Abstract: This study argues that ongoing contestations over the sustainability of the capitalist food regime can be framed as a struggle between ‘rational’ and ‘wise’ futures, the two prevailing counter-tendencies regarding the future of agriculture and food. On the one hand, corporate-based bio-industrial approaches present the issue as a question of rationalising agrifood relations: fine-tuning systemic imbalances through cutting-edge technologies (e.g., genome editing, digital agriculture, etc.), complemented by political and socio-cultural restructuring (e.g., so-called comprehensive legislative frameworks, awareness-raising, etc.). On the other hand, alternative socio-ecological imaginaries and practices are proliferating, as reflected in concepts such as agroecology, food sovereignty, peasant agriculture, and alternative food networks. These alternatives – by criticising mainstream rationalisation attempts as capitalist, industrial, modernist, Euro-Atlantic-centric, patriarchal, and more – highlight the significance of the wisdom implicit in peasant and indigenous knowledges and traditional agrarian and food practices. As those mainstream corporate attempts aim to sow rational futures by harvesting the previous successes of a developmentalist past, they appear as the most progressive, scientific, and incontestable solutions to our problems. In contrast, yet in connection with this, as those alternative imaginaries try to harvest wise futures by re-sowing socio-culturally and ecologically sustainable and inclusive pasts, they appear romantic, not only in their conceptions of our past but also in their attempts to address the escalating agrifood problems jeopardising the future, such as feeding the growing world population. By situating the divide between rational and wise futures within the socio-historical and ecological tendencies and contradictions of the capitalist food regime (i.e., planetary agriculturalization and de-agriculturalization of food), this study argues that neither the rationalist camp is as progressive as it claims to be, nor are the alternative imaginaries as romantic as they seem.

Read the chapter: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004776630-027

Abstract: This article aims first to understand how and why refugees decide to leave or stay in their first country of asylum, and second to contribute to the theory of agentic analyses of migration. Our contribution adds to the growing body of research examining the impact of social class and associated capitals on the trajectories of forced migrants. Our analysis of the experiences of Syrians in Turkey and Lebanon demonstrates that social class is a critical factor in shaping their experiences in their first countries of asylum. We assert that social class has a significant impact on their future mobility and immobility decisions. By using a Bourdieusian conceptualisation of capitals, habitus and social space and relying on in-depth interviews, we analyse the types of capital that forced migrants possess, their convertibility and their chances of re-establishing their class status. We show that convertibility depends on the type of capital and its interaction with social space. The difference between pre- and post-displacement class status is a significant factor in determining decisions regarding onward mobility, along with the capacity for social reproduction. Our findings demonstrate that voluntary immobility may occur among those who have achieved similar livelihoods to their pre-displacement status and are content with their lives. Lower-income households that struggle to restore their livelihoods are more likely to engage in irregular migration or become trapped in involuntary immobility.

Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1177/01979183261478058

Abstract: This paper proposes a typology to analyse the diverse politics of contemporary mobilisations that are explicitly focused on challenging fossil fuel extractivism. It argues that such efforts predominantly draw on one of three distinctive but overlapping perspectives – supply-side policy, just transition and environmental justice – which are characterised by variations in their primary motivations, actors involved, and arguments and strategies employed, as well as the challenges and critiques they face. The elaboration of these perspectives highlights the different ways in which they incorporate a vision for broad-based ecosocialist transformation focused on systemic drivers of the climate crisis and fossil fuel-based economic growth. The paper’s discussion of anti-coal mobilisations in India further illustrates how this typology can be applied to analyse diverse efforts to contest fossil fuel extraction within a specific empirical context, and the context-specific limits and possibilities for building transformative resistances to fossil fuel extractivism.

Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2026.2703560

Abstract: This essay presents an analysis of the Human Right to Adequate Food (DHAA) and community soup kitchens in the Brazilian context, examining their relevance to food justice and the fight against hunger. Firstly, we establish the HRFA as a fundamental right guaranteed at both international and national levels, before going on to distinguish between the concepts of Food Security (focused on regular access and quantities guaranteed by the State) and Food Sovereignty (emphasising the right of peoples to define their own food systems and modes of production). The text also explores recent public policies, such as the Cozinha Solidária Programme and the Paul Singer Training Programme, which point to the possibility of institutionalising these practices based on community self-organisation and the strengthening of working-class neighbourhoods. Finally, the essay discusses community solidarity kitchens as social practices and insurgent social technologies that not only provide food but also promote collective organisation and build food sovereignty, in line with the theoretical perspective of ‘Law Found on the Street’.

Read the article here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/412925136_Entre_o_Direito_Humano_a_Alimentacao_Adequada_a_Seguranca_Alimentar_e_Nutricional_e_a_Construcao_da_Soberania_Alimentar_as_Cozinhas_Populares_Solidarias_como_experiencia_de_Acesso_a_Justica_Alimentar

On September 23^rd, over 100 farmers’ groups marched through Bangkok and submitted a letter to the Ministry of Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives protesting the possible adoption of UPOV 1991 in Thailand’s Plant Variety Protection Act. Adopting UPOV 1991 is part of the negotiations for the FTA between Europe and Thailand, but its adoption creates further barriers to protecting peasants’ and small-scale farmers’ seeds, while at the same time allowing legal gaps for misappropriation of local plants’ genetic material.

Thai and European farmers and peasants (organised across over 100 farmers’ groups, including the Assembly of the Poor, and the European Coordination of the Via Campesina) are standing together against the EU-Thailand FTA. In Thailand, the FTA agreement is also expected to expand the poultry and corn monoculture production, reinforcing pathways towards increased greenhouse gases resulting from large-scale stubble burning and benefiting only a handful of poultry industry giants. In Europe, food sovereignty will be threatened by the incoming flux of cheap industrial poultry from Thailand. The FTA agreement will put at risk food sovereignty and peasants’ rights in both Thailand and Europe, advancing only concentration and contamination.

CASAS stands with peasant organisations and farmers protesting the possible acceptance of the UPOV 1991 and the FTA agreement and supports La Via Campesina’s demands for placing people and ecologies at the heart of economic policy, instead of corporations’ interests. We support the need to cancel debt in Global South countries, tax corporations and reallocate the budget towards farmers, peasants, indigenous peoples, and local communities’ needs.  We support the transformation of the global food system through food sovereignty and agroecology, as part of the wider socioecological change needed for addressing the multi-faceted crises evident today.

Read our full statement below:

Abstract: This study analyzes how the agricultural sector in Manabí, a historical pillar of the economy, is shaped by the corporate food regime. Using descriptive statistics and a survey administered to 52 women members of the AMUCOMT organization, the study shows that the agricultural modernization has been unable to mitigate rural poverty, which reaches levels of up to 82% in the province. Although agricultural activity employs 84% of Manabí’s rural population, deep inequality persists, with 2% of productive units concentrating 26% of the land area. In the particular case of AMUCOMT maize producers, 90.7% of households are unable to meet their basic needs, while the women are compelled to accept technological packages in which 96% depend on chemical fertilizers. The article concludes that integration into agro-industrial chains does not guarantee social well-being, but rather transfers production risks to peasant families and increases their dependence on external inputs.

Read his full article here: http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/s0717-73562026000100515

In Seeding Empire, Aaron Eddens critically examines how governments and philanthrocapitalists from the global North have shaped agricultural development in the South. Specifically, Eddens focuses on the maize seed industry in Africa and the continued dominance of capitalist interests in the ongoing dispossession of indigenous knowledge, land and seed systems.

Read his review here: https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70112

Abstract: This chapter examines the proactive roles of agrarian social movements involved in food production and trade in Southern Africa in addressing corporate accountability for human and environmental rights violations, with a particular focus on Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. It highlights how these movements and networks, in particular La Via Campesina Southern and East Africa and the Rural Women’s Assembly, not only seek justice and reparations for human rights abuses and ecological harm by agribusiness corporations, but are also committed to building transformative economic alternatives that prioritize local, ecologically sustainable practices. I argue that, while corporate power and impunity dominate the food and agriculture sector by controlling value chains and market mechanisms, emerging regional networks of small-scale food producers and traders are making a significant impact in counterbalancing this power. These movements and networks are creating alternative economic systems that not only challenge agribusiness power, but also reclaim accountability from corporate hegemony in the food and agriculture sector across the region.

Read the chapter: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003789055-16

From One River to Another is a collection of video messages from people defending the Indrayani River in India, the Magdalena River in Colombia, and the Berkel River in Germany. Conceived as open letters, the messages share what people have witnessed along their rivers and ask how movements in different places might learn from one another and build solidarity.

The videos could be found in Spanish and English here: https://movingrivers.org/

Abstract: This study examines how overlapping territorial regimes, specifically state conservation zoning, industrial plantation frontiers, and customary tenure, generate divergent socio-ecological pathways and human–orangutan relations in two Dayak Iban communities in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Utilizing a retroductive research design grounded in comparative ethnographic fieldwork and environmental history, the analysis traces how national forest classifications and corporate expansions intersect with everyday forest practices. Despite a shared Iban identity and comparable ecologies, the two landscapes have diverged significantly, materializing as contrasting spatial arrangements, shifting relations with state authority, and uneven ecocultural continuity. This study positions human–orangutan dynamics as a vital empirical entry point to show how uniform state frameworks fracture on the ground. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that the uneven impacts of green frontiers are experienced not merely as administrative friction, but as a deeply shared, multispecies experience of environmental precarity, thereby offering a diagnostic framework for reimagining conservation futures.

Read her full text here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/25148486261491610