Agriculture and Human Values最新文献

Pesticide exposure is a common occupational hazard for Latine farmworkers laboring in the United States, causing harm to farmworkers’ wellbeing and the wellbeing of their families and communities. While existing scholarly literature documents various issues related to occupational pesticide exposure for farmworkers, limited research has centered on farmworkers’ voices to understand their views on pesticides, including the degree to which they express or experience a sense of agency in managing pesticide exposure. This paper outlines key findings from mixed methods research conducted throughout 2022 focused on pesticide beliefs and exposure among Latine farmworkers in Southwestern Idaho. Drawing from survey and interview data, we focus on findings related to the following questions: Do farmworkers believe they have agency in protecting themselves from pesticides? What strategies do farmworkers use to protect themselves from pesticides in their agricultural work? What factors limit or facilitate farmworkers engaging in agentic acts as they work to protect themselves from pesticides? We further consider these questions through a lens of gender, utilizing concepts of carework, hegemonic masculinity, and familism to frame how gender and intersectional factors may shape the degree to which and the ways in which agency is expressed and enacted by farmworkers in their agricultural labor.

Seed activism critiques the various ways in which capitalist accumulation through modern agricultural development separates farmers from the seed. Debates centre on legal activism contesting privatisation and seed registration based on exclusionary criteria and various examples of practical work to strengthen farmer seed systems organised around ideas of seed sovereignty and seed commons. The article provides an illustrative example of practical seed activism of the farmer-led network MASIPAG in the Philippines that has been contesting the government’s Green Revolution-oriented commercial seed sector development. Examining critiques in the literature and MASIPAG’s practical work, we propose a distinction between four trajectories of accumulation that separate farmers from the seed and four corresponding fronts at which practical seed activism mobilises: genetic properties of modern varieties, commodified farming and labour, seed and variety legislation, and the contemporary regime of modern plant breeding. Our analysis of the empirical case illustrates the particular dynamics associated with the different trajectories of accumulation, the seed activist responses, and how they intersect in local level seed networks. We argue that MASIPAG’s practical work is an illustrative example of critical engagement with the very capitalist dynamics that its work critiques. Rather than developing an alternative that wholly withdraws, its practical efforts provide lessons about redrawing the boundaries of seed systems and reveals the possibilities for seed systems writ large to be transformed.

Given the complex nature of agri-food value chains and related sustainability challenges, the question arises who has the agency and responsibility to address these challenges and facilitate systemic change. We address this question through a mixed method approach and examine experiences with agriculture among different actors along the agricultural value chains in Germany. Based on this, we explore how various actors make sense of current agri-food topics as well as of their perceived responsibility and agency to change practices. While our study shows weak signals for the favoring of collective and collaborative approaches to change, there is a dominant narrative of externalizing responsibility to other actors, mainly consumers, state actors, and to a lesser extent farmers; upstream market actors such as retailers are barely mentioned, indicating a lack of awareness of the power dynamics within agri-food systems. We discuss how these findings can inform appropriate governance mechanisms at different levels and future research to address the prospective responsibility of value chain actors and power dynamics within agri-food transitions.

The use of recently developed genome editing technologies in food and agriculture (GEAF) is a controversial social issue characterized by clashing discourses about ideal social, political, and economic orders. While dominant imaginaries about gene editing’s future legitimize and are being legitimized by widespread investment into and deployment of this technology, the critical voices of actors who hold less political and economic power have been marginalized in their development. In this article, we connect the sociotechnical imaginaries framework to insights from social movement framing theory to examine how and by whom competing sociotechnical imaginaries for this new technology are being developed and disseminated in the United States and the European Union, regions which have different histories of both state support for biotechnology and anti-biotechnology activism. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of online communications documents published by civil society organizations who have publicly articulated opposition to some element of GEAF, we find key differences between the regions with regard to the types of participating actors, their diagnoses of relevant problems, and the degree and type of change that they envision related to food system reform. We argue that these differences in both coalitional & framing strategies, which reflect distinctive visions about the appropriate relationship between science, state, and society, have significant implications for governance, public acceptance, and future development of agricultural gene editing in the US and the EU.

This article looks at the conditions and challenges for immigrant Latinx workers and farmers in accessing farmland in the United States. As white farmers retire in large numbers, and competing interests look to buy up swaths of American farmland for consolidation, investment, and development, newer groups of farmers struggle with finding and purchasing land at affordable prices. In the context of this land market affordability gap, there is increasing interest among Latinx farmworkers and farmers to utilize their knowledge and experience and establish their own farm businesses, yet they are limited in their ability to purchase land. This article looks at the historic conditions of racialized inequality in U.S. agriculture, how Latinx farmers are left behind today, and what recommendations have been made to address this inequality, from policy, to market-based programs, to more systemic land reform. Starting with a discussion of the exclusion of Latinx and other immigrants of color from agrarian land ownership and ending with an assessment of current recommendations, this paper provides an overview of the struggles being faced by this promising group of U.S. agriculturalists.

Cultural and ecological dimensions of agriculture are often considered as contrasting in agricultural research. This is well reflected on approaches to variety evaluation and selection that privilege a narrow set of agronomic indicators that do not account for the complexity of farmer-crop interactions. In this work, we explore the concept of ‘crop biocultural traits’ to integrate the social and biological dimensions of crops and the entanglements between them. Our research is based on a case-study in a Bassari village of south-eastern Senegal, where we explored the biocultural traits that farmers assign to crops and varieties together with their abundance, distribution and trends. We focus on six local staple crops, namely sorghum, Bambara groundnut, fonio, maize, rice and peanut. Our methods include key-informant and semi-structured interviews, individual trait scoring exercises and participatory workshops. Our results reveal that Bassari farmers characterize crops and varieties considering both their agronomic but also their socio-economic and cultural traits. Bassari maintain a basket of crops and varieties that, together, bear multiple and complementary traits. However, no biocultural trait alone can explain crop and variety abundance, distribution, and trends. We conclude that understanding crop diversity dynamics requires embracing the complexity of biocultural interactions. We argue that this is also a matter of ontological pluralism and of viewing agricultural knowledge as a collective effort and a common good. Only by including diverse ways of knowing will it be possible for plant breeding and conservation efforts to address farmers contextualized needs and priorities.

Both wild and farmed fish are integral parts of a broader food system, where human-assisted production increasingly meets the rising demand for food fish. This paper builds on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, introducing the concept of cumulative visioning to describe how multiple, often conflicting, visions of salmon have developed over time and been woven into biopolitical systems of economic and technological order. Drawing from 105 interviews with stakeholders involved in Canadian Pacific salmon management, the study identifies four distinct sociotechnical visions of salmon production: abundant, sporting, wild, and resilient. These visions reflect competing economic, cultural, and ecological priorities, shaping management strategies that attempt to balance sustainable harvest with conservation. Cumulative visioning influences not only the genetic and ecological characteristics of salmon but also the social and political dynamics surrounding fisheries, intensifying conflicts over the role of hatcheries in salmon production. This study offers new insights into the evolving and sometimes contradictory nature of sociotechnical imaginaries in the context of sustainable fisheries, food security, and conservation.

Despite the benefits of ecological complexity, tidy and ecologically simple landscapes are the hegemonic aesthetic norm in many rural and urban settings. In rural agriculture, tidy landscapes of perfectly spaced, weed-free rows are often taken as an indication of farmer skill. Meanwhile, suburban yard owners face cultural pressures to maintain immaculate lawns through intensive lawn care regimens. In both contexts, an aesthetic of tidiness can contribute to dire ecological outcomes. Community gardens have potential to break the mold of tidiness. They are influenced by both agricultural and suburban aesthetic lineages but also by alternative agri-food movements, which place a higher value on sustainable practices, opening possibilities for alternative aesthetic outcomes that support greater ecosystem health. Drawing on a photovoice project and semi-structured interviews with community gardeners in the California central coast, we investigate the values that drive community garden aesthetics. We find that tidiness remains the hegemonic aesthetic, upheld by formal and informal governance mechanisms as well as personal taste. However, an alternative aesthetic, which we term “wildness,” provides a counterpoint to tidiness that can contribute valuable ecological resources to community gardens. Ultimately, however, we find that garden tidiness is not necessarily mutually exclusive with a sustainability orientation and wildness was not always the product of sustainability values.

I argue that the recent emergence of aspiring small- and medium-size capitalist farmers in Ethiopia is both a spontaneous and state-orchestrated from and through the spectacular land rush during the past two decades. This emerging sector that shows great dynamism in land and capital accumulation has emerged not only and not primarily from the agriculture sector, but from non-agricultural and urban sectors mainly. Furthermore, this paper shows the inseparability, empirically and analytically, of land and labor, as well as production and social reproduction dynamics in explaining the character and trajectory of social change. The role played by migrant labor in the land rush has been manifested in two interconnected ways underpinned by a singular logic and social force, that is, the capitalist commodification of land and labor, namely, outward labor migration away from the land grab sites, and the inward migrant labor inflows into the same land grabs sites.

Agrobiodiversity is widely recognized as essential for smallholder agriculture, particularly for enhancing resilience to disruptions which are increasingly frequent and intense. However, whether agricultural policies support or hinder agrobiodiversity in these systems remains debated. A deeper understanding of how policies intersect with other change drivers and local practices is crucial to improving decision-making. Using a case study from northwest Morocco, this research explores the complex interplay between public policies and other factors affecting local agrobiodiversity management. This study is based on the analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with 48 farmers documenting the changes in their farm and agrobiodiversity management system, and comparing it with that of their parents, as well as the perceived drivers of these changes. The results of this analysis were cross-checked with literature on agricultural policies. Our results show that major changes in agrobiodiversity management systems occurred at three levels: (i) seeds and varieties of annual crops; (ii) farming activities (i.e., crop species and livestock); and (iii) associated agricultural practices from plot to landscape. Public policies were found to be important drivers of these changes but interacted with other drivers such as climate change, rural exodus and other societal and economic shifts. Nevertheless, our research also highlights the persistence of local practices and motivations that sustain agrobiodiversity despite strong pressures, particularly through culinary practices, crop rotation, and agroforestry. This study underscores the complex, context-specific interactions that shape local agrobiodiversity management systems. It discusses the implications of changes in agrobiodiversity management systems on the resilience of farm livelihoods, and emphasizes the need to recognize local distinctiveness in adapting these systems to global change.