This issue brings together a selection of articles based on presentations at two Conferences in 1997. The aim has been 1) to offer clearer and more understandable descriptions of the major trends and relationships that are involved in the structural transformations that are occurring in food systems at all levels; 2) to help develop better theoretical and conceptual tools to aid us in analyzing such restructurings and their dynamics; and 3) to clarify a number of practical issues facing those seeking (...) to promote more sustainable and just food systems, especially at the local level. With only one exception, all the articles here focus on Western economies where food systems are highly commodified, globally integrated, corporate, and state structures have been restructured by a series of neo-liberal reforms in recent years. In pointing out the problems with these food systems, the articles also discuss various possibilities for structural reforms for more healthy, sustainable, just, and equitable food systems and societies. (shrink)

Over the past several decades, a group of scholars at the Berkeley campus of the University of California have frequently challenged many of the dominant themes of contemporary agricultural research. In their work, they have organized curricula questioning the assumptions of conventional agriculture and its sciences while encouraging the development of alternative agricultural practices based on principles of ecology. Their collective critique has stimulated an intellectual climate calling forth a scrutiny of the university's role in the production of knowledge and (...) the social consequences of its works. The result of this intellectual project has been a group that has also largely challenged the dominant themes of the modern university. In place of a setting where ideas are a passive currency, the modern university is a place where knowledge and power are manifest in a dialectic that is revealed not simply by the production of knowledge, but its destruction as well. It is in this context that the recent history of a group of scholars at the University of California provides a striking testimony concerning the disturbing character of science in the modern university. The ecological and social dimensions of “killing fields” that captures the contemporary hazards of food and fiber production in California is also reflected in the gradual demise of a group of researchers at Berkeley who have endeavored to provide an alternative vision of agriculture. (shrink)

In 1973, Jim Hightower and his associates at the Agribusiness Accountability Project dropped a bombshell – Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times – on the land-grant college and agricultural science establishments. From the early 1970s until roughly 1990, Hightower-style criticism of and activism toward the public agricultural research system focused on a set of closely interrelated themes: the tendencies for the publicly supported research enterprise to be an unwarranted taxpayer subsidy of agribusiness, for agricultural research and extension to favor large farmers and (...) be disadvantageous for family farmers, for public research to stress mechanization while ignoring the concerns and interests of farm workers, and for the research and extension establishment to ignore rural poverty and other rural social problems. By 1990, however, there had been a quite fundamental restructuring of the agricultural technology opposition movement – one that is not often well recognized. Two overarching changes had occurred. First, agricultural-technology activism had shifted from contesting land-grant/public research priorities and practices to contesting private agribusiness technological priorities and practices. Second, the relatively integrated, overarching Hightower-type opposition had undergone bifurcation into two quite distinct social movements: the agricultural sustainability/local food systems movement on one hand, and the anti-GM food/crop and anti-food-system-globalization movement on the other. In this paper I explore the causes and consequences of these restructurings of the agricultural research and technology opposition movement. Chief among the major factors involved was the fact that “Hightowerism'' involved an ineffectual representational politics. Hightowerist claims – especially the claim that land-grant research was detrimental to family farmers – generated little support among the groups it claimed to represent (particularly “small'' or “family'' farmers). The two successor movements, by contrast, have relatively clear and dependable constituents. Further, the progressive molecularization of agricultural research, which proved to be both an antecedent and consequence of corporate involvement in agricultural research in the US, has decisively changed the issues that are contested by technology activists. Since the age of Hightower, the agricultural technology activist movement has shifted its 1970s and early 1980s emphasis from contesting public sector/land-grant research priorities to contesting private sector activities, particularly genetic engineering, GM crops, and globalization of agricultural technologies and regulatory practices. Even the sustainability/localism wing of the new agricultural technology movement configuration has progressively backed away from contesting public research priorities. The efforts of the sustainable agricultural and localism movement have increasingly focused on quasi-private efforts such as community supported agriculture, green/“value-added'' labeling and marketing strategies, and community food security. Some implications of this increasingly bifurcated, agricultural technology, activist movement configuration in which there is decreased interest in land-grant/public research priorities are discussed. (shrink)

Proponents of sustainable agriculture seek deeply rooted social changes, but to advance this agenda requires political credibility and work with diverse partners. Asthe literature on political co-optation makesclear, the tension between conviction andcredibility is persistent and unavoidable; nota problem to be solved so much as a built-incondition of movement politics. Drawing on acase history of California's largestsustainable agriculture organization, astructural assessment is made of the strategicchoices facing movement leaders, organizationaltensions that accompany these choices, andperceived gains and losses. The case historydemonstrates (...) how movement leaders craft middlerange strategies that adapt to politicalcircumstances while retaining attachments tocore values and constituencies. Thesestrategies are ripe with tradeoffs, placingdemands on leaders who must implement them in aspirit that sustains organizational vitalitywhile broadening political and social impact.But they also enlarge the democraticsensibilities of movement leaders, increasingtheir ability to listen, learn, and forgealliances based on shared goals rather thansimilar motives. (shrink)

The discourses of agricultural extension reveal how actors represent their scientific activities and goals. The “transfer of technology” discourse developed with the professional U.S. extension service, reproducing its expert/lay power relations. Agroecology is emerging as a systems approach to preventing agricultural pollution. Its theoreticians argue that agroecology cannot be transferred like technology but must be extended through networks of participatory social learning. In California, hundreds of actors and dozens of institutions have cocreated agroecological partnerships using this alternative extension model. They (...) have developed three alternative extension discourses to represent and explain their activities. Bruno Latour's “circulatory system of science” model provides a superior theoretical framework for interpreting the participation and discourses of diverse actors in this extension practice. (shrink)