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Agriculture and Human Values

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ISSN (Print) 1572-8366 - ISSN (Online) 0889-048X
Published by Springer-Verlag

[2218 journals]

Julie Guthman: Weighing in: obesity, food justice, and the limits of capitalism
- PubDate: 2013-06-19
Growing food, growing a movement: climate adaptation and civic agriculture in the southeastern United States
- Abstract: Abstract This article examines the role that civic agriculture in Georgia (US) plays in shaping attitudes, strategies, and relationships that foster both sustainability and adaptation to a changing climate. Civic agriculture is a social movement that attracts a specific type of “activist” farmer, who is linked to a strong social network that includes other farmers and consumers. Positioning farmers’ practices within a social movement broadens the understanding of adaptive capacity beyond how farmers adapt to understand why they do so. By drawing upon qualitative and quantitative data and by focusing on the cosmological, organizational, and technical dimensions of the social movement, the study illuminates how social values and networks shape production and marketing strategies that enable farmers to share resources and risks. We propose a conceptual framework for understanding how technical and social strategies aimed to address the sustainability goals of the movement also increase adaptive capacity at multiple timescales. In conclusion, we outline directions for future research, including the need for longitudinal studies that focus on consumer motivation and willingness to pay, the effects of scale on consumer loyalty and producer cooperation, and the role of a social movement in climate change adaptation. Finally, we stress that farmers’ ability to thrive in uncertain climate futures calls for transformative approaches to sustainable agriculture that support the development of strong social networks.
  PubDate: 2013-06-17
David Goodman, E. Melanie DuPuis and Michael K. Goodman: Alternative food networks: knowledge, practice and politics
- PubDate: 2013-06-15
Kristina A. Vogt, Toral Patel-Weynand, Maura Shelton, Daniel J. Vogt, John C. Gordon, Calvin T. Mukumoto, Asep S. Suntana and Patricia A. Roads: Sustainability unpacked: food, energy and water for resilient environments and societies
- PubDate: 2013-06-15
The labor of terroir and the terroir of labor: Geographical Indication and Darjeeling tea plantations
- Abstract: Abstract In 1999, Darjeeling tea became India’s first Geographical Indication (GI). GI has proliferated worldwide as a legal protection for foods with terroir, or “taste of place,” a concept most often associated with artisan foods produced by small farmers in specific regions of the Global North. GI gives market protection to terroir in an increasingly homogenous food system. This article asks how Darjeeling tea, grown in an industrial plantation system rooted in British colonialism, has become convincingly associated with artisan GIs such as Champagne, Cognac, and Roquefort. The answer lies in a conceptual dyad that frames how British colonial officials, the Indian state, and international consumers have understood Darjeeling and its signature commodity. Since the colonial era, these actors have conceived Darjeeling as both an idyllic “garden” space and an industrial “plantation” space. As I show through an analysis of GI marketing materials and interviews with planters, pluckers, and consumers, this dyad maps in surprising ways onto labor relations. While planters’ and marketers’ discourses tend to emphasize the “garden,” laborers’ investment in GI lies primarily in an active—if also ambivalent—embrace of the plantation, encapsulated in the Nepali word “kamān.”
  PubDate: 2013-06-15
How then shall we eat? Insect-eating attitudes and sustainable foodways
- Abstract: Abstract Negative attitudes toward invertebrates are a deep-seated, visceral response among Western peoples. These internalized aversions toward insects and other terrestrial arthropods, both in general and specifically as a food source, subtly and systemically contribute to unsustainable global foodways. Insect cuisine is, for Westerners, emblematic of the alien, a threat to our psychological and cultural identity. Yet failure to embrace entomophagy prevents us from seeing the full humanity of those of other classes, races, and cultures, and leads to agricultural and food policy decisions that fail in their objectives to improve nourishment for all people. Key to enabling the world’s peoples to live sustainably with the land are: (1) awareness of the psychological and cultural barriers to a more insect-positive perspective (2) embracing insects as a desirable food resource, (3) understanding the processes by which those barriers are constructed, their negative consequences, and (4) identifying strategies for transforming our attitudes.
  PubDate: 2013-06-02
Supermarkets and private standards: unintended consequences of the audit ritual
- Abstract: Abstract Recent scholarship has considered the implications of the rise of voluntary private standards in food and the role of private actors in a rapidly evolving, de-facto ‘mandatory’ sphere of governance. Standards are an important element of this globalising private sphere, but are an element that has been relatively peripheral in analyses of power in agri-food systems. Sociological thought has countered orthodox views of standards as simple tools of measurement, instead understanding their function as a governance mechanism that transforms many things, and people, during processes of standardisation. In a case study of the Australian retail supermarket duopoly and the proprietary standards required for market access this paper foregrounds retailers as standard owners and their role in third-party auditing and certification. Interview data from primary research into Australia’s food standards captures the multifaceted role supermarkets play as standard-owners, who are found to impinge on the independence of third-party certification while enforcing rigorous audit practices. We show how standard owners, in attempting to standardize the audit process, generate tensions within certification practices in a unique example of ritualism around audit. In examining standards to understand power in contemporary food governance, it is shown that retailers are drawn beyond standard-setting into certification and enforcement, that is characterized by a web of institutions and actors whose power to influence outcomes is uneven.
  PubDate: 2013-06-01
Supermarket power, own-labels, and manufacturer counterstrategies: international relations of cooperation and competition in the fruit canning industry
- Abstract: Abstract Growing supermarket dominance and the expansion of own-label market share in Australia has put considerable pressure on agri-food manufacturers, and the recent movement of a number of manufacturing operations off-shore has attracted widespread attention. This paper examines the pursuit of an international manufacturing base by SPC Ardmona, one of Australia’s major fruit and vegetable processors, with a focus on strategic alliances formed with Siam Foods in Thailand and Rhodes Food Group in South Africa/Swaziland. Strategic horizontal alliances have become increasingly important for manufacturers seeking to counter retailer dominance, yet have received little attention in the agri-food literature. The two alliances examined in this paper illustrate the profound importance of prevailing societal and institutional environments in which production networks ‘touch-down’, and their influence on firm-level dynamics of trust, motivation, corporate values, and strategic objectives. Horizontal alliances can offer a promising alternative to cut-throat competition and a ‘race- to-the-bottom’ between agri-food manufacturers. However, with own-label sourcing strategies deepening competition between geographically-disparate manufacturers, identifying compatible alliance partners is likely to become an increasingly greater challenge.
  PubDate: 2013-06-01
Introduction to symposium on the changing role of supermarkets in global supply chains: from seedling to supermarket: agri-food supply chains in transition
- PubDate: 2013-06-01
Agri-food system transformations and diet-related chronic disease in Australia: a nutrition-oriented value chain approach
- Abstract: Abstract Attention has become increasingly focused in recent years on the role agri-food system transformations have played in driving the global diet-related chronic disease burden. Identifying the role played by the food-consuming industries (predominantly large manufacturers, processors, distributors, and retailers) in particular, and identifying possibilities to facilitate healthier diets through intervening in these industries, have been identified as a research priority. This paper explores the potential for one promising analytic framework—the nutrition-oriented value chain approach—to contribute to this area, drawing on recent insights from the global value chain (GVC) literature to develop an institutionally-enriched approach. The research focused on a canned deciduous fruit value chain linking growers, processors, and retailers in South Africa and Australia. Findings reveal the multiple drivers which have converged to shape this value chain over time, and the key actors which are influencing product availability, composition, price, and promotion within this sector. With its emphasis on identifying implications for end-consumption, rather than economic outcomes within the chain, nutrition-oriented value chain research represents a significant shift in focus for the GVC framework. Therefore, an immediate opportunity for further research is to extend the analytic framework to primary research on end-consumption behaviours.
  PubDate: 2013-06-01
There’s certainly a lot of hurting out there: navigating the trolley of progress down the supermarket aisle
- Abstract: Abstract For the past decade, supermarket chains have been positioned as the pre-eminent actor in global and national food systems. Some agri-food scholars argue that their ever-expanding transnational supply chains have established an era of stable production-consumption relations (or Food Regime), while others point to the conflicts they are encountering with governments, social movements and ‘alternative’ consumers. However, remarkably little attention has been paid to their relationship with communities and to community system sustainability. Based on fieldwork conducted in the Goulburn Valley, Australia, we argue that supermarket operations are contributing to community tensions through contestation over valued symbols and narratives about what desirable ‘progress’ looks like. We identified three interrelated points of tension being intensified by supermarket chains: whether progress is encapsulated by being an agricultural production or a modern consumption centre; whether progress should be based on a model of corporate capital or the local small business; and to what extent modern citizens can and should support community shopping instead of convenience shopping. For long-time residents, supermarkets are paradoxical actors appealing to, as well as, challenging the narrative of a community whose economic strength was based on the surrounding natural environment and local people’s endeavours. The concepts of solastalgia and structural nostalgia are relevant, with the former referring to the place-based distress experienced by residents whose local area is changing profoundly and the latter describing a process amplifying that distress. Through exploring the political paradoxes of community solastalgia, we raise new questions about supermarket authority within contemporary Food Regimes.
  PubDate: 2013-06-01
Financialization in agri-food supply chains: private equity and the transformation of the retail sector
- Abstract: Abstract The analysis of the financialization of food and farming has tended to focus on issues such as the impact on the productive and input sectors of the food chain, including the role of asset management companies, private equity consortia and other financial institutions in acquiring and managing farmland. However, processes of financialization impact along the whole agri-food supply chain, including the retail and food service sectors. This paper analyses the take-over by a private equity company of Somerfield, one of the UK’s leading supermarket chains, and the impact the subsequent restructuring had on the management and organization of the retailer’s operations. In doing so, the paper not only extends the analysis of the effects of financialization on the food system, but also raises questions about the extent to which the supermarkets are the dominant actors in the establishment and management of agri-food supply chains.
  PubDate: 2013-06-01
My decision to sell the family farm
- Abstract: Abstract This paper presents a discussion of my personal experiences of selling a family farm and analyses those experiences using the layered account form of autoethnographic writing. I describe how the cultural influences from family farming led me, a farmer’s son, to also become a farmer, why farmers may choose to continue in their occupation sometimes against increasingly negative economic pressures, why I continued farming for as long as I did, and the thoughts and feelings associated with my decision to sell my farm and exit the industry. I discuss the emotions that I experienced and place them in a theoretical context that makes them more understandable to others. Because this paper examines the effects from my decision to retire from farming it makes a contribution to the limited literature on farmers’ retirement.
  PubDate: 2013-06-01
Integrating culture and community into environmental policy: community tradition and farm size in conservation decision making
- Abstract: Abstract Community research by anthropologists and sociologists details the effects that centralization of decision making has on local communities. As governance and regulation move toward global scales, conservation policy has devolved to the local levels, creating tensions in resource management and protection. Centralization without local participation can place communities at risk by eroding the environmental knowledge and decision making capacity of local people. Environmental problems such as water quality impairments require perception, interpretation, and ability to act locally. Through a presentation of findings from farm communities in the Sugar Creek Watershed (Northeast Ohio, USA), this paper examines tradition, social scale, and land use among Anabaptist and other farm households, and refocuses on-farm conversation away from conventional individual metric-based studies and toward a systems approach. This new approach frames conservation behavior in a socio-cultural system that is influenced by tradition in on-farm decision making. Data from four subwatersheds are used to probe the effects of these variables on conservation adoption, explore the optimal farm size concept, and discus the roles of tradition and local and non-local knowledge in sustainability.
  PubDate: 2013-06-01
Hannah Wittman, Annette Aurélie Desmarais, Nettie Wiebe (eds): Food sovereignty: reconnecting food, nature and community
- PubDate: 2013-04-27
From the editor
- PubDate: 2013-04-26
Catherine Aubertin and Estienne Rodary (eds.): Protected areas, sustainable land?
- PubDate: 2013-04-26
Books received
- PubDate: 2013-04-26
Peter Oosterveer and David A. Sonnenfeld: Food, globalization and sustainability
- PubDate: 2013-04-24
Michael S. Carolan: The real cost of cheap food
- PubDate: 2013-04-24