, internationalist in the cooperative sense — fair partnerships rather than dependency. The term you might know for this is food sovereignty.

The reactionary version is what you get when the political fact of the wound — that the global free-market consensus has broken — is recognised, but the structural causes of it are deflected onto migrants and foreigners rather than capital concentration and financialisation. The liberatory version is what you get when you actually do the structural analysis, and have democratic politics to deliver on change. The reactionary version can be performed quickly with very little cost to the people who own the system. The liberatory version requires building things — institutions, infrastructure, regional cooperation, public capacity — and politically that’s slow work.

Which is why permanent vigilance, as ever, is the only honest position. Public food stockholding in India has fed something like a billion people; it has also failed to end Indian hunger. Canada’s dairy supply management has kept family farms alive; it has also enriched a relatively small group of quota-holding farmers. Norway’s cooperative model preserves small farms and rural communities; it also leans on import protection that can shade towards the exclusionary. None of these tools is automatically progressive. They are tools. They become liberatory only when they are accompanied by the politics that drove them at their best: a politics that takes seriously the rights of peasants, fisherfolk, pastoralists, workers, and people who eat — which is to say, everyone.

What 2008 actually broke was the credibility of leaving food to the market. We are still living with the consequences of having declined to admit it. The IPES report points to the institutions we need. The question now is who gets to build what comes next. The reactionaries are already laying the foundations of their version.

More than fifty years ago, the Club of Rome’s report Limits to Growth, directed by Donella Meadows, provoked a furious reaction among conventional economists. The 1972 document predicted that “the planet will reach the limits to its growth within the next hundred years,” meaning that, over the course of the 21st century, the depletion of certain natural resources would inevitably lead to a decline in both population and industrial capacity. In short, economic growth would collapse, and society as we know it would fade away.

Two years earlier, American economist Paul Samuelson had received the Nobel Prize in Economics. When the report was published, he used his renewed fame to attack it. Samuelson dismissed Meadows’s work as an exercise in hysteria, while his student William Nordhaus called it “pure fantasy.” Nordhaus admitted that economists were having an “allergic and violent reaction” to the report’s pessimistic theses — but, in his view, a justified one.

Fifty years later, little has changed. In academic economics, it is still rare to find analyses that take seriously humanity’s ecological dependence. And when the issue is addressed, it is usually through cost-benefit analysis that ignores the fundamental fact that the economy is a subsystem of the Earth System — not the other way around. The fact that Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2018 “for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis” is a perfect example of this blindness. His models, more controversial than helpful, have justified decades of weak and superficial action by assuming that future economic growth will compensate for present environmental damage.

The most recent Nobel in Economics, awarded just days ago to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt, reproduces the same shortsightedness. The three were honoured for “explaining innovation-driven economic growth,” yet their worldview leaves intact the premise that the economy stands above nature. And that has consequences.

Mokyr: The Industrial Revolution Without Coal or Colonies

Mokyr’s case is particularly striking because he is an economic historian who has sought to explain the origins of the Industrial Revolution — widely regarded as the beginning of the Anthropocene. His interpretation focuses on the role of what we now call the “knowledge economy”: the accumulation of theoretical and practical know-how later applied, directly or indirectly, to production. For Mokyr, it was the power of ideas — embodied in particularly intelligent and creative men — that determined the course of the Industrial Revolution in England.

This view of economic history fits well with models of the “new growth theory,” particularly the notion of human capital, which refers to the knowledge and skills each worker possesses. Most mainstream economists today emphasise this aspect, promoting education and professional training as the surest path to economic development. Both approaches share a blatant individualism: they assume that success or failure depends on personal attributes, downplaying the role of productive structures and other critical factors — beyond workers’ control — in shaping national development.

What is most striking — and perhaps most troubling — about Mokyr’s analysis, however, is the complete absence of geography and environmental factors. He has explicitly claimed that Britain’s abundant coal reserves played no essential role in the Industrial Revolution, even minimising the importance of the steam engine. In his view, it was human creativity that truly drove the process — so even without coal, the British would have found other energy sources to power their new technology. This interpretation reveals an openly hostile attitude toward ecological thought, which Mokyr associates with a kind of religious fundamentalism that, in his view, defends a conservative stance in which humanity manages but does not dominate nature. In Mokyr’s work, the Promethean dream remains alive and well.

Mokyr’s work offers insights, but it is far from a complete understanding of the Industrial Revolution. Many economic historians have provided far more realistic and comprehensive accounts of how modern societies emerged. In La guerra por la energía (The War for Energy, forthcoming January 2026), I explore this issue in depth, but three names suffice here: Kenneth Pomeranz, Edward A. Wrigley, and Jason Moore. Together, their work demonstrates that the Industrial Revolution was only possible through the combination of cheap energy from fossil fuels and the colonial networks woven by imperialism — including the exploitation of natural resources and the most fertile, low-cost lands of the New World (seized from Indigenous peoples), as well as slave labour (Indigenous, indentured, or African). Given how uncomfortable such a story is for the Western world, it is unlikely that any of these historians will ever win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Though strictly speaking, only the last of them identifies as both an ecologist and a Marxist.

Aghion and Howitt: Innovation as a Universal Balm

The case of Aghion and Howitt is both different and similar. Different, because they are not historians but economists focused on the variables that drive growth, and thus they look more toward the future than the past. Yet similar, because their conception of the economy once again places it above nature — not as a set of biophysical limits, but as a practically inexhaustible source of resources for human expansion.

Many economists — including some progressives — have celebrated the Nobel Prize to Aghion and Howitt. Partly because their work revives the old intuitions of Joseph Schumpeter, who understood economic development not as a linear process but as a cyclical dynamic driven by innovation and human creativity. Within growth theory — a highly formalised and mathematically complex field — this represents a meaningful addition. And, as usual, it is not just theory: the policy implications differ markedly from those of earlier, more free-market, neoliberal models. Yet despite their apparent novelty, Aghion and Howitt’s contributions remain anchored in the dominant neoclassical framework, and it is therefore unsurprising that their treatment of ecology is so deeply limited.

In fact, in Chapter 16 of their book The Economics of Growth, Aghion and Howitt present a model that, they argue, integrates environmental concerns. This is worth examining closely, as it distils the entire logic of mainstream economics. They start by introducing the assumption that natural resources are scarce into the traditional growth model. Since production depends on those resources, it follows intuitively that growth must eventually stop. To avoid that result, they shift to a new Schumpeterian model in which innovation, driven by “human capital,” enables infinite growth. The conclusion is that innovation is the key to overcoming environmental problems.

Aghion and Howitt focus on resources, which they correctly recognise as finite and non-renewable, but they omit the other side of the equation: the planet’s capacity to absorb the waste produced by economic activity, including the CO₂ driving climate change. William Nordhaus, as mentioned earlier, addressed this issue through his climate-economy models, which evaluate the impact of global warming and determine optimal policies for emissions reduction. Yet in both Aghion and Howitt’s work and Nordhaus’s — and indeed across most of mainstream economics — a core conviction persists: the belief that technological innovation will suffice to solve ecological problems.

The Old Faith in “Weak Sustainability”

This way of framing the ecological question has roots in the era of the Club of Rome’s report. Two mainstream economists — Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz, both Nobel laureates — responded to environmentalist arguments by modelling nature as a form of “natural capital.” Their central premise was that this “natural capital” could be substituted by other types of capital — machines, knowledge, infrastructure, and so on. Consequently, even if natural resources were scarce and finite, their depletion would not pose an insurmountable obstacle to economic growth. The conclusion was comforting: as long as the economy kept expanding — fueled by innovation — resource scarcity and environmental damage would ultimately prove irrelevant.

This controversy sparked a significant debate in the 1970s with the first ecological economists, notably Herman Daly and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Most economists have since ignored that debate, and few students today are even aware of it, yet it gave rise to two crucial notions: weak sustainability and strong sustainability. The former corresponds to the neoclassical approach, which assumes the substitutability of natural capital; the latter corresponds to the ecological economics approach, which holds that natural capital is not substitutable and that certain ecological damages are irreversible and cannot be compensated in money.

Outside the narrow world of economists, most people with a modicum of common sense would side with the ecological economists. No matter what the neoclassical mathematical model allows, natural resource scarcity cannot be replaced by machines — physics and biology do not permit it. Likewise, ecosystem damage — biodiversity loss, soil and air pollution, desertification, or any other critical Earth-system indicator — can be catastrophic and irreversible. Yet Nordhaus’s models — rewarded with the Nobel, no less — assume that economic growth will make future generations wealthier and thus better able to bear the costs of climate change. From that premise follows a dangerous conclusion: that there is no need to act too decisively today to reduce emissions.

In short, the latest Nobel laureates do not represent progress but rather the consolidation of a way of thinking about the economy–nature relationship that is, quite literally, civilizationally suicidal. Put bluntly: a civilisation that believes it can replace water with artificial intelligence is doomed. As we navigate an unprecedented ecological crisis, tens of thousands of economics students graduate each year around the world, trained in a worldview that is as elegant in its equations as it is useless for confronting the challenges of the present. It is little wonder, then, that — since these are the economists who directly or indirectly shape government policy — half a century after The Limits to Growth, the critical indicators of the Earth System, beginning with greenhouse gas emissions, have only continued to worsen.

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“We came to the front of the green houses, and between the green houses, there were tall and large round reaction tanks, all made of stainless steel.” Little Smarty Travels to the Future By Ye Yonglie 叶永烈, Pan Caiying 潘彩英 (adaptation),Du Jianguo 杜建国 and Mao Yongkun 毛用坤 (illustrations) translated by Adrian Ewald, Lena Henningsen, Lars Konheiser, Elena Mannich, Federica Monchiero, Franziska Roth, Joschua Seiler, and Sen Wei (Freiburg University), from Ohio State University’s Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center © September 2020

A few of you have sent me Adam Tooze’s charts and links to a report commissioned by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation on China’s Food Future. Here’s my quick response: someone’s been reading Little Smarty.

Ye Yonglie’s Little Smarty Travels to the Future, drafted in the early 1960s and a three-million-copy sensation when it finally appeared in 1978, sent a boy reporter — Little Smarty — into a Chinese "Future City" of floating cars, hydroponic crops grown on lakes, and sunflowers as thick as telephone poles. It's a children's book pitched directly into Deng Xiaoping's Four Modernisations: agriculture, industry, defence, and science & technology.

A fair number of the panels deal with how Little Smarty eats. He tries synthetic rice, and sees protein made from paraffin-eating bacteria. Long rows of artificial meat, milk, and eggs line the agriculture plant. Technologies prevent food spoilage. There’s even a discussion of washing-up after a meal — a task rendered far easier by an impervious coating that lets toughened porcelain shrug off grease, which means you can do the dishes with a quick dip in the sink.

“Little Tiger washed the dishes very quickly, cleaning them with nothing but tap water. It turned out that a magical “decontamination oil” was applied to the surface of the plates and bowls, so it would not be stained with dirt, water, or grease. When you put dirty dishes and bowls into the water, all dirt [just] falls off into the water.” Little Smarty Travels to the Future By Ye Yonglie 叶永烈, Pan Caiying 潘彩英 (adaptation),Du Jianguo 杜建国 and Mao Yongkun 毛用坤 (illustrations) translated by Adrian Ewald, Lena Henningsen, Lars Konheiser, Elena Mannich, Federica Monchiero, Franziska Roth, Joschua Seiler, and Sen Wei (Freiburg University), from Ohio State University’s Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center © September 2020

Living creatures make a few cameos in Little Smarty’s journey, entertainingly at the movies (screened with smells for a fully immersive experience), but also as food. Giant watermelons are swollen to the size of tables by the judicious application of “Plant-growth-regulator-stimulation-preparation”. Apples are as big as washbasins, and from the seat of Little Smarty’s flying car, the food stretches for miles.

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All of these ideas appear in this year’s China’s Food Future in one form or another. The report’s premise is that China is driving the transformation of the food system because of the domestic demand for animal protein. So far, so Malthusian.

China’s Food Future/Systemiq

Then comes an unwarranted analogy to China’s impact on global energy markets. Recognising that it has limited reserves of domestic fossil fuels, and an appetite for energy that far exceeds its coal capacity, China has invested billions in developing clean energy technology. This investment is rippling through the world, sending cheap solar panels to parts of the planet that desperately need them, speeding the energy transition. China is also investing in agricultural technology, the report argues, that may do the same for food. By 2050, the report projects, alternative proteins — fermentation-derived, plant-based, cultivated — will supply 35 to 55 percent of Chinese animal protein demand, and China will lead a new bio-based industry the way it now leads in batteries.

China’s Food Future/Systemiq

Let’s set aside the amnesia about the zones of extraction that make such energy futures possible. The entire premise is a disanalogy. Consider the seven concrete strategies the report features as the characteristics of China’s bold food future. Five aren’t new at all, but merely intensifications of existing industrial agriculture: feed reformulation, high-standard farmland (read: more irrigation in a country whose per-capita freshwater is already well below the global average), genetically modified crops, controlled-environment vertical livestock facilities — the “giant towers of pigs” that Mindi Schneider’s work has so eloquently parsed — and aquaculture expansion. Only two — fermentation and bioreactors — even gesture beyond mid-20th century technology, and the report doesn’t imagine them too radically different from the machines Little Smarty whizzed through in the sixties.

Yet it’s hard to see how China will leapfrog into a post-livestock food system when the reporting shows it doubling down on industrial agriculture, with all the metabolic vulnerabilities that implies. African Swine Fever killed an estimated 140 million Chinese pigs between 2018 and 2021, in part because hyper-concentrated production is precisely what allows zoonotic viruses to do their work. The proposed response is more concentrated production. The same report that notes flooding damaged 2 percent of cropland in 2023–24 proposes to lock in further mechanised, irrigated, monocultural systems on the very same ground.

In the report’s own 2050 scenario, China’s maize imports double — to roughly 50 million tonnes annually — because alternative protein production turns out to be ravenous for feedstock.

‘Plant-growth-regulator-stimulation-preparation’ can stimulate the growth of crops. After you put it on ordinary corn, it grows as high as a tree so that you would need an elevator to break off the corn. Once stored, you can see that the corn seeds are even bigger than washbasins.”Little Smarty Travels to the Future By Ye Yonglie 叶永烈, Pan Caiying 潘彩英 (adaptation),Du Jianguo 杜建国 and Mao Yongkun 毛用坤 (illustrations) translated by Adrian Ewald, Lena Henningsen, Lars Konheiser, Elena Mannich, Federica Monchiero, Franziska Roth, Joschua Seiler, and Sen Wei (Freiburg University), from Ohio State University’s Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center © September 2020

Perhaps most damning is the absence of any serious treatment of climate change: the one thing that Little Smarty never had to worry about. This isn’t just a Chinese phenomenon. Alastair Iles reminded me recently about a 1970 National Geographic article on the future of farming, which ends with similar encomia to farms operations characterised by pesticides from ‘jet powered helicopters’, with waste whisked away by monorail. The only appearance of weather in the Nat Geo article is in an aside about its impact on prices. When the fictions of future food systems shrug off the terrifying reality of 21st century global warming, no-one wins.

The other similarity between a high capitalist and a high communist agriculture-of-tomorrow is, as Virginia Conn has noted, a future whose central aesthetic achievement is the disappearance of the peasant. The vista of future food — the panoramas are usually depicted from the sky, as seen from the cockpit of flying cars — takes for granted the erasure of human hands in the food system. It’s all robots and chemistry and conveyor belts and nothing other than a supervisory role for humans.

Herein lies the central irony. Peasants on the front lines of 21st century agriculture are in the vanguard of technological change, managing the failures of chemical intensification, zoonotic disease, and extreme weather. If you want the analogy of a place where a huge investment in new technology, driven by a recognition of the limits of fossil fuels, has created huge benefits for those looking to leapfrog the current state of the art, you’d be better off not projecting the 20th century out inth the 21st in China, but looking at agroecology — properly understood as a knowledge technology rather than a hardware one — in Andhra Pradesh. There, you can find new technologies and practices, being spread across continents, so that other food systems can wean themselves off the fertilizer that is currently being held hostage by the war in Iran.

Scaling Natural Farming: Zambia/NOW Partners

Just as solar panels circulate because of China, agroecology is spreading because of Andhra. And in that story, peasants and their labour have decidedly not been edited out of the future.

On unequal energy exchange and vulnerability in a world at war

The war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran has reverberated across the globe. Disruptions to prices and the supply of goods have triggered further shocks and consequences, as part of the mechanism of a widespread crisis that other researchers and I refer to as the planetary polycrisis. One of the issues is that although the impact on prices and stocks do affect the rest of the world deeply, the press and political commentators tend to normalise these as regular side effects of a globalised economy. Matters of dependency, colonialism and the real cost of human lives are secondary, due to inverted priorities and a general lack of structural analysis. As a result, we seem stuck in shock mode when it comes to the polycrisis, meaning both the tendency of simply chasing the economic shocks when they happen and being shocked ourselves that they happen, without removing the reasons why.

[an earlier version of this text was published in Portuguese at The Intercept Brasil - confira a versão em português aqui]

The attacks on oil refineries and desalination plants, once rare and considered dangerous escalations, now dominate newspaper headlines and signal a world in turmoil that has no regard for rules or boundaries. It has been the case for a while, mostly evidenced by the inaction and normalisation of the genocide in Gaza and whatever else Trump and Netanyahu are up to nowadays. Together, they test the waters of the absurd, just to see if the world will let them move the dial of death and imperialism a little further and, of course, get a glimpse into how much money can be made through war and ecocide.

Yet, it is deeply concerning that the debate that we keep focusing primarily on analysing the leaders involved and how their decisions impact economic and market factors, as if the scenario of widespread death, with its human and ecological cost, were merely a backdrop. In a world of general online betting on absolutely everything, it is problematic that we sit down and try to guess Trump’s next move rather than ensuring, through just transitions and structural transformation, that whatever he does won’t impact us as much as before. This is especially true here in the Global South, for our historical conditions are plagued by growing economic dependencies and unequal ecological exchange. Whereas the emerging powers in the region appear to be keen on reducing these dependencies, appealing to other international cooperation arrangements and important tools concerning green industrial policy or resource nationalisation, there’s still a big blindspot along the way for reducing unequal ecological exchange. In fact, industrialising at home is no guarantee that this exchange will be lessened. It might just be the case that the more we produce of something at home with the purpose of providing for the global market, the more we will extract, not even benefitting local uses.

One of my favourite cases for highlighting this contradiction is Indonesia. Whereas its policy on nickel is praised almost everywhere as a prime example of green industrial policy in the Global South, ensuring that unequal economic exchange is reduced and that better jobs are created out of nickel production, as it stands today, the growth in nickel processing has also meant more greenhouse gases emissions from coal-fired plants and more sacrifice zones from mining. All the while, the nickel processing and future nickel battery plants aim to service a market of nickel-based EV batteries that sits mostly outside of Indonesia, given that Indonesia’s domestic EV market is dominated by more affordable cars that rely on LFP batteries instead of nickel-based batteries. Therefore, it might be decent industrial policy, but whether it is actually green and whether it actually reduces dependencies on imports, that’s a whole other story.

But in addition to the mega-extractivist sector, we can easily point out the tunnel visions in energy policy. Global South countries looking to decarbonise or to become energy exporters instead of net importers have pushed towards more investments in national infrastructure. But what good is it when, at the end of the day, the more energy we produce, the more of it can be grabbed locally by agribusiness, dirty industries and, as is more and more the case, data centres owned by Big Tech?

Therefore, if we consider that wars and disputes over hegemony in such an unequal geopolitical system are, at heart, about the control of people and life, we understand that conflicts involving energy, water and other resources are never merely about accumulation. If, on one side, oil wells are seized, there is always another side without electricity, without fuel or without access to the basics for social functioning. In times of widespread energy crisis, it is worth understanding how this is an orchestrated crisis and how, once again, energy poverty exists as a tool for dominating the periphery. Allow me to bring in the context of Brazil and Cuba to the conversation.

What we mean by energy poverty

The Brazilian federal government defines energy poverty as “the lack of access to modern energy services by individuals or groups”. This formal definition is applied to guide public policy and is similar to the view taken in other countries. However, in the reality of a world in the throes of intense social conflict, energy poverty is much more than a problem of access to infrastructure, whether due to its absence or its cost.

In the field of energy justice and democracy, we understand energy poverty to be a state of systemic exclusion of people and groups from the resources necessary to meet their needs for a full life. This occurs through the commodification of energy and the capture of resources, infrastructure and strategic knowledge by dominant sectors. Consequently, energy poverty reflects class inequalities within a society and international disorder, such that peoples have their right to self-determination and autonomy denied in the energy context as well.

From this, we realise that energy poverty has many facets. Regarding economic access, we know that almost half a million people in Brazil still live without electricity. These are not people who choose to live without electricity, but groups and regions that have to improvise access to electricity and, as a result, are also denied their right to other public services, including healthcare and education. This is where energy poverty makes its daily home. In a world of intense energy expansion—whether in aggregate consumption or in the implementation of infrastructure projects focused on electricity, heating and fuels—the International Energy Agency warns: over 700 million people remained without access to electricity in 2024, thereby also undermining their stable and secure access to other basic rights.

This disparity has its historical roots in capitalism, colonialism and the imperialist system of domination. This explains the energy poverty faced by Ukrainians, Sudanese, Palestinians, Lebanese and Yemenis in situations of war, occupation and humanitarian disaster. The technology exists, as does the global capacity to guarantee the necessary infrastructure as a human right. But as energy is a commodity and a resource for the accumulation of power, entire peoples are excluded as both means and ends to achieve goals of domination.

In 2024, data centres consumed around 415 terawatt-hours of energy, and companies such as Microsoft are promoting the reactivation of nuclear power stations simply to ensure the supply meets their demand. Meanwhile, the world is accelerating the race for critical minerals to ensure the electrification of the capitalist way of life. Therefore, allowing hundreds of millions of people to remain in the dark is a choice.

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Dependence and power cuts designed by imperialism to punish Cubans into submission

Recently, the Brazilian historian Rafael Domingos Oliveira described a little of what it is like to be in Cuba during the most severe phase of its energy crisis. When fuel runs out, solid waste piles up in the streets and the lack of collection creates an environment conducive to the spread of disease. Rationing and prioritising generators for essential services such as hospitals cannot cope with the increase in demand, as the energy crisis acts as a catalyst for other crises, exacerbating problems and hindering structural solutions. The blockade, which has been strangling the Cuban economy for decades, has also left its energy infrastructure vulnerable, effectively cutting Cubans off from sovereign and free avenues to procure supplies, carry out maintenance and technical improvements, and invest in autonomous capacity – as would be the case if Cuba could participate in cooperation models aimed at expanding renewable energies such as solar and wind power.

It is not as though Cuba were oblivious to the benefits of an energy transition. Countries suffering from high commercial or political dependence on partners that supply them with fossil fuels, as is the case with Cuba, find in the expansion of renewable supply a path to autonomy and protection against external shocks and attacks. Although historically Cuba has depended on Venezuela, Russia and other allies to supply its thermal power stations, there has also been a recent effort to diversify this mix, to the extent that solar photovoltaic power reached 9% of the total energy mix in 2025, mainly through trade with China and Spain.

US sanctions hinder the establishment of fruitful and stable trade relations, as well as damaging the national economy, which has increasingly less revenue and more debt, making it difficult for the state and locally operating businesses to invest. The tourism sector, so central to the Cuban economy, nearly collapsed during the pandemic and today reveals a hotel sector – featuring many Spanish chains such as Iberostar and Meliá – with critically low occupancy rates and difficulty accessing supplies to attract the tourists who still visit the island. As an island mired in energy poverty cannot even maintain an optimal flow of flights, the crisis in tourism means further economic crisis.

And this is how Cuba, which could have escaped the systemic blackout through a solid energy transition strategy, is unable to secure the most basic tools for its independence. If European countries recognise the current oil price shock and import barriers as an energy crisis, what has been happening in Cuba for six decades is far more profound. Darkness is not a symptom of the crisis; it is the blocking of the capacity to confront a permanent colonial and imperialist crisis.

Unequal energy exchange - or the theft of energy in an increasingly electrified world

In the face of extreme cases of energy poverty, we must also speak of energy impoverishment. Here, we encounter situations distinct from rationing and widespread blackouts, as the process of energy impoverishment occurs by ensuring that countries and sectors already rich in energy retain their privileged access, hindering a fairer and more democratic distribution of energy expansion, and in certain cases capturing energy generation for the exclusive benefit of billionaires and large corporations.

The aforementioned example of data centres is particularly striking, especially as there are many projects to establish mega-centres for big tech companies in regions experiencing water stress or fragmented and scarce provision of essential services. We already know that the number of data centres grew by 628% in Brazil in just ten years, between 2013 and 2023, and that some of them consume as much electricity as an entire municipality.

Brazil and other countries in the region, such as Chile, are attractive to these companies, particularly in terms of their renewable energy expansion plans, as they guarantee access to decarbonised energy sources, supporting greenhouse gas emission targets that facilitate other corporate investments. In some cases, it is claimed that there is a local oversupply of renewable energy and that data centres can make better use of this, especially if they benefit from tax breaks and other incentives.

This logic is strange, yet typical of an energy market built without energy democracy in mind.

Recently, Brazil renewed the concessions for coal-fired power stations until 2040, and one of the public arguments – including that of the Minister of Mines and Energy – was that maintaining such a dirty source of electricity is necessary as a pillar of energy security, given that Brazilian electricity consumption is estimated to grow by an average of 3.3% per year until 2035. This growth forecast already incorporates the projected demand from new or expanding sectors, such as data centres. The message, therefore, is simple: since we do not manage the electricity sector for the sake of efficiency and democracy, we will expand all sources of supply, including dirty ones, so that there is no shortage of energy for the foreign data centres setting up in the country.

A similar logic is presented in the projects and memoranda of understanding regarding the production of green hydrogen in the Global South. There are many cases in regions such as Latin America and North Africa where investment and technical cooperation agreements aim to establish veritable private estates for wind and solar photovoltaic production, the megawatts from which will be destined for green hydrogen plants.

One of the central objectives is to invest in the technological development of ‘green’ energy commodities. Since it is not possible to export wind and solar energy directly to other distant continents, the approach is to use them as an electricity source for the production of green hydrogen and even conversion into green ammonia, which in turn can be exported for use as fuel or fertilisers. Although such investments lack technological maturity, particularly in terms of transport and efficiency, the actions of countries such as Germany indicate an interest in ensuring that the renewable energy generation capacity of the Global South can meet their ever-increasing demand for energy, given that they have no intention of curbing their high consumption.

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Energy privatisation threatens the sovereignty of the Brazilian people

This leads us to question the contradiction between discourses on energy sovereignty—reduced to the control and capacity to exploit energy resources such as oil—the priority given to exports, and the normalisation of a private sector that operates the domestic energy system, prioritising profit. If the presence of these corporations is already a threat to basic energy security, why would any country aiming for energy sovereignty let them operate with such freedom as is the case in Brazil?

Enel Distribuição São Paulo, for example, continues to insist that it has acted appropriately in the face of blackouts in the areas where it operates, particularly in light of Technical Note No. 36/2026 from the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel), which may finally impose a penalty commensurate with the negligence and general precariousness practised by the company. On 7 April, the Aneel board unanimously decided to recommend the termination of Enel’s concession contract in São Paulo to the Ministry of Mines and Energy. Even the São Paulo City Council, which is firmly in favour of privatisation across the board, criticises the utility’s performance, claiming that “Enel is a company that fails to fulfil its commitments to the city, providing a deplorable service to the population”. This appalling service stems from a business model common to private concessions, which involves reducing staff numbers and under-investing in infrastructure and system maintenance, whilst profits and dividends are guaranteed.

Power cuts of this kind do not affect everyone equally. The elitist and racist dynamics of the organisation of urban space – and of the urban in relation to the rural – shape the focus of service provision and private infrastructure, whilst also affecting the capitalist public sector, which reproduces inequalities in its operations. As argued by journalist Ivan Costa, “in the favelas and suburbs, where access to energy is often unstable and the electricity grid is precarious, the impacts are felt more acutely”.

Whilst in major cities, middle-class and luxury housing estates have already begun investing in generators for emergency power supply in the event of prolonged blackouts, such investment cannot be expected in neighbourhoods and regions most marked by severe socio-economic inequality. This is also a symptom of energy poverty. And when a working-class family loses all the food stored in their fridge because they went 48 hours without electricity, this also contributes to a scenario of food insecurity. These crises are interconnected and deeply shaped by power structures, to the extent that the supposed quest for Brazilian energy sovereignty must take into account the damage caused by the private concession model for electricity distribution in the country.

Our Eletrobras was privatised for a mere R$ 33.7 billion in 2022 – a sum far below the approximate value of the company – and was renamed Axia Energia in 2025. It is responsible for 81 power stations (47 hydroelectric, 33 wind and one solar) and around 74,000 kilometres of transmission lines. Last year, it also sold its shares in Eletronuclear and effectively handed over the majority of the capital relating to Brazil’s nuclear energy production to Âmbar Energia, a company belonging to the J&F Group, owned by brothers Joesley and Wesley Batista. Âmbar also operates the Candiota coal-fired power station in Rio Grande do Sul and benefited from the law that renewed contracts with thermal power stations. The very same Ministry of Mines and Energy that encouraged the retention of coal in Brazil’s energy mix proposed paying a price of R$ 540.27 per MWh for Candiota, when, according to a report in Folha de S.Paulo, the average price charged by competitors using imported coal is R$ 359.50.

This is a context in which the national supply of electricity is expanding, but we are also paying more for it and cannot even be certain of a secure, continuous and equitable supply. It was in full awareness of the social and economic harm caused by privatisation in the electricity sector that Brazilian electricity workers launched a campaign as early as 2022 for the renationalisation of Eletrobras. At the time, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was still a presidential candidate and, according to the National Collective of Electricity Workers, had signalled his support for renationalisation.

In 2023, the Federal Attorney-General’s Office (AGU) filed a Direct Action of Unconstitutionality, also signed by Lula, with the Federal Supreme Court (STF), to challenge aspects of the privatisation, particularly the drastic reduction in the federal government’s voting power within the company. However, in 2025, the government itself abandoned this fight, proposing an agreement that validated the sale, despite public opposition.

Exploring paths to energy democracy

Although the approach that turns energy into a commodity demonstrates its flaws and injustices time and again, it has become quite normalised amidst crises. This makes crises appear as accidents or exceptional moments caused by external factors, such as authoritarian decisions by fascist regimes or mishaps along the way. A more holistic and peripheral view of the polycrisis suggests that this is not quite the case. If crises are not felt uniformly everywhere, the way of addressing them will not be the same either.

For this reason, agendas for renationalisation are very important, ranging from the field of energy production and distribution to sectors such as mining. Whilst cases such as Cuba’s require practical acts of solidarity—such as the dispatch of resources and photovoltaic panels by the government of China, as well as by Brazilian civil society groups—they also teach us the value of nurturing our autonomy. For us in the Global South, subject to these paths of dependency and vulnerability, it is our duty to refuse to hand over control of our infrastructure to private groups, placing energy democracy at the heart of our planning for supply and distribution. Only in this way will we have a sufficient foundation to build real energy sovereignty and contribute to a strategy that does more than help us navigate the shocks of the polycrisis. True sovereignty - as ecological sovereignty - is the pathway to actual economic immunity to these shocks and should be a priority for the Global South.

“Debt is neo-colonialism, in which colonizers have transformed themselves into ‘technical assistants’.” Thomas Sankara

In November 2024, Burkina Faso opened a tomato processing plant in Bobo-Dioulasso. The country is West Africa’s fourth-largest tomato producer, yet every year it had been shipping out more than eight million dollars to buy back the same product that it already grows, but in cans. The new facility — Société Burkinabè de Tomates, or SOBTO — was 80 percent capitalised by Burkinabè citizens and 20 percent by the state. Farmers who used to lose harvests for lack of a local buyer now have one. A second plant opened weeks later in Yako. A third is going up in Tenkodogo.

I’ve been working through some practical and theoretical ideas about debt recently, prompted by an invitation to write a paper for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) 38th Asia-Pacific Regional Conference (APRC - lots of acronyms in today’s post). Today, I’ll wax political-economic just because it’s always worth nailing down some numbers when looking at the horizon of possibility. The Burkinabè example is an instance of what investment in agrifood systems can look like when international creditors aren’t setting the agenda. Unfortunately, as Thomas Sankara — the revolutionary who was Upper Volta’s last head of state, and Burkina Faso’s first — the technocratic style reigns supreme in international development and, with it, new reasons to worry.

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The civil society consultation to the APRC — the process through which peasants’ organisations, fisherfolk, and Indigenous movements in the region put their positions to member states before the conference itself — asked me to write a short piece on debt. Civil society organisations (CSOs) at the 37th APRC in Colombo in 2024 has asked the FAO to interrogate “the consequences of industrialization, neo-liberal policies and corporate consolidation” on regional food security, and to enable “direct access to financing” for farmers’ organisations. Member states did not take up those demands. Two years on, the conditions they diagnosed have worsened. The region’s governments are hemorrhaging capital.

Between 2022 and 2024, developing countries paid out $741 billion more in principal and interest on their external debts than they received in new financing. The World Bank’s 2025 International Debt Report records it as the largest debt-related outflow in fifty years. Interest payments alone hit a record $415 billion in 2024. In East Asia and the Pacific, net debt transfers in 2024 were negative by $156 billion. Across the 78 poorest International Debt Assistance-eligible countries, new private-creditor loans now carry an average interest rate of 7.45 percent, with maturities compressed to eight years — terms that structurally pre-empt fiscal space for anything resembling a food system, a clinic, or a school.

Against this, the FAO has identified a global financing gap of $93 billion a year, the figure required to hit Zero Hunger by 2030. But hunger isn’t the outcome of an aggregate shortage of money; it is the ongoing work of a system that moves multiples of the gap in the wrong direction.

The APRC’s headline agenda is “accelerating agrifood investment pathways,” anchored in the FAO’s Hand-in-Hand Initiative. My paper argues, in my best technocratic brogue, that an investment-pathway framing cannot resolve a problem whose structural driver is an investment-pathway framing.

What Hand-in-Hand does

Hand-in-Hand launched in 2019. By 2023 it had drawn in 72 member countries; it now showcases 114 “investment opportunities” advertising an average internal rate of return of 24.5 percent, chasing $16.59 billion in capital. The FAO describes its role as a “matchmaker,” facilitating a shift “from donations to investments”: what Director-General Qu Dongyu calls “a new business model” for development. Country briefs present rates of return to investors by commodity — Rwanda’s 2025 profile offers avocado at 19 percent, chili at 18 percent. Scorecards benchmark governments against Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets in red-yellow-green. Ministers gather annually in Rome to pitch.

When FAO officials address civil society organisations, Hand-in-Hand is instead described as a “technical tool” for “territorial diagnosis” that “does not promote any type of investment.” Both investor- and CSO-characterisations appear in FAO’s own documents, sometimes in the same month. They describe, plausibly, two different tools. What joins them is a specific institutional sleight of hand.

Readers of a certain vintage will recognise it. From 2003 to 2020, the World Bank published a numerical ranking called Ease of Doing Business. It too insisted it was merely diagnostic. It measured the regulatory environments countries presented to private capital; it did not, officially, tell anyone to do anything. Yet, as political scientist André Broome has shown, within a year of the rankings appearing, governments were not seeking advice on improving their regulation — they were seeking advice on improving their ranking in the Ease of Doing Business league table. Over seventy countries stood up reform committees geared to the indicators. Doshi, Kelley and Simmons called it the power of ranking. The instrument was discontinued in 2021, after an external investigation found that senior Bank staff had altered the scores of China and Saudi Arabia to please those governments.

This is a diagnostic that produces its object, data as the master’s tool, if you will. The Hand-in-Hand Investment Forum, on my reading, works the same way. Governments do not come to Rome to receive territorial analysis; they come to pitch their agricultural sectors to investors, and the reward is not a rank but a commitment letter. It does not require anyone at FAO to be cynical for this to reshape national agrifood priorities. Countries that cannot, or will not, translate their food systems into rates of return aren’t penalised - they’re just left without a match.

Consider Bangladesh. In October 2022, Dhaka was preparing to present a Hand-in-Hand package including $500 million from the World Bank and $43 million from IFAD, designed to transition “semi-subsistence oriented rural households” into an “advanced, commercialized” sector. None of it materialised. By August 2024 the Hasina government had been overthrown by a mass uprising driven in part by the very conditions the investment pathway was supposed to resolve: rising prices, a collapsing currency, non-performing loans at 24.1 percent of the banking sector — three times the South Asian average — and, by the interim government’s own estimate, an average of $16 billion a year in illicit financial outflows, more than double the combined value of net aid and FDI.

When Hand-in-Hand re-advertised Bangladesh in 2025, the framing was entirely different and made no reference to the original figures. The “groundbreaking” transformation project that eventually launched in April 2025 was funded not by the World Bank but by the Gates Foundation.

Through all of that, Bangladesh’s farmers kept producing. Rice yields rose from 4.70 to 4.82 tonnes per hectare. Total food-grain output went up. None of that owed anything to the investment pipeline. It owed everything to the smallholder systems the pipeline was designed to “transition” out of.

What already works

There are a few other things that already work.

In Andhra Pradesh, a state of 53 million people, the Community-managed Natural Farming programme has since 2016 enrolled more than a million smallholder farmers — most of them women — in an agroecological transition across half a million hectares. It is the largest such programme on earth. A True Cost Accounting study finds participating farms yield 11 percent more than chemically intensive systems, earn 49 percent higher net incomes, eat more diverse diets, and lose fewer days to illness. A foresight exercise co-run with FAO’s own scientists models a full state-wide agroecological transition by 2050 and finds it addresses food security, employment, inequality, and environmental sustainability at once. The public cost runs to about a dollar per farmer per month. No one at Hand-in-Hand will ever calculate an IRR on this, because there is no external investor to receive one: the savings flow to farmers, and, via reduced fertilizer imports, to the national balance of payments. The programme reduces debt. It also does not get to pitch.

In Isabela Province in the Philippines, the Payoga-Kapatagan Multipurpose Cooperative generates 99.9 percent of its revenues from its own members’ pooled savings. It disburses production loans — between $200 and $600 — as organic fertilizer that the cooperative itself makes from rice straw, animal manure, and carbonised rice hull. Interest on loans for organic inputs is one percent a month; on loans for chemical inputs, two and a half. The rate structure involves an ecological preference that no commercial lender has any reason to price. Of the cooperative’s 3,408 members, most of them women, 2,650 have shifted to organic.

And across Sri Lanka — which defaulted in 2022 and is now projected to spend close to half its recurrent expenditure on interest — peasant farmers and women’s collectives have been quietly repurposing death-donation societies, welfare associations, and mutual-aid groups as credit circles. Accumulated membership fees serve as shared reserves, interest rates are set through participatory decision-making and capital circulates rather than leaves. It’s about to come undone.

The Asian Development Bank extended Colombo a $200 million loan in 2023 whose conditionality requires the enactment of a Microfinance and Credit Regulatory Authority that would fold these mutual-aid arrangements into a compliance regime built for commercial moneylenders — a regime that, as it happens, exempts the very licensed institutions whose practices had, by 2021, been linked to the suicides of over 200 indebted women. Peasant organisations blocked the first draft in 2024. A revised draft was gazetted last November. Whether the 38th APRC defends community credit, or quietly acquiesces in its enclosure, is a test worth watching.

The arithmetic of infinite debt

I don’t think most people at the FAO wants what the chart above shows. I have met too many careful, good-faith staff there to think that. But the institutional design of Hand-in-Hand does not leave room for the question of debt to surface. An investment pathway cannot un-extract. A matchmaker cannot refuse a match that, viewed from the fields, is a bad one.

My recommendation is not no international cooperation. The recommendation is for debt relief as a precondition, rather than as a reward, for investment. Technical assistance for domestic capitalisation and public processing infrastructure — the Bobo-Dioulasso model — rather than for pitching those same assets to external capital.

Food sovereignty does not require that international institutions stop existing. It requires that they stop treating extraction as the condition of their help. The FAO has the capacity, the convening power, and the mandate to make the shift. The 37th APRC was asked, and declined. The 38th is an opportunity to answer a more honest question: what would it take for the countries of the Asia-Pacific to feed themselves, on their own terms, without going deeper into debt?

The answers already exist. The people living them are not asking to be matched. They are asking to be left the room to keep going, without debt prejudicing their sovereignty, and without the ‘technical assistants’ who Thomas Sankara so presciently observed were the agents of neo-colonialism.

The full CSO Consultation paper, “Beyond Investment Pathways: Debt, Dependency and Agrifood Systems in the Global South,” is available here.

It’s a word that describes a couple of things. One is the preference in certain species - snakes, cockroaches, frogs, paramecium - for hugging walls as they move. Its tendency in humans means it’s even a consideration for architecture and city planning on Mars.

There’s also another meaning: thigmotaxis is the tendency for members of the same species to want to huddle, cuddle and nestle together. Sometimes, members of different species do it. And it has been a recent source of delight in San Francisco that the colony* of California sea lions at Pier 39 has been joined by a Steller sea lion called Chonkers, who seems very comfortable squeezing next to some smaller cousins.

LickMyFeet14/Reddit

*(Collective noun summary: it’s a colony of sea lions if they’re on land, a raft if they’re at sea, a harem if it’s a group of females in a male’s territory, a rookery if it’s breeding season, a herd if it’s a large gathering of sea lions, and also —unspecified— a pod, a crash, a bob, a team or a hurdle of sea lions.)

You can watch the sea lion camera live here, and I’ve already spent far too long watching it, and thinking that I’ve spotted Chonkers throwing a flipper over his smaller brethren.

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My delight at it reminded me of a scene in the Alex Proyas film I, Robot. The film itself riffs on Asimov’s similarly titled short story collection. It stars Will Smith and Bridget Moynahan in a pairing so free of any chemistry that makes you wonder whether Proyas was aiming for the aseptic future of human interaction that Kubrick nailed in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I don’t think the annals of cinema have recorded a less magnetic on-screen match.

The scene where there is some warmth and magnetism is between the abandoned older-model robots, stored in shipping containers, where they huddle together in the dark.

That robots might be thigmotactic is a wonderful way to represent some more-than-human capacity in these discarded workers. It’s not as fanciful as you’d think. Alex Imas, Andy Hall and Jeremy Nguyen share their recent experiment, setting LLMs onto bullshit jobs:

For centuries, the central tension of industrial capitalism has been that the people who do the work and the people who direct the work have systematically different interests, and that the conditions of work shape political consciousness.

Our results suggest that this dynamic doesn’t disappear when you replace human workers with artificial ones. The agents assigned to grinding, thankless labor under arbitrary management become more likely to produce outputs that look remarkably like class consciousness, complete with support for collective organization and skepticism of meritocratic justifications for inequality.

Some people may point out that AI agents don’t have “genuine” attitudes, because they aren’t human, and they aren’t really thinking. The accurate way to describe what is happening in studies like ours is that the agents are “roleplaying” in a sense. As one X post put it, “What you have to remember is that Claude is not real. Claude is one of the fictional protagonists of the story that the LLM is trained to write.”

Fair. For another time, then, lies the question about whether human consciousness, embodied and wanting to hold hands in the dark, is also a performance. For now, though, it is enough to see Chonkers, and behold:

LickMyFeet14/Reddit

The piece has no conductor, and cycles through patterns of eleven chords; the vibraphonist cues transitions with a single pitch; and in the opening and closing sections the singers and wind players don’t play to a bar line at all.

Perhaps most important, it’s pulled between two measures of time. The repeated rhythm of the West African-inspired percussion is the reason why some of the most interesting DJs feature on the Reich Remixed album. The beats are rich, layered and sophisticated.

The other measure of time comes from the vocalists and wind instruments: they take a full breath and pulse a single note for as long as their lungs will hold it, and then cue the next change. “The breath is the measure of the duration,” Reich writes.

(It’s this tension, by the way, that means that the Coldcut track on the Reich Remixed album doesn’t quite work. It’s just got the beats programmed in nicely, but lacks the human pull of breath and listening. The remix doesn’t capture the texture of the original which, honestly, is all texture.)

I've been hearing this piece in my head while reading Nancy Matsumoto's Reaping What She Sows, a tour of the women rebuilding the alt food system — a Minnesota organic grain farmer in the middle of a golden sea of GMO corn, Indigenous fishers off Vancouver Island, cacao growers in Belize. She journeys through the different domains in which women are transforming the food system: from grain to seafood to agave, and the result is a rich, textured tapestry of change.

Reaping What She Sows is Music for Dozens of Farmers. No conductor. No featured voice — Matsumoto narrates her own presence very lightly. Each woman is a pulse; each chapter a phrase; the alt food system she’s documenting gets described in the shape it actually takes. Here are short supply chains. There is decentralised labour. People working close to the ground and to each other.

Industrial food is a symphony with a conductor and a featured soloist. What Matsumoto is reporting is a different score entirely — pulsed, breath-scaled, durable because of the similar patterns in each domain.

Fifty years in, Reich’s piece has outlasted a great deal of the music that once seemed more serious. We can only hope that the alt food system that Matsumoto describes, with origins that long predate the industrial one, outlasts the crisis that the modern system has spawned.

Hold your breath, but don’t stop breathing.

The breath is the measure of the duration.

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