Die Diversität von Nahrungspflanzen, ein Ergebnis Jahrtausende langer Zuchtbemühungen, ist in den letzten Jahrzehnten dramatisch zurückgegangen. Schätzungen zufolge machen von den über 7000 Nahrungspflanzenarten ganze 103 Sorten 90% der Nahrungsmittelproduktion aus. Dieser Verlust könnte in Zukunft gewaltige negative Auswirkungen auf die Nahrungsmittelsicherheit haben, da die Biodiversität eine zentrale Rolle bei der Absorbierung biotischer und abiotischer Stressfaktoren spielt, die auf die Pflanzen wirken. Darüber hinaus stellt der Verlust eine bedeutende Verarmung nicht nur des Pools genetischer Ressourcen dar, die zukünftigen Generationen zur (...) Verfügung stehen, sondern auch der kulturellen Diversität, indem die Nahrungsmittelvielfalt der Landesküchen eingeschränkt und sowohl Kulturlandschaften als auch Stadtgärten vereinheitlicht werden. Wegen der grundlegenden Funktion, die die Agrobiodiversität in der menschlichen Gesellschaft erfüllt, werden wir im Folgenden verschiedene Schwierigkeiten bei der Pflege der Agrobiodiversität als ein gemeinsames Erbe der Menschheit in einer stark ungleichen Welt erörtern. Zuvor jedoch möchten wir untersuchen, was Agrobiodiversität eigentlich ist und welche Funktion sie für das menschliche Wohlbefinden erfüllt. Ziel dieses Artikels ist zu zeigen, inwieweit sich verschiedene Anreizsysteme unterschiedlich auf den Erhalt von Agrobiodiversität auswirken. (shrink)

Having an adequate and extensively recognized resource governance system is essential for the conservation and sustainable use of crop genetic resources in a highly populated planet. Despite the widely accepted importance of agrobiodiversity for future plant breeding and thus food security, there is still pervasive disagreement at the individual level on who should own genetic resources. The aim of the article is to provide conceptual clarification on the following concepts and their relation to agrobiodiversity stewardship: open access, commons, private property, (...) state property and common heritage of humankind. After presenting each property regime, we will examine whether and how these incentivize the conservation, improvement and sharing of crop genetic resources, and conclude by defending a mixed property regime. (shrink)

Use of the term “agroecology” has greatly increased over the past few decades, with scholars, civil society actors, and intergovernmental organizations identifying agroecology as a promising pathway for realizing more just and sustainable food systems. Using a community-engaged approach, we explore how diverse agroecological actors in southern Brazil describe and define agroecology. We find that across a range of social differences, agroecological actors come together in describing agroecology as a philosophy of life that promotes well-being, positioning agroecology as a counter-narrative (...) to global discourses on “development” that promote economic growth and productivism as the path to a good life. Our findings suggest that the practice of agroecology can enhance diverse rural peoples’ well-being by providing a pathway to overcoming alienation, commodification, and exploitation, although broader political-economic conditions constrain this potential. As socioecological crises continue to accelerate and undermine human and environmental health and well-being, the capacity for agroecology to promote wellness from various ontological and epistemological positions warrants further attention. (shrink)

Food security brings a number of benefits to humanity from which nobody can be excluded and which can be simultaneously enjoyed by all. An economic understanding of the concept sees food security qualify as a global public good. However, there are four other ways of understanding a public good which are worthy of attention. A normative public good is a good from which nobody ought to be excluded. Alternatively, one might acknowledge the benevolent character of a public good. Others have (...) argued that public goods demand being public in the sense of being visible to all. Finally, it has also been argued that public goods are those goods which need joint action to be produced and maintained. This chapter discusses these five understandings of the public good in relation to food security and highlights the advantage of assessing policies from each of these perspectives. (shrink)

Extreme inequality of opportunity leads to a number of social tensions, inefficiencies and injustices. One issue of increasing concern is the effect inequality is having on people’s fair chances of attaining meaningful work, thus limiting opportunities to make a significant positive contribution to society and reducing the chances of living a flourishing life and developing their potential. On a global scale we can observe an increasingly uneven provision of meaningful work, raising a series of ethical concerns that need detailed examination. (...) The aim of this article is to explore the potential of a normative framework based upon the idea of contributive justice to defend a fairer provision of meaningful work. (shrink)

The concept of food sovereignty is becoming an element of everyday parlance in development politics and food justice advocacy. Yet to successfully achieve food sovereignty, the demands within this movement have to be compatible with the way people are pursuing consumer sovereignty, and vice versa. The aim of this article is to examine the different sets of demands that the two ideals of sovereignty bring about, analyze in how far these different demands can stand in constructive relations with each other (...) and explain why consumers have to adjust their food choices to seasonal production variability to promote food sovereignty and so secure future autonomy. (shrink)

Although organic standards and certification schemes have a crucial role in ensuring quality, safety, and sustainability within food systems, there is a need to critically analyze their implications on human capabilities within alternative food networks (AFNs). Therefore, this paper draws upon the capability approach to analyze the implications of three governance mechanisms (i.e., third-party, social control, and hybrid certification) on human flourishing within AFNs in Ceará, Brazil. The three cases primarily build on 66 interviews with farmers, consumers, AFN owners and (...) employees, certifying officials, governmental and non-governmental representatives, and researchers. Third-party certification has some positive effects in terms of material, political, and environmental capabilities and many negative effects regarding social/cultural capabilities. Social control certification bolsters material, social/cultural, political, and environmental capabilities for the benefit of farmers and consumers. Hybrid certification increases the material control, political power, social legitimacy, and environmental governance of market intermediaries. The findings can help scholars, practitioners, and policymakers rethink the role of organic standardization and certification in fostering fundamental human capabilities and tackling inequalities within AFNs. (shrink)

Farm to school is a popular approach to food systems education in K-12 schools across the United States. FTS programs are highly heterogeneous, but generally include serving locally grown fruits and vegetables in school nutrition programs, planting and maintaining school gardens, and engaging students in garden and food-based learning across the school curriculum. While FTS has been promoted as a “win–win–win” for children, farmers, and communities, it has also been critiqued for reinscribing neoliberal trends that exacerbate social inequalities. Through a (...) year-long, ethnographic study of FTS within one public middle school in the Southeast US, this paper contributes to these debates. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks of materiality and affective labor, we investigate how engagement with FTS activities can transform the social practice of everyday life in school for students, staff, and teachers. We find that FTS can reframe success in collaborative terms, engage the school around collective responsibility, and foster relationships across socioeconomic and racial difference. Although there is continued need to expand policies to ensure equitable funding for FTS, our research demonstrates that the hands-on work and collective subjectivities produced through FTS can mitigate the harms of neoliberalism and be a force for positive social change within a school. (shrink)

This research examines a series of case studies from the agricultural sector to illustrate how various models of innovation embrace value proposition. A conscious value contestation at the interface of science, policy and civil society requires transformations in the triple-helix model of university-government-industry collaboration, because reiterations in the triple-helix model of innovation, such as quadruple, quintuple and higher helices, do not necessarily address civil society concerns for human values and science ethics. This research develops and tests a matrix model of (...) university-government-industry-civil society collaboration, which involves the co-creation of inclusive and transformational spaces for value proposition. Findings suggest that the matrix model of innovation institutionalises citizen science as it serves as a moral heuristic to make seemingly apolitical science responsive to essentially contested societal values. (shrink)

This paper makes the case for an environmental justice approach to the practice and study of participation and effectiveness in agrobiodiversity governance. It is argued that, in order to understand the conditions under which participation leads to improved outcomes, the concept has to be rethought, both from a political and a methodological perspective. This can be done by applying an ex-ante environmental justice approach to participation, including notions of distribution, recognition and representation. By exploring the approach through empirical examples of (...) participation in biodiversity and environmental governance, a research framework is outlined, attempting to bridge normative and practical approaches to environmental justice, and tested on two cases of agrobiodiversity governance in Western Europe. (shrink)

Robots are widely expected—and pushed—to transform open-field agriculture, but these visions remain wedded to optimizing monocultural farming systems. Meanwhile there is little pull for automation from ecology-based, diversified farming realms. Noting this gap, we here explore the potential for robots to foster an agroecological approach to crop production. The research was situated in The Netherlands within the case of _pixel cropping_, a nascent farming method in which multiple food and service crops are planted together in diverse assemblages employing agroecological practices (...) such as intercropping and biological pest control. Around this case we engaged with a variety of specialists in discussion groups, workshops, and design challenges to explore the potential of field robots to meet the multifaceted demands of highly diverse agroecological cropping systems. This generated a spectrum of imaginations for how automated tools might—or might not—be appropriately used, ranging from fully automated visions, to collaborative scenarios, to fully analogue prototypes. We found that automating agroecological cropping systems requires finding ways to imbue the ethos of agroecology into designed tools, thereby seeking to overcome tensions between production aims and other forms of social and ecological care. We conclude that a rethinking of automation is necessary for agroecological contexts: not as a blueprint for replacing humans, but making room for analogue and hybrid forms of agricultural work. These findings highlight a need for design processes which include a diversity of actors, involve iterative design cycles, and incorporate feedback between designers, practitioners, tools, and cropping systems. (shrink)

An emerging discourse about automated agricultural machinery imagines farms as places where farmers and workers do not need to be, but also implicitly frames farms as intolerable places where people do not want to be. Only autonomous machines, this story goes, can relieve farmers and workers of this presumed burden by letting them ‘farm at a distance’. In return for this distanced autonomy, farmers are promised increased control over their work-life balance and greater farm productivity from letting ‘smart’ robots assume (...) control over the operational environment. Drawing upon the ways that these machines are promoted by manufacturers in various media, we trace the nascent contours of what we term a liberatory sociotechnical imaginary for agricultural automation across three cases—automated milking systems, self-driving tractors, and robotic strawberry pickers. We show how promises for new freedoms and autonomy are flexibly deployed to respond to distinct frictions that farmers, workers, and even farm animals experience in different modes of industrial agriculture. However, underlying these promises is the purposefully understated self-interest of manufacturers, who stand to gain further control over farms if automated technologies assume a central role in agriculture. Through the liberatory rhetoric, we contend, the imaginary seeks to enroll farmers into a socio-technical network that creates new relations of dependence upon the companies who design, sell, maintain, and often retain ownership over automated technologies. While potentially powerful, this imaginary may nonetheless fail to coalesce as farmers, workers, and agroecosystems exert their own agency on automated imaginaries and technological futures for agriculture. (shrink)

Since 1984, the AHV journal has provided a key forum for a community of interdisciplinary, international researchers, educators, and policy makers to analyze and debate core issues, values and hopes facing the nation and the world, and to recommend strategies and actions for addressing them. This agenda includes the more specific challenges and opportunities confronting agriculture, food systems, science, and communities, as well as broader contextual issues and grand challenges. This paper draws extensively on 40 years of AHV journal articles (...) and reviews and begins with a focus on a limited number of key grand challenges (climate change and global warming; threats to democracy and the growing neo-nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism; and increasing national and international inequality). With these challenges as the underlining context, the remainder of the paper addresses core journal themes of sustainable agriculture and local food systems, citizen and public science, and empowered communities. Highlighted are numerous important journal contributions to the analyses and recommendations to address these hopes and themes. I conclude that these themes and hopes not only deserve to live but are essential for changing and redirecting an unsustainable and destructive environmental, economic, political and social agenda to a viable, livable and just democratic society. (shrink)

Craft food and beverage makers regularly emphasize transparency about the ethical, sustainable sourcing of their ingredients and the human labour underpinning their production, all of which helps elevate the status of their products and occupational communities. Yet, as with other niche ethical consumption markets, craft industries continue to rely on employment conditions for agricultural workers that reproduce inequalities of race, class, and citizenship in the dominant food system. This paper interrogates the contradiction between the exaltation of craft cidermakers’ labour and (...) the devaluation of farmworker labour by assessing how craft beverage actors make sense of inequalities facing manually skilled agricultural workers. Through a focus on the emerging craft cider industry, this paper draws on in-depth interviews and ethnographic data with a range of urban and rural cider actors in the Pacific Northwest (British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington State). I find that actors in the craft cider industry engage with inequalities affecting farmworkers through three main patterns: (1) Justifications of the status quo; (2) Supply chain fog; and (3) Misgiving/critique. By using an analytical framework that integrates critical agrarianism and the politics of sight, this study provides insights into both barriers and opportunities to redistribute social recognition and material rewards across food supply chains. (shrink)

Since its origins as an academic newsletter, _Agriculture and Human Values_ has evolved to be one of the leading journals publishing critical scholarship of the food and agricultural system. This essay illustrates and comments on the evolution of the scale and scope of research published in the journal over the years.

Domestic activities, involving productive and reproductive spheres, are mainly performed by women, requiring a great amount of knowledge and skills that are poorly represented in the literature and often undervalued in the society. Women’s role in the food system was investigated in Lacanjá Chansayab, Mexico, a village inhabited by ~ 400 Lacandon Maya people. This research included participant observation for three months in the community and semi-structured interviews with 10 cis-women and 5 cis-men documenting their recipes, the relationships that are (...) developed along their work in the food systems and actions for the restoration of traditional food. Women’s roles in food systems are central; they have an intricate knowledge of their environment and have principal roles in producing, obtaining, and transforming biodiversity into diverse meals within the kitchenspace. But they do more than producing, collecting, and mixing of ingredients. Their role in the food systems creates different types of relationships; the kitchenspace is a source of empowerment, traditional food is crucial for maintaining biocultural memory, and for establishing relationships with other-than-human beings. However, serving traditional foods is also a potential source for discrimination against their families even from members of their own community. It was recognized by participants that traditional food system is a medium for biocultural restoration in their community. Dignifying women’s work, views, techniques, and knowledge in traditional food systems is critical for food sovereignty, social justice, and biocultural restoration. (shrink)

Agroecological transitions aim at developing sustainable farming and food systems, adapted to local contexts. Such transitions require the engagement of local actors and the consideration of their knowledge and reasoning as a whole, which encompasses different natures of knowledge (empirical, scientific, local, generic), related to different dimensions (economic, environmental, technical, social, political), as well as their values and perceived uncertainties. While these transitions are often problematized in relation to technical issues, this article's objective is to start from the way the (...) local actors consider these transitions in order to see what issues are actually involved. In this study, we analyzed the reasoning of diverse farming actors, including farmers and farm advisors. We conducted 30 cognitive mapping interviews, during which the local actors drew cognitive maps to explicit their reasoning concerning their agroecological transition with an open approach. Their reasoning revealed an emphasis on the human & social dimension of the process of agroecological transitions: (i) human and social considerations come first in the transition process, while technical solutions are viewed as secondary, (ii) use and development of human capacities, social interactions and human well-being are crucial to the conduct of agroecological transitions, (iii) human-scale farming appears as a condition for the use of human capacities, human well-being and rural development, (iv) agroecological transitions imply farming advisory transitions, and (v) rural development appears as a condition for agroecological transitions, implying transitions in society as a whole. (shrink)

Senegal is among the few African countries that counts with an important agroecological movement. This movement is strongly backed up by a network of transnational partnerships and has recently matured into an advocacy coalition that promotes an agroecological transition at national scale. In this article, we investigate the role of transnational links on the empowerment potential of agroecology. Combining the multi-level perspective of socio-technical transitions and Bourdieu’s theory of practices, we conceptualize the agroecological network as a niche shaped by the (...) circulation of different types of capital. Using social network analysis, we investigate the existing flows of resources and knowledge, as well as membership and advocacy links to critically address within-niche empowerment processes. We show that transnational ties play a key role in building the niche protective space, showing a financial dependency of the agroecological niche on NGOs and international cooperation programmes based in Europe and North America. This configuration tends to favor the empowerment of NGOs instead of farmer unions, which only play a peripheral role in the network. However, the multiple innovations focus of agroecology may open up prospects for more gradual but potentially radical change. Based on our findings, we suggest to include more explicitly core-periphery dynamics in transition studies involving North–South relations, including circulation of capital, ideas and norms. (shrink)