This article investigates cotton promotion policies in colonial Korea, with a focus on the role of a series of semi-governmental organizations (SGOs) in implementing colonial policies to shape farmers’ interactions with global, capitalist markets. Colonial attempts to develop the cultivation of cotton, a quintessential commodity of modern capitalism, highlight the incorporation of the Korean countryside into imperial networks of commercial commodity production and circulation. However, despite appeals to the rhetoric of capitalism and the expected response of profit-maximizing cotton cultivators, in practice colonial cotton campaigns relied on the active intervention of the colonial state to reinforce the adoption of new scientific and commercial agricultural practices. SGOs performed multiple roles in the promotion of cotton cultivation—distributing resources, defining expertise, regulating the production and sale of cotton, and attempting to change the behaviour of cotton cultivators, landlords, and even merchants in line with the colonial government’s strategic interests. As such, SGOs represent an understudied extension of the colonial state into the rural economy, which influenced the conditions under which farming households engaged in the commercial cultivation of cotton.

Awareness of agricultural climate impacts is growing. In the European Union (EU), the agricultural sector is responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions while continuing to receive considerable EU budgetary support. A large share of agricultural emissions is linked to livestock husbandry, a sector the direct and indirect climate impacts of which the EU's ‘green’ agricultural policies have historically ignored. This blind spot extends to the sizeable global deforestation footprint from EU livestock feed imports that remains unaddressed, despite the EU's aspired status as a global climate leader and major global agricultural market player. This article benchmarks the evolution of EU agri-climate legal and policy developments, using livestock emissions as a case study to highlight the importance of learning from the successes and failures of the EU experience, to realize future attempts to tackle global agricultural emissions.

Biofortification – the process of increasing the concentrations of essential nutrients in staple crops – is a means of addressing the burden of micronutrient deficiencies at a population level via existing food systems, such as smallholder farms. To realise its potential for global impact, we need to understand the factors that are associated with decisions to adopt biofortified crops and food products. We searched the literature to identify adoption determinants, i.e. barriers to (factors negatively associated) or facilitators of (factors positively associated) adoption, of biofortified crops and food products. We found 41 studies reporting facilitator(s) and/or barrier(s) of adoption. We categorised the factors using the Consolidated Framework of Implementation Research 2.0, resulting in a set of factors that enable or constrain adoption of biofortified foods across twenty-four constructs and five domains of this meta-theoretical determinant framework from implementation science. Facilitators of orange sweet potato adoption included knowledge about importance, relative advantage, efficient production and management practices; barriers included lacking timely access to quality vines and market remoteness (28 studies total). Facilitators of vitamin A cassava adoption included awareness of its benefits and access to information; barriers included poor road networks and scarcity of improved technology including inadequate processing/storage facilities (8). Facilitators of high-iron bean adoption included farmers’ networking and high farming experience; barriers included low knowledge of bean biofortification (8). Barriers to vitamin A maize adoption included low awareness and concerns regarding yield, texture and aflatoxin contamination (1). These barriers and facilitators may be a starting point for researchers to move towards testing implementation strategies and/or for policymakers to consider before planning scale-up and continuous optimisation of ongoing projects promoting adoption of biofortified crops and food products.

China has initiated three antidumping (AD) investigations against US feed products since 2010, despite clear mutual benefits from such exports from the US to China. This article provides a close examination of these investigations, what prompted them, how they were resolved, and the costs they imposed on importers and exporters. The article also describes the political economy around these investigations and how China's antidumping laws provide it with flexibility to manage these investigations. The article concludes that this flexibility makes China well-positioned to continue using AD investigations against some trade partners in the future, particularly if AD use continues to rise globally.

This project focuses on the subsistence strategies of Early Neolithic communities that inhabited the upland region of South Bohemia. Its results reveal a distinctive trajectory for this peripheral area that was colonised significantly later, brought incoming farmers into close contact with hunter-gatherers and made them adapt their conservative farming practices.

La agricultura fue una actividad fundamental de las comunidades aldeanas de las tierras altas de Arica en los Andes centro sur, durante el período Intermedio tardío (1100-1450 dC), hasta convertirse en uno de los principales propósitos de la expansión inca en la región en los siglos quince y dieciséis. Este trabajo presenta el hallazgo, en la cuenca alta del Valle de Azapa, de maquetas o infraestructuras agrícolas grabadas en miniatura. Caracterizamos sus formas y soportes, examinamos su distribución en los territorios tardíos de la región y las contrastamos a macroescala regional con evidencias similares. Finalmente, discutimos su vínculo con el flujo de conocimientos y experiencias relativos al manejo del agua y la topografía, junto con la ritualización del paisaje agrícola en tiempos incas.

The shift towards cultivating domesticated crops was a pivotal development in ecological, economic, and human behavioural systems. As agriculture expanded beyond its origins, it faced diverse environments, often unsuitable for the originally cultivated domesticates. Farmers in Central Europe had to adjust and transform their farming systems, typically cultivating only five domesticated crop species. Here, we present new archaeobotanical data comprising 7955 determined charred remains and 22 radiocarbon dates from South Bohemia. This region, with higher altitudes, colder climates, and less fertile soils, lies on the periphery of Early Neolithic settlement. Our results reveal increased crop diversity as a form of adaptation to the harsher environment that bolstered resilience against crop failure. The earliest 14C-based evidence of deliberate cultivation of barley and Timopheev’s wheat in the region also provides new insights into the interplay between crop diffusion, landscapes, and food choices in the Neolithic Central Europe.

This article argues that live cattle futures, launched in 1964 in Chicago, were revolutionary for professional economics, the derivatives industry, and the beef cattle industry because cattle were the first successful “non-storable” derivatives. Since the late nineteenth century, the ability of derivatives to provide financial services to risk-averse farmers rested on the assumption that futures were interchangeable with physical commodities in storage. Live cattle futures upset theories and norms, which enabled experiments in increasingly abstract forms of speculation and tremendous growth in the derivatives industry. Economists, exchange leaders, and commodity producers cooperated to make live cattle futures work, but they all understood and felt their impacts differently. The article applies market performativity theory to better understand how financial instruments and markets became first less and later more physically abstract over time. The article reveals that the changing materiality of derivatives also led to changes in the social purpose of speculative finance. Sources include published economics articles, conference proceedings, congressional hearings, historical newspapers, and archival records from the derivatives and cattle industries.

The American craft beer industry’s creation narrative is rooted in countercultural food politics. Popular stories describe how plucky brewers pioneered complex and hoppy beers that revolutionized a bland American beer industry dominated by industrial lagers. Hops are now the most celebrated ingredient in the craft beer industry and serve as visual representations of the artisanal and revolutionary values of small brewers that contrasts with the industrial and bland products of the nation’s massive lager brewers. The history of hops and brewing presented here, however, demonstrates the connections between big and small brewers and the environmental impacts of craft brewers’ hoppy beers otherwise obscured by their preferred dichotomous narrative. Craft beer grew in tandem with the modern hop industry and became enmeshed with big business and industrial agricultural practices to access their signature commodity, hops. By integrating environmental and business history, this article explores how brewers, scientists, farmers, and nonhumans influenced each other to create the modern craft brewing industry. This approach demonstrates the often-obscured connections between big and small firms by examining the environments, organisms, and supply chains they depend upon.