Culture Agriculture Food and Environment最新文献

High-altitude farmers in South Tyrol (Italy) live and work in the mountain belt of the Eastern Alps and are the focus of an ongoing research project on which first results are presented here. Located between 1200 and 1900 m above sea level, some of their farmsteads are among the highest in Western Europe. This historico-political development of the region accounts for the relatively favorable situation of these farmers. Since the 1970s, the regional government has regularly subsidized these smallholdings, to ensure that the farmers can remain on their land and market their produce. Keeping the mountain sites cultivated is crucial for ecological reasons but also for the tourist industry on which the region and its people depend heavily. How do farmers approach the apparent contradiction between self-sufficiency that lies at the core of their work, and, the resources that they need and receive from external agencies?

At the time of publication of this special issue, Smallholdings, livelihood strategies and public policies in Europe: the issue of self-sufficiency, it has become increasingly crucial to rethink the livelihood strategies and forms of production and distribution characterizing small farms and the ways in which these farms are shaped by public policies. The outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine comes at a time when smallholdings are attempting to recover from the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and has affected food supplies worldwide. Europe has been forced to reorganize the supply chain and is suffering rates of inflation that have not been seen for years.

In Spain, for example, the truckers' strike has contributed to grounding fishing fleets. Dairy farms are forced to throw away milk because it is not profitable to collect, while the grain shortage leads to a lack of supply in supermarkets. During the lockdown, the Spanish State restricted the production, distribution, and consumption of goods to formal activities and channels. This led to the exclusion of forms of supply that were not oriented to the market economy (Gascón 2020). Policies of this kind overlook “peasant economies” (Narotzky 2016), depriving them of revenues, although demand for local and organic food is increasing in rural and urban areas for reasons relating to health and security (Batalla et al. 2020; Escribano, Hummel, and Milano 2020). This situation highlights the dependency of livelihood strategies on transnational flows of commodities and the lack of a regional food policy to ensure a secure supply via sustainable local systems. Policies and regulations do not always nurture life or meet people's real needs. At times, they are designed to create competitive holdings in the market with little regard for the consequences at the micro-scale.

For years, Europe has been immersed in a market economy underpinned by a system of neoliberal policies. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), introduced in 1962, is the main European Union public policy to have shaped agro-industrial production, rural life, and landscapes and ecosystems in Europe. The policy has been detrimental to prices and harmful to ecosystems and health (FAO, UNDP, and UNEP 2021). Rural areas have also been influenced by productivist and post-productivist paradigms based on agricultural industrialization, commercialization, intensification, and specialization, as well as increasing use of biochemical inputs and corporate involvement in the sector, among other aspects (Wilson 2001). These paradigms changed the role of smallholdings in livelihood strategies, producing the perfect conditions for the industrial agri-food system to grow and become more concentrated.

Agricultural entrepreneurs have displaced traditional peasants, and the agrarian sector is becoming professionalized in a context of globalizing

To problematize the idea of peasant autonomy in old capitalist societies, this paper will explore the evolution of two phenomena in present-day France: peasantry, commonly understood as relatively autonomous small family farms that rely on subsistence farming, and the neorural movement, that is, urban-to-rural migration that has a counter-cultural connotation. While peasantry is believed to be disappearing, the neorural movement is charged with “deradicalization” because it distances itself from subsistence farming. The juxtaposition of both phenomena shows that capitalism has transformed the countryside, making it difficult to live from agriculture. In old capitalist countries, peasant autonomy is no longer about subsistence farming but about achieving an economic equilibrium that increases autonomy from market pressures created by high input prices and low output values.

This article focuses on power relations between the rural public authorities and the neo-peasant movement in Catalonia (Spain). On the one hand, the public authorities promote a productivism-oriented, professional model of farming informed by the Common Agricultural Policy. This policy results in the gradual disappearance of small-scale agriculture. On the other hand, the neo-peasant movement resists the productivist model of agriculture, proposing a new reinvented peasant model. We focus on how the discourses—images and labels—associated with these different models of agriculture are reproduced, perpetuated, and internalized by the different actors who use them to exercise power or resistance. More specifically, we analyze how the use of the concept of “professional farmer” is constructed as a new subjectivity and acts to exclude the peasant model of agriculture. We also explore how the concept of the “peasant” is used to resist this process of exclusion.

Historically, Latvia has been integrated into several (multi-) national state formations that have shaped agricultural practices. Beginning in 1991, newly independent Latvia reintroduced a family farming model and prepared to join the European Union. The ability of small farmers to adapt to and implement the new EU regulations that support farming either as efficient food production or alternatively as cultural landscaping has been contingent upon many socio-economic and cultural factors. Today, most family farmers have only reluctantly formalized their practices to satisfy the requirements of the EU, while others have readily embraced the current discourses, policies, and laws to strategically access agricultural funds and scale up operations. We discuss these agricultural tensions by contrasting two forms of selective formalization: the reluctant “projectification” of a subsistence farm by founding a cultural NGO vs. the strategic founding of an “entrepreneurial” cooperative of sea buckthorn producers to access transnational markets and development subsidies.

El Penedès is a traditional viticulture area, and this activity has been essential to the region's economic development and the construction of its identity. Throughout the last three centuries, family and subsistence farming became a market-oriented economy, characterized by significant mechanization, grape monocultures, and dependence on chemical inputs. Small-scale agriculture therefore shifted from being the centre of household economies to a job or a supplementary source of income for a small number of family members. In the summer of 2019, grape prices dropped to levels that jeopardized the sustainability of many small farms, whose final selling prices were not even sufficient to cover production costs. In this context, I have observed through two years of fieldwork (participant observation and interviews) how the viticulture sector suffers aggressive intrusion by agribusiness, positioning farmers at the confluence of a market economy monopolized by three large companies, regulation at different scales that has proved inefficient in ensuring the sustainability of small-scale agriculture, and a territorial model that reallocates agricultural land to logistics infrastructure. This article concludes that despite farmers' demands for just prices to ensure economic viability and dignity, the sustainability of small farms is effectively under threat today in El Penedès. Indeed, farmers are entangled in a capitalist moral economy that impedes the possibility of imagining real non-exploitative socioeconomic relations and thereby reproduces and reinforces existing patterns of capital accumulation.

Sweet potato is a valuable staple crop that guarantees food security to a large segment of the world population. The wide phenotypic and genetic variability of this species is an indication of its high adaptation capacity to diverse environmental conditions. In Colombia, it is a neglected and underutilized crop, mainly managed by traditional knowledge. The aim of this study was to recognize the contribution of in situ conservation and to characterize the habitats and the traditional uses to shed light on the design of their management and conservation strategies. Germplasm and data collection were conducted in the Caribbean and Andean regions of the country. This collection resulted in 750 accessions from 131 municipalities, belonging to 19 departments of the two regions. In these regions, sweet potato has been conserved in situ in a wide spatial and altitudinal distribution. The major collection sources were wild and cultivated habitats, which highlight the invaluable contribution of farmers and communities in the preservation of this species and its associated knowledge. In situ conservation seemed to be an efficient strategy for conserving and using plant genetic resources; therefore, it should be considered by conservation efforts.