Thin from Thin Ink

’I don't see Palestine as an isolated story‘: An interview with Vivien Sansour, founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library “[W]e want the Seed Library to be a place of freedom, an initiative for us to have autonomy over our food, but also over our spirit, our minds, our words.”

so pleased that we're able to republish this story from the great @thinink.bsky.social - read about the seed library, then go read more from news.thin-ink.net, and more from globalvoices.org!

This week’s issue grows out of a presentation I gave at GIJC two weeks ago, where I tried to puncture persistent myths about hunger and malnutrition.

Also in this week's issue: fellowship positions opening at Lighthouse Reports. Come work with us for six months!

rewards for exchange of labour, commodities and other possessions, even without a ‘sudden, sharp reduction in the food supply.”

Half a century later, it seems we must reiterate his arguments yet again.

www.regionalclimateperspectives.com/uploads/4/4/...

“In an exchange economy, whether a family will starve or not will depend on what it has to sell, whether it can sell them, and at what prices, and also on the price of food.

“An economy in a state of comparative tranquillity may develop a famine if there is a sudden shake-up of the system of...

Despite the wonky title, this short paper fundamentally changed how we understand famine: from an event that happens due to a natural or production failure to a failure of political economy, inequality, and governance.

He expanded his arguments in later work, writing:

www.jstor.org/stable/43648...

The FAD That Won’t Die The persistent myth of hunger as a result of “food availability decline”

In “Famines as Failures of Exchange Entitlements”, published in August 1976, the great Amatya Sen made a novel argument: famines can arise from causes other than not having enough food to go around, or “food availability decline” (FAD).

open.substack.com/pub/thinink/...

...despite the critical role food plays in our daily existence - we all have to eat - we take it for granted to the point where investigating the forces that shape our food systems is considered ‘niche’.

🇧🇷 That + outcomes from Belém where food systems barely featured, led me to this week's issue.

🥬🥒🍅 So food was in front of us, every single day, many times a day.

⁉️ And yet... I also had people come up to me and say something along the lines of, “The work you’re doing is so interesting. It’s also quite niche, isn’t it?”

🤔🤔🤔 I find it fascinating that....

🫖 ☕ There were tea & coffee breaks with trays of veggie & non-veggie snacks, sweets, & more substantial eats.

🌯🍱🍜🍲 There were lunches - the obligatory long buffet table laden with dishes of meat, fish, veggies, & rice + individual stations serving one-dish meals + fruits and desserts.

😊 Southeast Asian journalists, including yours truly, took the comments with grins & chests swelled with pride.

♨ “This is how we do it. We can’t let our guests go hungry.”

🍳 𓐐𓎩 There were morning sessions with beautiful quiches, bite-sized sandwiches, curry puffs, & an assortment of drinks.

Food, Climate, & Where They Meet… Reflections from Kuala Lumpur and on Belém

✍🏻 I spent much of last week in a freezing cold conference centre, listening & talking to fellow investigative journalists. It was inspiring & exhilarating. Amusing too, whenever I keep hearing a common refrain.

🍝🍜👩🏻‍🍳🥘🤌🏻 “There’s so much food. They keep feeding us.”

news.thin-ink.net/publish/post...

What We Eat Is Harming Us Scientific review urges urgent reform, regulation, and collective action on UPFs

What We Eat Is Harming Us
news.thin-ink.net/p/what-we-ea...

Recommended reading with plenty of food for though, as usual. Thanks @thinink.bsky.social for yeat another thought-provoking post!

There, efforts are underway to regulate UPF production, marketing, & consumption despite strong industry resistance. These “offer crucial lessons for scaling action globally”.

The papers are worth devouring (pun intended) in full. But if you don't have time, I've done the leg work for you.

“The continuing rise of UPFs in human diets is not inevitable; rather, this rise can be disrupted and reversed through sustained social mobilisation and collective action”, it added. The 43 global experts behind the papers pointed to successes in Latin America & sub-Saharan Africa.

Ultra-Processed Foods and Human Health This 3-paper Series reviews the evidence about the increase in ultra-processed foods in diets globally and highlights the association with many non-communicable diseases. This rise in ultra-processed ...

Reining in this global health challenge requires “urgent, coordinated public policies and collective actions” such as regulating food environments & corporate practices, & ensuring fresh, healthy food is available, affordable, & easy to prepare, said the series.

www.thelancet.com/series-do/ul...

What We Eat Is Harming Us Scientific review urges urgent reform, regulation, and collective action on UPFs

We're eating more & more UPFs which are linked to chronic health conditions including obesity, type 2 diabetes, & cardiovascular disease, often displacing whole, traditional foods that could nourish us, according to a scientific study in The Lancet this week.

news.thin-ink.net/p/what-we-ea...

Investigating World Hunger Despite excess food production, nearly 300 million people in 59 countries and territories across the Global South face life-threatening levels…

Side note: I’ll be in Kuala Lumpur next week to attend the 2025 Global Investigative Journalism Conference & speak on a panel about investigating world hunger. So if you’re also coming or happen to be there, do drop me a line. Food recommendations very much welcome.

gijc2025.org/program/sche...

So here's Who Owns The Farmland - Redux, where he explained the differences between land ownership and land use, why Europe's march towards consolidation of farmland is both inevitable and desirable, and how caring for the soil and land is more about practices and less about scale.

Understanding the structure of EU agriculture Agricultural structure data represent the crown jewels of agricultural policymaking. For researchers and policymakers alike, the Farm Structure Survey and Agricultural Census are a rich and detailed s...

Alan is Professor Emeritus at Trinity College, Dublin, & runs CAPreform.eu blog, a go-to source for anyone looking for detailed expert analysis of all things CAP.

He shared some thoughts provoked by my newsletter, which I found to be fascinating. So asked him to elaborate them over a Zoom call.

Who Owns The Farmland - Redux Ownership versus Use + Europe’s inevitable march to consolidation

Last week's Thin Ink was farm size & land distribution.
Afterwards, I got an email from @alanmatthews.bsky.social, widely perceived as the foremost authority on EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which the NYT called one of the world’s largest subsidy schemes.

news.thin-ink.net/p/who-owns-t...

When telling the story involves absorbing the despair

Myanmar journalists in exile are "unable to escape the grim realities of the junta's brutality because their days are spent gathering news of the loss, grief, and despair back home" but downplay their trauma, writes our fellow from Kayin State.

kite-tales.org/en/article/w...

Quick thread on the BBC and the political and societal significance of recent developments:

One of the main reasons the UK has historically been so much less polarised than the US, is that Britain has a shared source of information, consumed and trusted by most people regardless of their politics.

Coming from a country of small farms & now living in 2 where farms are getting larger, I find these global trends deeply personal & political.

So I break down 11 fascinating findings & share my two cents: are bigger, more intensive farms the food future we want or are we heading there by default?

Why? Because land ownership is one of the clearest indicators of wealth, power, & inequality - in farming as in society. How land is owned & used shapes everything from policy decisions to people’s livelihoods.

See Chapter 3 + background paper.

doi.org/10.4060/cd70...
doi.org/10.4060/cd73...

It comes with striking new data and insights:

➡️ 1.7 billion people now live in areas where crop yields are at least 10% lower because of human-induced land degradation.

But what really caught my eye are the new figures on farm sizes and land distribution.

Who Owns The Farmland? Updated data on farm sizes, land distribution, & food production

If anyone still doubts how connected our food and climate systems are, this week’s State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) report from the FAO is a reminder.

The 2025 edition focuses on land degradation after two years of emphasis on true cost accounting.

news.thin-ink.net/p/who-owns-t...

thank you for all the support; the statement from our union is now live here with some more reporting.

now that this is public I can confirm that the majority of today’s layoffs were women of color. there are no longer any Black women working at Teen Vogue.

Thanks to Jose Luis Chicoma, who co-edited and also wrote in the report, for sharing the thought processes behind the project and what they are hoping to achieve.

Here's hoping we see more open discussions and actions on this topic.

news.thin-ink.net/p/how-to-eat...

It suggests concrete, structural & actionable ways to address the yawning power gap & has this cracking opening line:

“Food systems will not be transformed unless power is confronted - not as an abstract concept, but as concrete control over land and water, markets and labor, taste and narratives.”

Eating this elephant requires naming, confronting & doing so with big, bold actions, not timid little changes at the margins.

It's based on a great new report: “The Elephant At The Table: Policy Pathways to Confront Power in Food Systems” (hence, my title). thenew.institute/en/media/the...