Culture Agriculture Food and Environment最新文献

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.

North American farmers manage massive soy farms in the Brazilian Cerrado from the clean offices off the dusty streets of Luis Eduardo Magalhães, Brazil. As they delegate field work to farmworkers, they focus on paperwork, managing investment capital, and satisfying the investors that control that capital. This comparative ethnographic article considers the agrarian values and farm life of the author's childhood on a small South Dakota farm alongside the experience of transnational soybean farmers in Brazil to understand the perception of good farming in two different contexts. This imaginary of the good farmer tells us about what behaviors are rewarded within farming communities and how farming behaviors become idealized. While “good farming” in 1980s South Dakota was measured by straight rows, high crop yields, and weed-free fields, good farming for transnational farmers is measured by efficiency, profit, and clean shirts. Transnational farmers center the farmer, not the field, as the site of aestheticizing as they disassociate from crops, work, and even land.