Agriculture and Human Values最新文献

While smallholder farmers in Africa produce most of the world’s cocoa, they receive only a fraction of a chocolate bar’s value. Fairtrade is meant to mitigate such disparity by certifying that cocoa production meets environmental, sustainability, and human rights standards. Ghana is the second largest producer of cocoa globally and the leading producer of Fairtrade cocoa, where a tenth of cocoa farmers are certified. Yet, Fairtrade production in Ghana offers a perplexing context: Fairtrade provides relatively limited direct financial benefits to farmers, but Fairtrade cooperatives have over eighty thousand members, retain farmers for decades, and continue to attract new farmers. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article examines the everyday significance of participation in Fairtrade cocoa cooperatives for producers. This article argues that farmers’ participation in Fairtrade cooperatives was meaningful because of enhanced ownership, decision-making, and control in the cocoa value chain. For instance, in the cooperative system, where “the group is for the farmer,” farmers controlled the weighing scale for cocoa beans, which was a site of mistrust for non-Fairtrade farmers. Ownership benefits, however, were circumscribed, as they were unevenly distributed among producers and extended farmers’ control only to a restricted scale of the global value chain. With the increasing importance of traceability mechanisms like certification and over three decades of Fairtrade implementation in Ghana’s cocoa sector, this research sheds light on Fairtrade’s enduring significance for farmers, and suggests potential shifts to center farmers’ control and decision-making.

The Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming established the Food Sovereignty Fund in 2020 to provide families facing food insecurity with first-quality food grown in New York’s Hudson Valley while supporting small, regeneratively managed farms. The initiative is grounded in food sovereignty, which is defined as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” This paper describes the Food Sovereignty Fund model and shares findings from a multi-methods evaluation of the model which incorporated perspectives from farmers, food access organizations, and food access clients through surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews. Evaluation findings highlight how this approach enhances dignity and agency for both producers and consumers while bolstering the regional food system. By providing fresh, sustainably produced, culturally appropriate foods, the Food Sovereignty Fund upholds clients’ right to healthy food choices. Simultaneously, farmers experience greater control over their produce distribution and receive fair compensation, thus supporting sustainable livelihoods and investing in the regional food economy. The Food Sovereignty Fund offers a promising example of how food sovereignty is being applied in the United States and can serve as a model for creating more equitable, sustainable, and resilient food systems.

Cow’s milk has long occupied a privileged status in the dietary guidelines and social imaginaries of the Global North, especially regarding children’s health and development. Recently, the rise of plant-based milk has disrupted this dominance, generating debate and anxiety about its place in children’s diets. Through critical discourse analysis of government, industry, and advocacy materials from the United States and Switzerland—two historically “lactophile” nations—this paper examines how various actors construct and contest the meanings and values attached to cow’s and plant milks. We find similar discourses in both countries: a pro-cow’s-milk stance affirming cow’s milk as a nutritionally unique and essential food, and a pro-plant-milk position promoting plant milks as suitable alternatives to cow’s milk while emphasizing the taste and choice benefits of these milks, their place in culturally diverse diets, and suitability for children with milk allergies or lactose intolerance. Notably, we find these discourses are grounded in nutritionism, reducing debates to the quantity, quality and what we call “molecular harmony” of nutrients, and often centering cow’s milk as the point of comparison. However, these discourses obscure broader social inequalities related to race, class, and access: dietary guidelines and milk promotion tend to implicitly privilege White, healthy, and affluent children, rendering issues of affordability, cultural foodways, and lactose intolerance invisible. We conclude that, while plant milks seek to disrupt the status of cow’s milk as the “perfect food” for children, core social imaginaries about health, diet, and childhood remain rooted in exclusionary ideals.

Confronting the deep-rooted social inequities and environmental harm in animal agriculture research demands approaches that link Just Transitions (JT) with Participatory Action Research (PAR). We present a case study from the Midwest, USA, drawing on an ongoing participatory action research project, started in 2020, where we conducted semi-structured interviews with 128 participants and three participatory workshops with farmers, non-profit leaders, and community organizers. Adapting established PAR methods, we integrated community organizing tools such as one-on-one relational meetings and interactive workshops to better understand barriers to transition and how to foster meaningful change. These methodological interventions shifted who participated, how knowledge was produced, and whose voices shaped the terms of agricultural research and its implications for just transitions. They created deeper conversations about race, land, labor, and governance, which surfaced tensions while also creating the conditions for solidarity across difference. Grounded in this case study, we articulate a Just Transitions PAR Implementation Framework that highlights four interconnected elements: engagement and trust-building, collaboration and co-design, action and co-production of knowledge, and reflection and iteration. We argue that without intentional, justice-centered adaptations, participatory agricultural and transitions research risks reinforcing the very exclusions it aims to challenge. This paper contributes a conceptual intervention by positioning PAR as a valuable approach for advancing Just Transitions in agriculture and a practical methodological guide for researchers committed to transformative change from within and beyond the university.

Bangladeshi farming households are turning to vegetable production to increase their incomes and earn returns at regular intervals. This ‘high risk, high gain’ strategy lacks institutional support relative to Green Revolution legacy rice production. In the western district of Rajshahi, a center of the transition to vegetable cultivation, the challenges of high labor demand and wages are met through the socially devalued un- and underpaid labor of women, who are working regularly in agricultural fields for the first time. This paper examines this gendered subsidy through the lens of the depletion of social reproduction (DSR). DSR is a threshold concept used to identify combinations of bodily, emotional and discursive harm that undermine the sustainability of women’s un- and underpaid labor. We adapt the DSR framework to an analysis of agrarian change by adding the dimension of environmental harm and the compounding factors of risk and uncertainty for this climate-vulnerable and market-volatile activity. We identify principal avenues of DSR in Rajshahi’s vegetable transition that are undermining women’s health and wellbeing. Overall, we argue that DSR offers a useful analytic for understanding combined socioenvironmental harms that shape gendered outcomes and the social limits to smallholder production in contexts of rapid agrarian change.

Improvements to the agricultural system and tackling challenges emerging from societal, geo-political or climate change requires decision makers to consider trade-offs between technological solutions and consumer preferences. Such a challenge is the breeding of resilient crops through traditional techniques (i.e. crossbreeding, mutagenesis) and new breeding techniques (i.e. transgenesis, cisgenic genetic modification, intragenesis, genome editing), and the protection from pests and diseases using plant protection products. This article presents nuanced insights into consumers views of plant protection products and new breeding techniques regarding the specific case study focused on potato blight. Two online studies were conducted in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. In the first study (N = 965), synthetic and natural fungicides, cisgenic genetic modification and genome editing were rated similarly by the participants in terms of acceptance and perceived naturalness. The second study (N = 1061) extended these insights and showed that different types of fungicides (i.e. natural vs. synthetic, named vs. unnamed) elicited different spontaneous associations, levels of acceptance and perceived naturalness. Interestingly, the ubiquitous mutagenesis was rated similarly as breeding techniques currently restricted by EU regulations.

In animal farming, there is the hope that artificial intelligence (AI) will improve efficiency and increase profits while providing solutions to reduce pollution and pesticide use and improve environmental sustainability, animal health and welfare. However, many are also concerned about AI’s ethical, legal, social, and economic impacts. These include the instrumentalisation of animals, bias caused by AI in how animals are portrayed, allowing the continuation of a harmful farming industry, and concerns around power asymmetries, data ownership, and copyright infringements. Therefore, there is a tension between the potential benefits and drawbacks of AI use in animal farming. This paper takes a forward-looking view of the benefits and challenges that AI may create in animal farming by the year 2032. Through several iterative rounds with stakeholders, this paper maps out a future scenario of AI in animal farming, identifying technological developments alongside potential drivers, barriers, and impacts. The scenario concludes with five recommendations for policymakers: 1. Initiate education programmes on AI in the sector; 2. Create ethical guidelines for AI in animal farming; 3. Science policy should be realistic and not only rely on technical solutions like AI; 4. Ensure public safety from harm caused by AI; 5. Implement better guidance on data-sharing in the sector.

How do small-scale farmers ‘adopt’ digital agriculture technologies, what is their use for diversified farming, and how do they position themselves vis-à-vis the seemingly inevitable era of ‘Agriculture 4.0’? This paper discusses results from the research project Diversity by Design to ponder how small-scale, biodiverse farmers in Ontario and Quebec, Canada, relate to digital agriculture and farming tools even though and exactly because these technologies are rarely part of their farming routines. These farmers’ perspectives did not reveal indifference to digital agriculture but a range of attitudes – from curiosity to a dismissal of digital tools – which also broadened the definition of what counts as ‘digital agriculture.’ We argue these perspectives stem from farmers’ positions ‘in difference’ to the dominant farming regime for which digital agriculture technologies are developed, and theorize this stance as farmers’ in-difference: a notional interest in and lack of concern for digital farming tools that reveals both their impracticality and potential for biodiverse farming. We propose farmers’ in-difference as a positional critique of a political economy that privileges tech-savvy, industrial agriculture and sustains asymmetrical power relations while obscuring the realities of small-scale, biodiverse farming. As such, farmers’ in-difference also troubles a more fundamental paradigm of ‘technology adoption,’ which inevitably assumes technologies to be at the center of analysis, rather than the farm, good working conditions, and the idea that digital tools may be more peripheral to small-scale farmers’ decision-making processes.

In Israel/Palestine, baladi, derived from the Arabic balad , is an agro-culinary category that operates as both a marker of authenticity and a site of political negotiation. This paper explores baladi as a borderline concept, simultaneously defining and destabilizing cultural and territorial boundaries. Palestinian uses of baladi often articulate indigeneity, environmental decolonization, revivalism, and gastro-political resistance, while Jewish-Israeli adaptations reframe it as an expression of local authenticity, frequently through appropriation and commodification. This study demonstrates that these invocations do not stabilize baladi as a bounded category. Rather, they underscore its function as a borderline concept, whose meaning emerges precisely through its unstable position between indigeneity, appropriation, and commodification. Drawing on socio-historical analysis and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, the paper reveals how baladi transcends binary categories of authenticity and appropriation. Theoretically, this study interrogates baladi as an untranslatable term shaped by settler-colonial histories, global markets, and sociocultural boundary work. Furthermore, it demonstrates how untranslatable concepts like baladi illuminate the contested processes of emplacement and cultural reclaiming that unfold within asymmetrical structures of colonial entanglement and global neoliberal circulation.

Generational renewal in agriculture has long been declared a priority of European policies, yet little critical attention has been paid to how the problem is represented and to the implicit assumptions that orient instruments and strategies. This study focuses on the first-settlement aid for young farmers (Measure 6.1) of the Rural Development Programme 2014–2022, one of the most prominent policy tools introduced by the European Union to attract new generations into farming. The analysis comparatively examines how Italian regions have implemented the measure through eligibility requirements, selection criteria, and the exercise of regional discretion, highlighting the diversity of policy implementation. Adopting Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) framework, the research focuses on how generational renewal is represented and which subjective, discursive, and lived effects – including unintended ones – emerge from such representation. Methodologically, the study combines qualitative content analysis of regional calls with cluster analysis, enabling the identification of five distinct regional approaches (clusters) to generational renewal, while also capturing commonalities and divergences. Results reveal that the dominant representation constructs the “desirable” young farmer primarily as the successor who has already inherited the family farm, while marginalising other categories such as new entrants (young individuals with no family farming background) and potential successors (those who may inherit but have not yet done so). Finally, the study deconstructs dominant CAP paradigms on the topic and argues for more inclusive and differentiated strategies capable of recognising multiple entry pathways and sustaining identity-building processes.