Agriculture and Human Values最新文献

In recent years, a great deal of evidence has accumulated on the health risks and environmental impacts of some herbicides. Both conventional agriculture and agroecology are searching for alternatives to address the challenges posed by the consequences of herbicide use. In this search, peasant and indigenous agroecosystems have much to contribute since their crops evolved thousands of years ago together with diverse communities of weeds, and farmers have carried out sophisticated strategies to manage them. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, free lists, and botanical collection, we document a milpa design that integrates and manages spontaneous vegetation to take advantage of its presence and minimize risks of crop loss. The objective of this article is to critically contrast agroecological mechanisms in this milpa design which matches the prevention principle with a set of recommendations recognized as preventive in conventional weed science.

The global pesticide complex has transformed over the past two decades, but social science research has not kept pace. The rise of an enormous generics sector, shifts in geographies of pesticide production, and dynamics of agrarian change have led to more pesticide use, expanding to farm systems that hitherto used few such inputs. Declining effectiveness due to pesticide resistance and anemic institutional support for non-chemical alternatives also have driven intensification in conventional systems. As an inter-disciplinary network of pesticide scholars, we seek to renew the social science research agenda on pesticides to better understand this suite of contemporary changes. To identify research priorities, challenges, and opportunities, we develop the pesticide complex as a heuristic device to highlight the reciprocal and iterative interactions among agricultural practice, the agrochemical industry, civil society-shaped regulatory actions, and contested knowledge of toxicity. Ultimately, collaborations among social scientists and across the social and biophysical sciences can illuminate recent transformations and their uneven socioecological effects. A reinvigorated critical scholarship that embraces the multifaceted nature of pesticides can identify the social and ecological constraints that drive pesticide use and support alternatives to chemically driven industrial agriculture.

Over recent decades, influential agri-food tech actors, institutions, policymakers and others have fostered dominant techno-optimistic, future visions of food and agriculture that are having profound material impacts in present agri-food worlds. Analyzing such realities has become paramount for scholars working across the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and critical agri-food studies, many of whom contribute to STSFAN—the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network. This article introduces a Special Issue featuring the scholarship of STSFAN members, which cover a range of case studies and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary engagements involving such contested agri-food futures. Their contributions are unique in that they emerged from the network’s specific modus operandi: a workshopping practice that supports the constructive, interdisciplinary dialogue necessary for critical research and rigorous analyses of science and technology in agri-food settings. This introduction offers an overview of STS and critical agri-food studies scholarship, including their historical entanglements in respective studies of food scandals, scientific regimes and technological determinism. We illustrate how interdisciplinary engagement across these fields has contributed to the emergent field of what we term agri-food technoscience scholarship, which the contributions of this Special Issue speak to. After a brief discussion of STS concepts, theories and methods shaping agri-food policy, technology design and manufacturing, we present the eleven Special Issue contributions in three thematic clusters: influential actors and their agri-food imaginaries; obfuscated (material) realities in agri-food technologies; and conflictual and constructive engagements in academia and agri-food. The introduction ends with a short reflection on future research trajectories in agri-food technoscience scholarship.

In this article, we review the Agrarian Question focusing on dairy farms. We have the dual aim of adding to the debate surrounding the economic profitability of small and large dairy farms and increasing what is known about the decline of dairy farms. The agrarian question at the heart of our research centres on the paradoxical endurance of family farms, despite predictions from both liberal and Marxist perspectives that they would diminish in number over time. By addressing these complex issues, we hope to shed light on the challenges and opportunities facing the dairy industry today. We focus on analysing dairy farms in the European Union countries, using panel regressions from 2008 to 2018 to define the relationship between the average number of cows per farm, profit margins and Farm Net Income. The most important results show that (i) paradoxically, profits were higher on smaller farms; (ii) however, empirical data show that small dairy farms are disappearing; (iii) this is because when including subsidies, farms with a higher number of cows are more profitable than smaller farms.

Gender and social inclusion efforts in agricultural development are focused on making uptake of agricultural technologies more equitable. Yet research looking at how gender relations influence technology uptake often assumes that men and women within a household make farm management decisions as individuals. Relatively little is understood about the dynamics of agricultural decision-making within dual-adult households where individuals’ management choices are likely influenced by others in the household. This study used vignettes to examine decision-making related to maize plot management in 698 dual-adult households in rural Kenya. The results indicated a high degree of joint management of maize plots (55%), although some management decisions—notably those related to purchased inputs—were slightly more likely to be controlled by men, while other decisions—including those related to hiring of labor and maize end uses—were more likely to be made by women. The prevalence of joint decision-making underscores the importance of ensuring that both men’s and women’s priorities and needs are reflected in design and marketing of interventions to support maize production, including those related to seed systems, farmer capacity building, and input delivery.

Processes of rapid and truncated agrarian change—driven through expanding urbanisation, infrastructure development, extractive industries, and commodity crops—are shaping the livelihood opportunities and aspirations of Indonesia’s rural youth. This study describes the everyday experiences of youth as they navigate the changing character of agriculture, aquaculture, and fishing livelihoods across gender, class, and generation. Drawing on qualitative field research conducted in the Maros District of South Sulawesi, we examine young people’s experiences of agrarian change in a landscape of entangled rural, coastal and increasingly urbanised spaces. We find that young people aspire to secure, modern, and salary-based work, while continuing to seek and sustain intergenerational farming or aquaculture-based livelihoods. Youth take advantage of increased connectivity to diversify their incomes, yet their dependence on mobility also introduces new forms of gendered and class based precarity such as insecure working arrangements, disruption to education and violence (especially for young unskilled women and youth from financially insecure households). Our study highlights the persistent conditions of precarity that many young people encounter in both rural and urban settings, while challenging assumptions that youth are uninterested in rural futures.

Building on 42 semi-structured interviews with directors and stakeholders of food charities based in Greater Manchester (UK), alongside online data and Factiva references trends, I argue that the charitable food provision (CFP) sector can be effectively conceptualized as a strategic action field (SAF). To do so, I first focus on the shared rules, understandings and practices characterising the organizations that belong to the field and on the broader field environment that imposes constraints and provides opportunities to the field actors. Subsequently, I examine the characteristics of five particularly relevant charities to describe the social positions and position-takings of the incumbent, the challengers and the group I refer to as sideliners of the field. Hence, I briefly touch upon the Covid-19 outbreak as an exogenous shock to discuss the effect of the campaign carried out by a ‘socially skilled actor’ - football player Marcus Rashford. I conclude by suggesting future research directions to enhance the application of SAF theory as a tool for investigating food support organizing within and across countries.

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives are spaces where diverse work relations are performed. From a postcapitalist perspective, these initiatives attempt to create alternative-capitalist and non-capitalist work relations next to capitalist ones. While analyses of work relations in CSA abound, it remains uncertain how such diversification is made possible and how it is shaped by the micro-politics of and power relations in these initiatives. This paper addresses this gap by analysing how power shapes transformations to postcapitalist work relations in CSA. It provides substantial empirical evidence of multiple manifestations of power enabling or constraining postcapitalist work relations through a comparative case study of three CSA initiatives in Portugal. Results show that while CSA creates postcapitalist work relations that are non-alienated, non-monetised and full of care, they insufficiently unmake unbalanced power relations established in capitalist work relations. This paper argues that, when establishing postcapitalist work relations, the selected CSA initiatives could benefit from actively deconstructing internal hierarchies, de-centralising decision-making power from farm owners and addressing oppressive power relations that are ossified in their local and cultural context.

Scholars have demonstrated that common ways of performing charitable food aid in high-income countries maintain a powerless and alienated status of recipients. Aiming to protect the dignity of recipients, alternative forms of food aid have taken shape. However, an in-depth understanding of dignity in the context of food aid is missing. We undertook a scoping review to outline ways in which the dignity of recipients is violated or protected across various forms of food aid in high-income countries. By bringing scientific results together through a social dignity lens, this paper offers a complex understanding of dignity in the context of food aid. The online database Scopus was used to identify scientific literature addressing food aid in relation to the dignity of recipients in high-income countries. The final selection included 37 articles representing eight forms of food aid in twelve countries. Across diverse forms of food aid, the selected studies report signs of (in)dignity concerning five dimensions: access to food aid, social interactions, the food, the physical space, and needs beyond food. Research gaps are found in the diversity of forms of food aid studied, and the identification of social standards important for recipients. Bringing the results of 37 articles together through a social dignity lens articulates the complex and plural ways in which the dignity of recipients is violated or protected. In addition, this review has demonstrated the usefulness of a social dignity lens to understand dignity across and in particular food aid contexts.