FAO Food Price Index

The relief is unlikely to last. Grocery prices soared after the spike of 2022 and remain roughly 35 per cent above pre-pandemic levels. What shoppers have lived through is not a spike but a ratchet that clicks upward with each shock and never quite clicks back. It’s what Isabella Weber calls seller’s inflation, and the next turn of the ratchet is already in the pipeline.

What the latest UN figures tell us

Five UN agencies have published their annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report. Lest I be accused of accentuating the negative, let me begin with the good news: the new figures describe a better year. Hunger fell for a third consecutive year, reaching 645mn people in 2025.

But 2.7bn people, a third of humanity, still could not afford a healthy diet. And for the first time, Africa is home to more hungry people than any other region: one in five of its population.

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Have a look at when African hunger climbed, and you’ll notice that it coincides with the period when the Gates Foundation was most active with its Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. More on that in this Rosa Luxemburg Foundation report.

The headline in the Guardian is that 645 million people are hungry and one in three cannot afford a healthy diet. To be clear: this is a failure of political choices. Healthy food is becoming a luxury for billions, while farmers are paid less and consumers pay more. That’s the result of a food system where a handful of powerful traders, processors and retailers set the prices and pocket the profits. You cannot lower the cost of a healthy diet without asking who profits from an unhealthy one.

The crisis to come

The FAO statistics stop in 2025, before the conflict, the fertiliser shock and El Niño. The report itself warns that this year’s events threaten the progress it records. Official statistics will register the coming crisis only after it has happened.

Three forces are converging.

1. Fertiliser

This year’s conflict in the Middle East choked traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the corridor for roughly a quarter of the world’s urea exports. By April, the World Bank’s fertiliser price index stood at its highest since October 2022, and urea prices are projected to rise nearly 60 per cent this year.

Fertiliser is natural gas transformed into crop nutrition, which is why a war in energy markets becomes a rise in bread prices. Farmers priced out of fertiliser this planting season will harvest thinner crops next year.

2. Weather

El Niño is here, and it looks like it might be the strongest ever recorded. Past episodes have shrunk Australian wheat harvests, cut sugar production in India and Thailand by a fifth or more, and parched southern Africa. This one is timed to peak just as the fertiliser squeeze reaches the field.

3. Fracturing trade

Tariffs, export restrictions and aid cuts are ripping through the supply chains on which the world’s hungriest people rely. The world’s food import bill hit a record $2.2tn in 2025, with the steepest increases falling on low-income countries least able to pay, deepening debt and dependence at the same time.

When shortages loom, exporters hoard, as dozens did in 2022, and import-dependent countries bid against each other for what remains. Put it together and the squeeze arrives through late 2026 and into 2027, landing first on countries that import their food, and eventually on everyone’s receipts.

The fourth ingredient: margins

There is a fourth ingredient in every food price crisis: margins. Buried in the UN report is a remarkable admission. Between 70 and 75 per cent of what consumers pay for food is added after it leaves the farm, in the midstream of traders, processors, distributors and retailers.

The report cites research on the UK banana trade showing that shocks to world prices barely reach the supermarket shelf because they are absorbed into the margins of intermediaries—what economists call the ‘missing middle’ of the food chain. A handful of trading houses move most of the grain that crosses borders, and in 2022 they booked record profits in the middle of a hunger crisis. Margins that swell during a shock have a curious habit of not shrinking afterwards.

What governments can do now

There are ways to avoid the worst. Transparency and anti-monopoly action in the middle of the chain can clip the margins of traders, processors and supermarkets when prices surge. Aggressive competition windfall measures ready where gouging is found can prevent future infractions and redistribute resources immediately. Public food reserves need to be filled now, while grain is relatively cheap, rather than bought in panic at the top of the market. In the medium term, supply management of the kind Canada practises, alongside the public stocks and regional reserves used in India and West Africa, can provide a buffer. And, of course, there needs to be sustained investment in regional food systems and in farming less hooked on fossil fertiliser, so the next shock finds shorter chains to travel.

A crisis in the pipeline is a crisis that can still be met. Governments have perhaps two seasons. When your groceries cost more next year, the weather and the war will take the blame. Save some of that ire for the business model, and for the governments that had fair warning, today, in writing, from the UN itself.

Rosa Luxemburg/Açık Radyo

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Among the pressings that most delighted me was the goosefoot, an unshowy weed that I’ve just finished writing about (in my next book - more on that in the coming months). Luxemburg pressed the European species, Chenopodium album, lamb's quarters, but her fascination reaches across to its American cousin Chenopodium berlandieri, which the farmers of the Eastern Woodlands domesticated some two thousand years ago, breeding it patiently toward thinner-husked seeds long before maize arrived to eclipse it.

Lambsquarters is considered a weed here in the US, more collateral damage under the regime of glyphosate in the midwest. Luxemburg had an eye for the weeds, the everyday testament to life all around us. Not for her the aesthetics - and accompanying politics - of bourgeois environmentalism. When in prison, she had nothing but contempt for a fellow inmate who

lived with the firm conviction that nature began in the Tyrolean Alps, with a spectacular sunset. If someone had told her that here, at Barnimstraße No. 10, where she stood and walked, she was surrounded by nature from morning to night, she would surely have thought they were making fun of her.)

Given her early training in zoology and her lifelong habit of thinking in terms of metabolism, the Stoffwechsel that Horn traces so well from Marx into the plantation, I was hoping Luxemburg might have sketched and enthused over fungi, those small gods of metabolism. I realise it’s an anachronistic hope. In Luxemburg’s day, fungi were still filed as cryptogams, along with moss and algae: their method of reproduction was cryptic. Luxemburg’s care over social reproduction finds its resonance in the attention her notebooks give to flowering things.

The corollary, which Horn draws out beautifully, is that Luxemburg was well aware that colonialism was never a project of humans alone but a rearranging of whole living communities, a multi-species undertaking. That insight, arrived at between prison walls with a pressed weed in hand, is one that leaps out from her letters and Horn’s fine commentary.

Having read it twice now, the impression that I’ll carry most is of someone deeply and passionately attuned to the web of life, who understood the violence of capitalism’s operations on the web-of-life, and who understood how precious it was to be able to touch the world beyond the cycle of exchange and commodities. It’s the spirit behind this exhortation to Hans Diefenbach, on 6 July, 1917:

This day is a gift to you, like a rose in full bloom, lying at your feet, waiting for you to pick it up and press it to your lips.

Diefenbach, a doctor and close friend, was killed at the front that October. Luxemburg herself was murdered by the Freikorps on 15 January 1919.

The title of the concerto comes, as the liner notes observe, from a poem by the twentieth-century Persian mystic Sohrab Sepehri.

I must depart tonight.
Taking a suitcase
(the size of my loneliness)
I must go
where the mythical trees are in sight.
Toward that endless plain
that always
Is calling me to itself.

The concerto is at war with itself. The Persian Ney (different from Turkish and Arabic) has a particularly tricky technique, and it’s scored not for Equal Temperament like the rest of the orchestra but the microtonal scales of Dástghâh. It’s why you can hear friction even when in principle there shouldn’t be.

I know my political metaphors can be heavy-handed sometimes, but they rarely sound this transporting.

One of the unadvertised consolations of having an obsessive-compulsive disorder is that repetition can sometimes stop being a symptom and become an ally. If a piece of music holds an emotion you need to feel and work through, you can play it thirty times in a row at volume and each pass takes you a little further into the feeling rather than further from it.

My therapist calls this perseveration. In religion, it’s liturgy. The rosary, the dhikr, the kirtan. It’s a praise chorus repeated until some clarity emerges from the dirge. Repetition is the oldest technology for keeping alive a feeling the world is trying to switch off.

This week the feelings I’m working through are grief and love, and the loop I’m running is “KFC Santería”, specifically the remix that Cain Culto made with Sudan Archives last summer. I found it, as one finds everything now, by algorithmic accident, somewhere downstream of a Doechii playlist.

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A Violin as Weapon of Christ

Both of these musicians are string players, which is rarer in club music than it should be, and rarer still is the fact that these are two people for whom the violin is a church object.

Cain Culto was born Andrew Estevan Padilla in Florida to Colombian and Nicaraguan parents, raised in Lexington, Kentucky. He learned bluegrass fiddle at school and played it in the fundamentalist evangelical church where he grew up, eventually becoming a worship pastor and founding a Christian band.

When he came out as gay, the church’s answer was conversion therapy. The attempt to pray the gay out of himself ended in a week’s hospitalisation, an episode he now describes as spiritual psychosis. What walked out of that hospital eventually renamed itself after the brother whose offering God refused, joined to the Spanish word for worship. He became Cain Culto, an apostate who compulsively worships.

Sudan Archives was born Brittney Parks, a preacher’s daughter from Cincinnati. She learned the violin by ear in church, several services a week, and taught herself to play like the West African and Sudanese fiddlers she found in ethnomusicology archives, players who build instruments from gourds and horsehair. As a teenager she stayed out late in Cincinnati’s indie and electronic scenes, violin in hand, and got thrown out of the house for it. At nineteen she left for Los Angeles with a few outfits and her fiddle.

The music that crossed the Atlantic

What I hear in the remix, and mine is a viola player’s ear primed for harmony, is a progression carried in down-bows and pizzicato that grieves while the lyric blasphemes, and behind it all a wordless chorus whose cadence sounds, at first pass, Middle Eastern. Melismatic, modal, hovering somewhere between mosque and mass.

Parks has said that many of her favourite string players are Sufis, so maqam-adjacent ornament is squarely in her wheelhouse. But there’s a longer route to the same sound. What an Anglophone ear labels “Middle Eastern” in Iberian sacred music is usually the Andalusian inheritance: eight centuries of Arab modality baked into Spanish Catholic singing. This is the music that crossed the Atlantic with the conquistadors and was laid over Yoruba practice in the Caribbean. Yoruba praise-singing is itself melismatic, call-and-response, built on repetition. So a chorus inside a track called “KFC Santería” is the sound of syncretism doing what syncretism does. The ear’s inability to place the choir is the santería.

Because what santería names is the survival strategy of a faith under eradication. Enslaved Yoruba people in the Caribbean hid their orishas inside the coloniser's saints, Ochún robed as la Virgen de la Caridad, keeping the sacred alive by dressing it in the one costume empire had to applaud. Worshippers could express their fidelity, knowing that underneath the robes was something truer. What began as concealment became a religion in its own right, subordinate neither to Rome nor to the Yoruba faith it carried out of Africa. The mask, worn long enough, became a face. Culto takes that very seriously in the video.

Franchise theology

And KFC? Culto grew up in the state that the rest of the world encounters as a bucket of fried chicken, with Kentucky rendered into a franchise, a place become a supply chain, the same way God reached his childhood as a megachurch. Which is to say: as a franchise.

Cain Culto’s own account of leaving the church is not that he lost his faith but that he traced its wiring, and found that what had been sold to him as the eternal was plugged into capitalism. Listen to the lyrics and you can hear a deconstruction of the corporatisation of organised religion. The genius of the title is that it refuses to stop there.

KFC Santería: if the faith you were raised in turns out to be a franchise, you can still do to the franchise what the enslaved did to the cathedral. Smuggle the sacred through the deep fryer. Hide the worship service inside the club banger, the liturgy inside the jockstrap. The grief is that it was necessary. The love is that it works.

The remix has its own occasion. It was made last summer as ICE swept through Los Angeles, by a first-generation child of Central and South American immigrants who said plainly that he was holding a lot of grief and anger and needed to get it out on the track; its merch sent profits to communities hit by the raids. Parks found him the way congregations have always found their preachers — somebody in the comments said you have to hear this — and brought her own expulsion, her own church, her own violin.

Two hundred and fifty candles

Which brings us to the birthday. The United States turns two hundred and fifty this weekend, and the official liturgy will be the usual one: flyovers, fireworks, the founding recited like a creed. I have nothing to bring to that service. But I keep thinking that this track is the more honest anniversary hymn, because these two musicians stand in the country’s actual tradition, the one it exports less proudly than fried chicken.

A queer Colombian-Nicaraguan Kentuckian and a Black preacher’s daughter from Ohio, both thrown out of the houses that formed them, neither surrendering the instrument, both making something devotional out of the wreckage. That is not the exception to American history. Ask anyone whose gods had to travel here below decks. It is the through-line.

To live in this country at two hundred and fifty is to approach it the way Cain Culto loves the church: from outside the door it closed on you, fluently, and furiously. The grief and the love are not stages. They loop.

So no fireworks from me this year. Just one track, at high volume, on repeat, because repetition is how the expelled keep faith. I’ll let you know when I stop. Don’t wait up.

We don’t know how today – the day of the ‘deadline’ given by March and March – for ‘illegal immigrants’ to leave South Africa will unfold.

What we do know is that the politics of collective sadism that has been actively cultivated in the lead up to today has never had anything to do with a concern for the law. It has repeatedly taken unlawful and often criminal forms, and its targets have included people with and without documents, including South Africans from ethnic minorities.

We know that neither the people blockading hospitals and schools, the men in balaclavas whipping people in the streets nor the people coordinating the mobilisation of the amabutho and the often bot and influencer driven online attacks in a pincer movement are, as the media has so often said, participants in a ‘civil society organisation’.

We know that the language of fascism – of cleaning, criminalisation, animalisation, disease, poisoning and conspiracy is everywhere. Reflecting on German fascism Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘Part of the mechanism of domination is that one is forbidden to recognize the suffering which that domination produces’ so that ‘everyone in one’s own ethnic group can convince themselves they don’t hear the screams of pain’. This is a central aim of the work of dehumanisation.

We know that the reason why the people who have and are suffering from xenophobic terror, and who will suffer it in the days to come, seldom appear in our public sphere as people whose humanity is not in question is because instead of breaking with the idea of a graduated humanity after apartheid we merely sought to rearrange aspects of that graduation.

We know that in recent weeks tens of thousands of people have been terrorised, forced from their homes and had their means of livelihood seized, shut down or destroyed by armed mobs. People have been insulted, threatened, beaten, made destitute, and killed. Families are being split and children who were born here, speak our languages and have lived their whole lives among us are in desperate flight with their parents. Thousands of people have fled the country, thousands remain scattered into parks, community halls and derelict buildings and many more wait in that state of vigilant and brittle but strangely energetic exhaustion that carries people through times like these.

In Durban, documented refugees forced from their homes by the mob, and then beaten by the police and attacked by thugs from March and March and the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), have been sleeping outside the Home Affairs office on Che Guevara Road for more than five weeks.

We know that the atmosphere is febrile, heavy with cruelty and fear. We know that it will not lift at the end of today. We know that there will be more blood.

Aimé Césaire: ‘When the world shall be a tower of silence, we shall be the prey and the vulture’.

National dissolution

As racial and ethnic identities are being asserted against the idea of a country belonging to ‘all who live in it’ some South Africans are being referred to as izinyane or ‘Shangaan’. The mob has also turned on South Africans deemed ‘too dark’ and, on at least one occasion, Muslims.

We should not forget that according to the official count 21 of the 62 people murdered in the 2008 xenophobic pogrom were South Africans.

The police deny that Nhlamulo Sambo, the young man, still a teenager, who was murdered in Mossel Bay, was the third person to be murdered in the xenophobic violence since March and March announced its ‘deadline’. They say that although he was murdered during the same weekend in which 55 shacks were burnt and two men from Mozambique murdered in a xenophobic attack – two men whose names do not seem to have been given in any reports – his death was just a matter of ordinary crime.

His mother, Mikateko, insists that he was murdered because he was Tsonga, that when he was killed ‘he was explaining that he was Tsonga and had an ID’. His aunt, Nomsa, said that he had told her that he had been told that he was a ‘Shangaan’ and not welcome in the community.

It is a plain fact that the police habitually lie about impoverished black people.

It is also a plain fact that in the shanty towns in societies that remain structured in colonial logic, societies such as South Africa and Brazil, elites tend to assume that, in Frantz Fanon’s words, ‘they die there, it matters not where, nor how’.

Fanon: ‘From nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism’.

Deputising the mob

There has been systemic complicity with the mob by what are supposed to be democratic institutions, including the media and all the parties in parliament aside from the Economic Freedom Fighters. The state has not made any meaningful attempt to stop the terror and has often acted in concert with it. The police have often accompanied or watched the mob without intervening. In several instances, the police have taken people identified as ‘foreign’ by the mob into custody and our usually lethargic state has repeatedly moved with speed to check the papers of people targeted by the mob, including during its street actions.

The primary response of the state has, along with standing down while the mob does its work so effectively that tens of thousands of people have been driven from their homes, been to ‘verify’ the status of people who have been displaced and then rapidly move to mass deportation. Thousands of people have been moved out of the country with astonishing speed. The result is a highly effective working alliance between the mob and the state enabling rapid mass displacement and deportation.

The refugees on Che Guevara Road have been told to either leave the road or accept deportation to the counties they fled via the prison known as the Lindela Repatriation Centre. This is a gross violation of international law. Like the mob the state claims to embody the law while violating it.

The state has also arrested more than 50,000 people it claims are undocumented since January and deported more than 25,000. We have to say ‘claimed’ because the police continue to stop people for looking ‘foreign’, tear up their papers and take them away. At the same time, the state has moved to strengthen an already repressive although deeply corrupt and often ineffective migration regime.

While the mob – on the street and online – often uses gruesome rhetoric, including frequent death threats, the state speaks of humane repatriation without asking why people suddenly feel so panicked that flight is their only option. As we have moved closer to today the state has warned that there should be no violence on the planned marches and taken steps to avoid the kinds of organised looting and attacks on infrastructure that were carried out by the forces that have cohered around Jacob Zuma during the riots in the winter of 2021. The mob has been deputised but warned not to overstep the powers of the deputy.

Liberal democracy in decline

We must take full measure of the fact that South Africa is, in Fanon’s words, ‘a nonviable society, a society to be replaced’. The political arrangements in such societies do not and should not endure indefinitely. But, as we have seen in countries like Algeria and India, the loss of power by national liberation movements, and the wider collapse in the legitimacy of their projects, can bring far more dangerous, and even fascist, forces to power.

Now that the mob has been constituted and directed to take its place on the political stage – online, in the street and in the spaces abandoned by the state - it will not be withdrawn if it is not forced back. We can look to India to see what happens when the mob is given a permanent role in the national drama. We should not forget that the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat was a decisive moment in Narendra Modi’s path to power.

Authoritarian, demagogic and socially predatory, violent and ethnically inflected forces have been moving towards the centre of political life since Zuma’s rape trial. We are now a society in which extortion is endemic, and very dangerous people demand, in Fanon’s words, ‘to be part of the racket’. We have long been a society in which grassroots activists are assassinated when they stand against predatory forces. When Abahlali baseMjondolo adopted the slogan ‘socialism or death’ they did so without hyperbole. It was simply a plain statement of their situation. We have recently become a society in which professionals are assassinated when they do not cower before the same predatory forces.

There have been 16 reported political assassinations this month.

The uncontested hegemony of liberal democracy is behind us and the future that is rushing towards us is not just less liberal. It is also much less democratic and, for those who dissent, much more dangerous.

Now that authoritarian opposition to the form of democracy settled on after apartheid appears to have been rendered popular and predatory political forces have developed a capacity for armed street thuggery it seems highly unlikely that liberal democracy will not be further weakened, or that this will not happen with a velocity that will surpass the capacities of the law and the institutions of democracy to contain it. It will swiftly change the structure of society in ways that a new election with a different outcome will not be able to undo. There will be many more political funerals in the years ahead.

These dangers are most acute in KwaZulu-Natal.

The terror that, in a few weeks, has swept tens of thousands of people from their homes, and many thousands out of the country, is a form of organised and systemic cruelty that must be rejected without qualification or compromise. The often-repeated fact that all states regulate migration in some way does not legitimate dehumanisation and cruelty, or the effective legitimation of forced expulsions by the mob. It is a basic ethical principle that everyone everywhere should be received as a person among other people, as a fully and equally human person.

Abahlali baseMjondolo distilled this commitment to a universal humanism into an axiomatic statement, first developed in a discussion to formulate a principled and programmatic response to the beginning of the xenophobic pogrom in May 2008: ‘A person is a person wherever they may find themselves’.

It is also a basic ethical principle that we are called to conscience and action most urgently when humanity is called into question. We are in such a moment.

This is a time to accept risk and act with courage, a time to seek out new people and organisations with whom principles can be affirmed and lines held. New forms of solidarity must be built and sustained as we traverse the hard road that lies ahead. These new forms of solidarity cannot only be defensive. The only real alternative to the violent, predatory and ethnic politics in rapid formation is a politics that, building the power of the demos against the mob, works for the emancipation of all prioritising the worst off among us.

Books mentioned

Aimé Césaire – The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire (Wesleyan University Press, 2017)

Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin, 1976)

Theodor W. Adorno – Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (Verso, 2005)

Goethe was so moved that he wrote Howards Ehrengedächtnis (In Honour of Howard) a cycle of poems marvelling that a man had pinned the clouds like butterflies, that he “Bestimmt das Unbestimmte, schränkt es ein” (defines the indefinite, limits it). Naming the unnameable felt, in that imperial age, a conquest worth celebrating.

It took the better part of a century to finish the job. In 1896, following a recommendation of the International Meteorological Conference at Munich, the first International Cloud Atlas appeared: it had twenty-eight coloured plates, with definitions in French, German, and English, instructions for observers, and a single governing ambition: to make cloud observations “internationally comparable.”

Plate from 1896 International Cloud Atlas/Google Books

It was an immediate de facto standard and has remained in print, revised by treaty, for almost a hundred and thirty years. Today it carries legal status under the World Meteorological Organization’s Technical Regulations. There is a correct way to see a cloud, and it is binding on member states.

Like any taxonomy, the cloud atlas is an accounting tool. It makes clouds commensurable, sorting the formless into ten genera so that a cumulonimbus over Uppsala and a cumulonimbus over the Grand Canyon can be entered in the same ledger, compared, predicted, and governed. An atlas is an instrument for rendering the world legible to management.

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The Cloud Atlas Sextet

David Mitchell’s 2004 Cloud Atlas is a set of six stories nested inside one another like Russian dolls. A notary on a Pacific crossing in the 1850s, a broke composer in Belgium in 1931, an investigative journalist in 1970s California, a publisher, a clone in a future Korea, a goatherd after the fall are each interrupted at their midpoint and then the stories resumed in reverse. A comet-shaped birthmark recurs on a shoulder in every age, hinting that these are the same soul, or the same struggle, wearing different costumes through time. The other connection is that the weak are meat, the strong eat.

The slaver, the poisoner, the energy corporation covering up a reactor’s flaws, the corporate state that grows its servants in vats and recycles them are the same appetite in successive technologies. The composer of the middle story, Robert Frobisher, writes a piece he calls the Cloud Atlas Sextet: six overlapping soloists, each taking up and breaking off the others’ lines, a form that is also its content. Our lives are not our own: we are bound to others, by each crime and every kindness.

It is a sentimental book about an unsentimental fact, that power finds new ways to sate an old hunger. Which brings me to the third atlas, the one we have learned to call the cloud.

The Magnificent Seven in the Cloud

I learned about The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest — TITiPI, a transnational gathering of artists, engineers, and theorists — from Saskia Colombant last week. (This newsletter began with a set of questions she and I discussed on a sidebar conversation at an IPES-Food meeting.) Saskia has been following TITiPI’s work on ‘the cloud’, about the servers and mining operations and legislative chicanery and finance and theft which constitutes the infrastructure behind the Magnificent Seven tech giants– Alphabet (Google), Tesla, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Meta and Amazon, and more recently the AI leviathans. TITiPI offer an analysis that doubles down on the idea of cloud accounting and infrastructure. Their advice:

Stop calling the cloud an infrastructure and start calling it a regime.

“Infrastructure” invites you to think of plumbing: neutral pipes that carry whatever you pour through them. A regime is a political economy with a direction of travel and relations of power. The cloud is a software paradigm of continuously updated services, rented rather than owned, and fused to a model of accumulation that runs on the grabbing of land for data centres, the extraction of energy and water to cool them, the mining of minerals to build them, and the harvesting of data and racialised labour to feed them.

It has become the dominant way to deliver computation across finance, health, logistics, government, and agriculture. I’ve overheard several conversations recently in which at least one person can’t imagine living without its services. That feeling is not an accident of the technology. It is the regime’s central achievement.

What the technological cloud does is what Luke Howard did to the sky and the 1896 atlas did to the planet’s weather: it takes things that resisted counting and renders them legible and comparable. The 1896 atlas standardised clouds so that empires could predict their weather. The modern cloud commensurates us.

At the dawn of the first cloud atlas, capitalism’s great project was to pry a lucrative corner from the web of life: to isolate, name, and then conquer ‘nature’. Under today’s cloud regime, the taxonomies that matter most are the ones that map human action within the web of life. Clouds are a tool of commensuration as conquest, scaled to the whole of life.

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Head in the cloud

In February of this year, IPES-Food published a report called Head In The Cloud about what happens when Big Tech and Big Ag join forces to digitise farming: when Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba sit down with the agribusiness giants and propose to run agriculture through artificial intelligence, precision platforms, and proprietary algorithms, all of it sold under the banner of climate resilience and productivity.

What the report describes is, structurally, an act of atlasing. The knowledge a farmer holds is extracted, processed, and turned into a corporate asset. The mechanisms are mundane: subscription platforms, data-sharing arrangements between corporate partners, algorithmic price-setting that quietly erodes a grower’s bargaining power.

When the same firms point AI at the genome by scanning, characterising, and patenting traits that communities have stewarded freely for millennia, the appropriation becomes total. A farm is rendered as data; the farmer is dispossessed of the very knowledge that was the farm. Farming by algorithm, IPES-Food observes, is not the future farmers asked for.

The atlas has a material body, and it is mined from the usual places. The cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, the lithium from Bolivia, the copper from Chile, the coltan from Rwanda, and with the mining come the land dispossession and the poisoned water that have always followed it, in the same Global South that grew the cotton and the sugar. The cloud is not weightless. It weighs on exactly the people it always has.

Faced with this, IPES-Food reaches for a counter-instrument. They call it data sovereignty: the principle that farmers, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities have the right to decide what data is collected from their lands, how it is stored, who may see it, and what it is for.

The aim is not to abandon digital tools but to embed them in governance frameworks that serve the public good. It is a reformist’s hope, and a decent one: that the atlas can be taken back, re-owned, governed from below.

Dual abuse

But can it? Can these tools be repurposed?

The conventional frame for technology that can be used for both peaceful and military ends is “dual use.” It is a Cold War term, coined to regulate the trade in materials that could become either a power station or a bomb, and its premise is that the technology is neutral, the responsibility the user’s. The honest term, argues TITiPI, is not dual use but dual abuse: these infrastructures are engineered ready for abuse, and the fiction of neutrality is precisely what “exonerates entire industries and economies from their criminal responsibilities.” Tom Lehrer put it nicely in his song about Nazi missile scientist Wernher von Braun:

Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apolitical
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department!” says Wernher von Braun

If that seems like a stretch, here’s the modern day version. When Microsoft was asked in May of last year whether Azure had been used to harm civilians in Gaza, it said it “does not have visibility into how customers use our software on their own servers or other devices.”

Google, defending Project Nimbus internally, conceded in a report obtained by The Intercept that it was “not permitted to restrict the types of services and information” that the Israeli government and its Ministry of Defence chose to run on its cloud. These are not failures of the system. They are the system. The whole architecture of software-as-a-service is built around the abdication of the question of use. The provider supplies the capability and, by design, looks away.

So the question of whether a given act of computation is good or evil is rendered, at the level of the infrastructure, undecidable, and that undecidability is sold as a feature. Ask a language model what to do with a day in Amsterdam, and it returns a tidy itinerary of the most-visited attractions. The same model can deploy its taxonomies to select a target by silhouette and walking pattern. The model does not change; only the output differs. To trust the system in the first case is to ratify the regime that operates the second.

Project Nimbus is a $1.2-billion contract under which Google and Amazon supply cloud and AI infrastructure to the Israeli government and military. Its terms, according to reporting in The Guardian, contractually forbade the companies from suspending service under boycott pressure, and contain a mechanism to alert Israel secretly if another government requests access to the data held under it.

A +972 Magazine investigation found that purchases of cloud services by the Israeli military rose sharply after October 2023, and that intelligence gathered through the mass surveillance of Gaza’s population was stored on commercial servers. The targeting systems that have moved through that infrastructure carry names like the Gospel, Lavender, Where’s Daddy. The farm-data platform and the military data pipeline are not the same application. They need not be. They belong to the same political form: a regime that turns life into data, moves that data into proprietary systems, and then sells back the power to act on it.

Here the third atlas does both of the older atlases’ work at once. It commensurates — renders the soil and the face into the same legible data — and in the same motion it feeds the oldest hunger in Mitchell’s book. The weak are meat; the atlas tells the strong where to eat.

The non-manifestness of manifest evil

So far, this may feel like well worn ground. But the reason to set up the analysis like this is that I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours with Ayça Çubukçu this week. As always, she knocked me sideways. Her recent thinking makes me wonder about the reformist impulse in thinking around The Master’s Tools might just be fantasy.

In a 2025 piece in the Journal of Genocide Research, Çubukçu reflects on the problem of moral judgement in relation to Palestine, reading the anthropologist David Scott on the evil of New World slavery alongside Hannah Arendt’s essay Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship. Çubukçu’s question is not whether the violence is evil. Her question is why its evil is not manifest — why what is self-evidently a grave wrong to some is, to millions of others, morally justified or simply unseen. The horror, she insists with Arendt, is that it is carried out and enabled not by monsters but, in Arendt’s phrase, by the most respected members of respectable society. And where all are guilty, no one is.

Rereading Microsoft’s sentence — that it does not have visibility into how its software is used — clicks something into alignment. The cloud is a machine for the non-manifestness of manifest evil. It is engineered so that no one, at any node, ever has to judge.

The engineer ships a capability; the executive cites the terms of service; the procurement officer migrates a workload; the academic logs into Azure to mark an essay. Each performs a discrete, legal, deniable act, and the system is arranged so that the moral whole never assembles in any single pair of hands.

Arendt thought the precondition for refusing to be a cog was thinking, the silent internal dialogue between me and myself in which a person asks whether they could live with what they are about to do. Software-as-a-service is, among other things, an apparatus for abolishing that dialogue at scale. It distributes Eichmann’s desk across a hundred thousand login sessions, and asks each of them only to be convenient.

Çubukçu calls the Western academy a “zone of interest” and the universities she means are the ones that run, as mine does, on the rented cloud. The complicity is not metaphorical. It is contractual, and it is invisible by construction.

The master’s tools

Which returns me to a question that inaugurated this newsletter, on whether data is the master’s tool. I began part 1 by suggesting that data might be less a tool than a raw material, that a soil reading is a soil reading whoever holds it, and that the milk a cooperative runs on a colonial railway is still the cooperative’s milk.

I complicated that in a second essay with Donald MacKenzie’s distinction between a camera and an engine: some data merely records, but some — GDP, a doing-business index — is built to move the world toward particular ends, and changing who owns such an engine does not change where it is pointed. The next installment was to ask what a counter-hegemonic data system might look like. What a good atlas would look like.

I am no longer sure that installment can be written in the key I intended, and the materials in this essay are the reason. IPES-Food’s data sovereignty is a version of the good atlas, the cloud re-owned, governed from below. But Audre Lorde’s warning was never only about ownership. Here’s her insight, aimed as Çubukçu’s is, at the academy:

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house: not because the tools are in the wrong hands, but because some instruments produce the relation they appear merely to measure.

An atlas is a way of making lives legible for management. A sovereign atlas is still an atlas. To ask whether farmers should own the data extracted from their fields is already to have conceded that the field should be rendered as data, that the relevant political question is who administers the legibility, rather than whether the act of rendering-legible is itself the thing being done to them.

Çubukçu, reading Scott, lands on a formula in response: there is no way out but through. You cannot exit the hegemony of the present by wishing yourself outside it. TITiPI say the same in the register of infrastructure. To disengage from the cloud, they write, is a fiction. It’s satisfying on the individual and consumerist level, understandable as a tactic, but terrible as a strategy. You cannot unplug your way to freedom.

But neither, they insist, is the work a matter of swapping evil technologies for good ones, or even of reliably telling useful computation apart from abusive. So the two clean exits both close. You cannot leave the house, and you cannot renovate it with the master’s tools. What is left?

What is left

TITiPI do not answer the question. What they offer instead is a practice they call infrastructural rehearsal, drawn from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s idea of abolition as life in rehearsal. It’s an unfinished way to model the future from the present, in the ruins of the thing you cannot yet leave, learning collectively to move in a way no one quite knows how to move.

It’s what I’ve been calling movement science. I would drop the word rehearsal, which holds the future at arm’s length, as a performance still to come. The practices I have in mind are not preparation for the real thing. They are the real thing: knowledge made and tested in experiments of collective struggle, generated from below rather than deduced from the instruments of the order being struggled against. I have traced two cases at length here.

The mondine, the women who weeded the rice paddies of the Po Valley, built a science of endurance and refusal out of song, mutual aid, and the strikes that won them the hours of their own days.

The Black Panther Party met the crisis of social reproduction head-on with free breakfasts, people’s clinics, and sickle-cell screening, turning the provision of food into political praxis and, in the doing, producing testable knowledge about how to live otherwise through practices the cloud cannot file because they were never rendered legible for management in the first place.

This is more than permission to stop looking for The Good Cloud. It is a claim about where the tools to move through the cloud regime are already being made: in the food sovereignty movements that refuse to render the farm as data, in the workers fired for declining to build the targeting cloud, in the campaigns that withdraw a single institution’s consent at a time. Not a tactic that fails as a strategy, but the slow production of the knowledge a different order would need.

Robert Frobisher’s Cloud Atlas Sextet is six overlapping soloists, each taking up and breaking off the others’ lines; you cannot hear the whole of it from any one chair, and you cannot hear it at all without playing. The first cloud atlas, for all its legal force, never made a single cloud hold still. They go on forming and dissolving, indifferent to the plate that named them. The world exceeds the map.

Movement science is the procedures for thinking, for making knowledge that escapes the atlas in the same way: made in the moving, impossible to file. The weak are meat, the strong do eat, and the infrastructure of eating improves every year. Whether the sextet has a second voice is not, in the end, a question you can answer from the cloud. You answer it by joining in the great experiments in what comes next.

The idea originates in France and has spread to Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, with municipal pilots from Schaerbeek to Montpellier to Toulouse. This Tuesday in Barcelona, the cooperative el Pa Sencer presented a fully costed proposal to scale it to the entire Spanish state — 150 euros per person per month, 4.7% of GDP, less than Spain currently spends on the military. The event was chaired by the wonderful Sofía Monsalve Suárez, the current UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

Who better to explain it than Gaëtan Vanloqueren. He’s an agricultural economist at the University of Liège and the University of Lille, teaches in Brussels, and was one of the architects of the Belgian modelling that showed how a national food social security could be funded budget-neutrally over a sixteen-year transition. We first crossed paths when Olivier de Schutter was UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and Gaëtan has been one of the most rigorous voices on this terrain ever since.

Gaëtan was kind enough to volunteer to have our conversation recorded, and then spent far too long making sure the transcript was much better than the version I’d sent him. If you want more video/audio, let me know and I’ll see if I can find a way to do it that doesn’t tax the generosity of my guests.

The piece below, reposted with Sonia’s permission, is an argument about imperial epidemiology brought up to the minute. Ebola is getting bigger and more frequent, and one underreported reason is the device on which you’re reading this: the gold, tantalum, and cobalt in our phones and semiconductors are dug by hand from the Congo basin rainforest, and every track cut into the trees is another roll of the dice on a spillover. I’m grateful she let me put it here. Subscribe to her Substack, Cross Pollinations, for more.

Is our demand for smartphones and semiconductors making Ebola worse?

How cutting down trees to dig for gold and other critical minerals is fueling more and bigger outbreaks of Ebola

Sonia Shah

Jun 08, 2026

I started looking into the connection between deforestation and Ebola outbreaks many years ago, but it was only in the last couple weeks that I learned how much global demand for critical minerals—gold, tantalum, cobalt and others—is playing a role in the ecology of the disease. Turns out, since the first outbreak in 1976, Ebola outbreaks have been getting bigger and more frequent—and global demand for smartphones and semiconductors are one important and underreported reason why.

The lush Congo basin rainforest is the second largest tropical rainforest in the world and also one of the world’s biggest untapped sources of minerals such as cobalt, tantalum, and gold which the tech industry needs to build everything from smartphones to semiconductors. The US, the EU and others consider them “critical minerals” for the economy and national security. Demand is soaring and expected to triple in coming years. Just last year, thanks to Trump’s tariffs, the price of gold doubled.

The result is fattening the bottom lines of tech companies, showering consumers with tech gadgets—and transforming the ecology of Ebola.

By now most of us know that Ebola viruses live in the bodies of animals such as fruit bats and others. And that they spill over into our bodies when we come into intimate contact with their blood, saliva, or excreta, for example by eating a piece of fruit with bat saliva on it or by hunting and slaughtering a bat—or some other Ebola-laden animal—for food.

But here’s the key thing. Not every spillover will start an outbreak. Some spillovers—perhaps most!—will die out without causing any further infections or just a few that then peter out. Getting a chain of transmission going is a probability game. The more spillovers there are, the more likely one will spark.

In the quest to fatten the bottom lines of tech companies and shower consumers with digital gadgets, that’s precisely what’s happening right now.

More on that, below.

How Ebola is linked to the smartphone in your pocket: the back story

As I wrote in the Guardian story that came out last week, nearly 400,000 people in eastern DRC eke out a living by digging for minerals such as gold and tantalum that are required to build smartphones and semiconductors. It’s called “artisanal” mining, which really means informal and unregulated mining, because it’s done without the involvement of major mining companies, who are reluctant to open mines in the area because of the long-standing and ongoing conflict and political instability.

So far, Chinese mining companies have dominated the critical minerals sector in DRC, but the Trump regime is hoping to change that. In March 2025, a lobbyist enticed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to make a deal—access to DRC minerals in exchange for military support. The result led Trump to brag that he “actually stopped the war with Congo and Rwanda,” and that “‘they said to me, ‘please, please, we would love you to come and take our minerals. Which we’ll do.” (Side note: must he always be so weird and rapey?)

A handful of months later, Rubio hosted the inaugural “Critical Minerals Ministerial” in Washington DC, where he entertained delegations from 50 countries hoping to muscle in to the critical minerals sector and counter China’s dominance. The summit facilitated deals to sell copper and cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the world’s biggest untapped sources of critical minerals, to two US companies: Virtus Minerals and Orion Critical Minerals Consortium.

While dollar signs spin in the eyes of mining execs and political leaders, in the mineral-rich Congo basin, informal miners dig up the gold-specked rocks and pass it along into the global supply chain through intermediaries and traders. The higher the price, the deeper they go.

You can see their tracks from space.

Below is a satellite image of the area around Mongbwalu, the mining town that is the epicenter of the current outbreak of Bundibugyo Ebola. The red and orange areas are older deforested areas, with Mongbwalu in the lower right corner. The light blue indicates areas newly deforested in 2025, a year after record deforestation across the Congo basin rainforest. You can see what happened, as the price of gold doubled thanks to Trump’s tariffs, pretty clearly. People started penetrating the pristine forests around Mongbwalu, along the gold-rich riverways to the north and west.

I checked out this satellite imagery while on a video interview with Matthew Hansen, co-founder of the University of Maryland’s Global Land Analysis & Discovery Lab, which has been mapping global deforestation using NASA’s LandSat data since 2012. Hansen has spent time in the DRC, but he hadn’t looked at the area around Mongbwalu before we spoke. “All I know,” he told me, is that DRC is “typically second or third annually in terms of deforestation, and mostly it’s done by hand.”



He was incredulous when he zoomed in on Mongbwalu. “Wow, it is a ton of mining around here,” he said. “Holy shit.” The pattern struck him. It isn’t the expanding circles of growing farms, but ragged lines of deforestation along riverways, snaking deep into the core of the forest, with scattered clearings for small settlements. The footprint of mining was “impressive,” he said, “stellar,” even, though “in a bad way.” It wasn’t the scale of the deforestation that struck him, so much as what this particular kind of mining-related damage does to the forest. “Mines generally in terms of footprint are really small. But the problem is they are opening up the forest in a way that other land use doesn’t. You go out in the middle of the forest.”

By the way: none of this would be visible without data like Hansen’s. This is what the area around Mongbwalu looks like on Google Maps: green and untouched.

Why are people plunging deep into the forest, far away from markets where they can buy food other than Ebola-laden bushmeat and access healthcare and sanitary facilities? It’s the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change, which is making subsistence farming more difficult, unresolved and violent conflict, and the glittering high price of gold and other critical minerals that feed the global tech industry.

So yes, we need more treatments for Bundibugyo, and vaccines, and support for contact tracing and the rest of it. But there’s no number of emergency rooms that will prevent outbreaks of novel diseases like this before they start to spread, as veterinary epidemiologist Chris Walzer of the Wildlife Conservation Society said when we spoke. Outbreaks of new zoonotic pathogens like Bundibugyo Ebola is the price we pay for invading wildlife habitat.

That price—in lives lost to outbreaks, flights diverted, people evacuated, new treatment units constructed, and more—will be paid by the people of DRC and other countries in the region and the international community.

The benefits, on the other hand, flow into the private coffers of tech companies.

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If you click on the YouTube link, you’ll see this text below the video: “For the first time ever, Abdullah Ibrahim, formerly known as Dollar Brand, went to Robben Island, where Mandela was imprisoned. All forms of music were banned. A lawyer smuggled one of Abdullah's songs into the control room, blocked the doors and played it over the loud speakers. Mandela's first sound of music in decades.” It’s worth a watch.

Ibrahim added an extra "n" when he wrote the title down; the township is spelled Manenberg. It’s one of the housing estates on the sand flats outside Cape Town where coloured families were dumped after being cleared out of District Six. (Yes, that’s why the film’s called District 9). He said later that the name stood for everyone being removed from everywhere, an erasure answered with a melody that sounded like the life the clearances were meant to destroy. It became the unofficial anthem of the anti-apartheid years by sounding like home.

In 1976, weeks after the police opened fire on schoolchildren in Soweto, he played an illegal benefit concert for the then-banned ANC. He came home to play at Mandela's inauguration in 1994. Mandela called him "our Mozart," which is the sort of thing that gets carved on plaques. The more exact compliment is that he showed dignity could be a form of defiance. He resisted a regime simply by sounding wholly and unapologetically like the people it wanted gone.

I last saw Ibrahim play two decades ago in South Africa, and listening to him in the era of Unfreedom Days pointed to the work that remains unfinished, in South Africa as everywhere where apartheid persists. Which makes hamba kahle feel like the right thing to say.

*Hamba kahle is a Zulu phrase often said for the dead. It literally means to ‘go well’, like bon voyage but more final; like the Latin vale but kinetic; like rest in peace, but with the understanding that there’s still a journey ahead.

Belfast City Hall/ Itub CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia

Durban City Hall A3albOwn work/ CC BY 3.0 Wikimedia

The two buildings above are almost exactly the same. The same Edwardian Baroque, the same dome, the same allegorical statues of commerce and industry along the façade. Durban’s pediment says “unity, patriotism, and Great Britain.” In 1903 Durban’s architect, Stanley Hudson, set about copying Belfast’s new city hall. In 1910, the year the Union of South Africa was founded, he unveiled the result, a more or less stone for stone replica. The empire had a house style for civic confidence and a limited imagination. Hence Belfast-on-the-Indian-Ocean (though, if we’re being faithful to the cliché, it’s Belfast-on-the-uMgeni).

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The resemblance has outlasted the stonework. This month masked men in Belfast marched to migrants’ doors and burned families out. In Durban, as many as ten thousand people driven from their homes are penned in a single field while the state gets on with deporting them.

There is an older echo. In 1921 Belfast’s hall became the provisional seat of the parliament of a newly partitioned Northern Ireland. The building through which Durban could see like a state was itself a monument to drawing borders around who belonged and who did not.

None of the present violence is improvised. Writing about Belfast this week, Richard Seymour calls it distributed violence: never quite ordered from above, never quite spontaneous, its work of incitement and arson smeared across a loose network of agitators and after-the-fact apologists. It’s part of a reactionary international. In Belfast that includes Elon Musk, whose posts researchers judged instrumental to the riots. In Durban it is March and March, an astroturfed outfit with a well-funded media operation and the backing of the uMkhonto weSizwe Party.

The official account, in both countries, is that this is about numbers. Too many migrants, too few jobs, public services worn thin. It is a convenient story and a false one. Migrants are about 4% of South Africa’s population. They did not produce its 44% unemployment, its captured state, its political assassinations or its hunger, any more than refugees dug the potholes in County Antrim.

As Progressive International observes, scapegoating does one thing dependably: it turns public anger away from the people who caused the misery, and public attention away from anyone with a plan to end it. Seymour’s question for Britain is the question for South Africa. Why is ethnic purification always the answer offered to social ruin, and why do the people at the very bottom so often refuse to be complicit in it?

In 2025 a coalition of grassroots organisations, represented by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute, won a judgment against Operation Dudula in the Gauteng High Court. The court barred the group from demanding people’s documents, harassing foreign nationals and blockading schools and clinics, and restated the otherwise obvious point that only the state, and not a man in a borrowed uniform, may ask you who you are. The organisations doing this work pay for it.

Abahlali baseMjondolo, the country’s largest movement of the poor, has been on the front line throughout, and its members have been threatened with assassination and with necklacing. Yet still they march and organise.

Its founder, S’bu Zikode, has spent two decades being told he is about to be killed. He has spoken out plainly against the pogrom regardless, and has been threatened with death for it. None of this is new to him.

The demand the Progressive International is making of Pretoria is not complicated. Act against the people organising the violence. Enforce the court orders that already exist. House and support those who have lost everything. And drop the double act of condemning the mob while ventriloquising its grievances. A government that recites the marchers’ talking points about migrants and jobs, and that has arrested more than forty thousand migrants this year, is not fighting the fire. It is fanning it.

The South African state is sensitive to how it looks abroad. That is the one piece of good news, and very nearly the only reason a sentence like this one is worth writing. What is happening in Durban is being filed, by officials and by much of the press, under migration. It is not a migration crisis. It is a crisis of organised cruelty, conducted by people with names and addresses and party affiliations, and tolerated by a government that could stop it and has chosen not to.

Updated to add Progressive International’s statement (and fix some grammar):

Right now, South Africa is witnessing the accelerated escalation of a coordinated campaign of xenophobic terror by March and March, an ethnically inflected Durban-based anti-migrant organisation closely associated with the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP).

Small groups of armed men are moving through impoverished and working-class neighbourhoods, forcing families from their homes and shuttering or seizing their businesses. Everyone the mob deems ‘foreign’ is at risk — documented or not — and South Africans of minority ethnicities have also been targeted.

March and March rose to prominence earlier this year when it sought to bar the children of migrants from entering school. Since then it has also blockaded clinics, and hospitals, demanding that people produce identity documents; organised intimidatory marches; and engaged in repeated street thuggery.

In this latest effort to channel the fury of an immiserated society toward its most vulnerable, March and March announced 30 June as a “deadline” for all undocumented migrants to leave the country, escalating intimidation on the ground with a vast social media operation in which death threats have become routine. Xenophobic intimidation and violence has now been decentralised and often operates through locally organised thuggery.

There have already been murders, and thousands of people have been driven from their homes at the 30 June deadline nears. Ten thousand displaced people are now sheltering in a park in Durban in abject conditions. The governments of Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, and Mozambique are urgently repatriating their citizens.

The right in South Africa has a long and lethal history of inciting xenophobia — the worst of these waves came in 2008, when 62 people were killed, 21 of them South Africans, many from minority ethnicities, and more than 150,000 displaced. Many now fear that if urgent action is not taken there could be a pogrom of even greater scale.

The cultivation of xenophobic politics feeds on an acute social crisis. Unemployment is among the highest in the world at 44 per cent, and a catastrophic 70 per cent among 15-to-25-year-olds. Hunger and violence are endemic; pervasive corruption, collapsing public institutions and services, and regular assassinations of grassroots activists have hollowed out faith in democracy itself.

On 17 June the country’s four largest trade union federations — COSATU, FEDUSA, SAFTU and NACTU — declared: “Migrants must not be made scapegoats for failures they did not create. Removing foreign nationals from workplaces, communities or public spaces will not reopen factories, repair municipalities, strengthen public healthcare or create sustainable jobs. The frustrations of local communities must be addressed by fixing the economy, creating decent work and rebuilding the state.”

The federations warned, too, that the surge in anti-migrant mobilisation is increasingly coordinated and politically orchestrated — designed to fracture the working class and to shield the architects of poverty, unemployment, and collapsing public services from accountability.

Progressive forces are fighting back. Abahlali baseMjondolo, the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI), and others face intense pressure and routine threats of violence as the atmosphere grows ever more febrile in the days before 30 June.

Progressive forces around the world must stand with all those who are living in fear in South Africa, including migrants, South Africans of minority ethnicities — and all the movements refusing to let the working class be turned against itself. Their fight is ours.

Like this one, about two news stories I’m following. First, the New World Screw Worm.

The disease is ugly. Although it’s treatable, it’s not cheap or easy to fix, causes a tremendous amount of suffering, and is set to devastate the Texas cattle herd at a time when it’s facing a super-El Niño.

New World screwworm larvae in a Belgian Shepherd dog/Astridlorena cc-by 3.0

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It has been found only in Zavala county in Texas so far, but there’s more to come. There are now four infections, two more than when I started drafting this, and the one in New Mexico is far removed from the first detection in Zavala county.

USDA

Meantime, Alpha-gal syndrome — which causes life-threatening reactions to milk and meat for which there is no treatment or vaccination— is spread by the Lone Star tick.

Twiztedminds at https://www.flickr.com/photos/31275091@N03/14422859582 cc-by-2.0

Here’s the map of where Alpha-gal syndrome cases were found 2017-2022.

Geographic distribution of suspected alpha-gal syndrome cases* per 1 million population per year — United States, 2017–2022

Thompson JM, Carpenter A, Kersh GJ, Wachs T, Commins SP, Salzer JS. Geographic Distribution of Suspected Alpha-gal Syndrome Cases — United States, January 2017–December 2022. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2023;72:815–820. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7230a2

Beyond both involving the Lone Star state these are, of course, climate change stories. Which is to say they’re stories about late capitalism.

The flesh-eating New World screwworm was successfully eradicated from the U.S. in 1966. Because the parasite is highly sensitive to the cold and cannot survive freezing soil temperatures, winter was a natural shield. As winters grow milder and the current super-El Niño creates a warm, moisture-heavy corridor through Mexico, the fly's tropical habitat is expanding northward.

The disease may have entered Mexico through both an expansion of habitat, and cross-border cartel cattle smuggling at the border with Guatemala. Cartels are, after all, a symptom of late capitalism. And it was made likelier to spread north by a 2025 DOGE-sponsored cut of USDA personnel in precisely the department tasked with controlling threats like the New World Screwworm.

The exact same climate dynamic is driving the explosion of Alpha-gal syndrome. The Lone Star tick used to see its population checked by harsh Midwestern and Northeastern winters. Now, thanks to shorter, milder winters and longer tracking seasons, it is thriving in territories where it historically couldn't.

Keep an eye on your pets, stay clear of the high brush, and I’ll see you back here with more updates once I crawl out from under these final book edits.

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 comprise his 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.