Community food security and environmental justice: Searching for a common discourse

Community food security and environmental justice are parallel social movements interested in equity and justice and system-wide factors. They share a concern for issues of daily life and the need to establish community empowerment strategies. Both movements have also begun to reshape the discourse of sustainable agriculture, environmentalism and social welfare advocacy. However, community food security and environmental justice remain separate movements, indicating an incomplete process in reshaping agendas and discourse. Joining these movements through a common language of empowerment and systems analysis would strongly enhance the development of a more powerful, integrated approach. That opportunity can be located in the efforts to incorporate community food security and environmental justice approaches in current Farm Bill legislation; in particular, provisions addressing community food production, direct marketing, community development, and community food planning.     

Normalised,human-centric discourses of meat and animals in climate change,sustainability and food security literature

The large-scale, intensive production of meat and other animal products, also known as the animal-industrial complex, is our largest food system in terms of global land use and contribution to environmental degradation. Despite the environmental impact of the meat industry, in much of the policy literature on climate and environmental change, sustainability and food security, meat continues to be included as part of a sustainable food future. In this paper, I present outcomes of a discourse analysis undertaken on a selection of key major international and Australian reports. After highlighting common themes in the ways that meat and animals are discussed, I draw on the animal studies literature to critically analyse the assumptions underpinning such policy documents. My analysis illustrates that animals are effectively de-animated and rendered invisible in these bodies of literature by being either aggregated—as livestock, units of production and resources, or materialised—as meat and protein. These discursive frames reflect implicit understandings of meat as necessary to human survival and animals as a natural human resource. A critical examination of these understandings illustrates their dual capacity to normalise and encourage the continuation of activities known to be seriously harming the environment, climate and human health, while at the same time obstructing and even denigrating alternative, less harmful approaches to food. In response, I offer some conceptual and analytical modifications that can be easily adopted by researchers on climate change, sustainability and food security with the aim of challenging dominant discourses on meat and animals.     

Values,technologies, and epistemology

The aim of this paper is to make possible dialogue between those who claim that technologies are coded with social, political, or ethical values and those who argue that they are value-neutral. To demonstrate the relevance of this bridge-building project, the controversy regarding agrifood biotechnology will be used as a case study. Drawing on work by L. H. Nelson about the nature of human knowledge-building enterprises and E. F. Kittay’s account of the relationally-constituted self, the argument will be made that all technologies embody the values of the communities that created them. Zahra Meghani is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Rhode Island. Her research interests are philosophy of technology, feminist theory (especially feminist epistemology and feminist philosophy of science), normative ethics, practical ethics (especially health care ethics), disability issues, and political theory.     

From value to values: sustainable consumption at farmers markets

Advocates of environmental sustainability and social justice increasingly pursue their goals through the promotion of so-called “green” products such as locally grown organic produce. While many scholars support this strategy, others criticize it harshly, arguing that environmental degradation and social injustice are inherent results of capitalism and that positive social change must be achieved through collective action. This study draws upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at two farmers markets located in demographically different parts of the San Francisco Bay Area to examine how market managers, vendors, and regular customers negotiate tensions between their economic strategies and environmental sustainability and social justice goals. Managers, vendors, and customers emphasize the ethical rather than financial motivations of their markets through comparisons to capitalist, industrial agriculture and through attention to perceived economic sacrifices made by market vendors. They also portray economic strategies as a pragmatic choice, pointing to failed efforts to achieve justice and sustainability through policy change as well as difficulties funding and sustaining non-profit organizations. While market managers, vendors, and customers deny any difficulties pursuing justice and sustainability through local economics, the need for vendors to sustain their livelihoods does sometimes interfere with their social justice goals. This has consequences for the function of each market.

Transitions to sustainability: a change in thinking about food systems change?

In the present context of intertwined and intensifying economic, environmental and climate challenges and crisis, we need to enlarge our thinking about food systems change. One way to do so is by considering intersections between our longstanding interdisciplinary interest in food and agriculture and new scholarship and practice centered on transitions to sustainability. The general idea of transition references change in a wide range of fields and contexts, and has gained prominence most recently as a way to discuss and address sustainability challenges. To explore connections to food systems change, I highlight two broad approaches in the sustainability transitions research field. First is a multi-level perspective that examines sustainability innovation pathways and second is a social practices approach that illuminates the possibilities (or not) for shifts in normal everyday routines and practices. Taken together, these approaches offer different and useful ways to think about the dynamics, durability and significance of innovations in food and agriculture, and the part they play in transitions to sustainability. Numerous opportunities exist to forge more productive links between work on food systems change and the broad and growing sustainability transitions field. First, our research and practice insights about the importance of politics, governance, values and ethics in food and agriculture could help to strengthen the sustainability transitions field, which initially underplayed such questions. Second, the sustainability transitions field’s implicit systems sensibility and its futures orientation could help to widen the scope of inquiry and the contribution to policy and planning of research and practice on food systems change.     

Introduction to the symposium

A number of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) and commodity roundtables have been created since the 1990s to respond to the growing criticism of agriculture’s environmental and social impacts. Driven by private and global-scale actors, these initiatives are setting global standards for sustainable agricultural practices. They claim to follow the new standard-making virtues of inclusiveness and consensus and base their legitimacy on their claim of balanced representation of, and participation by, all categories of stakeholders. This principle of representing a wide range of interests with a balance of power is at the heart of a new type of action that forms part of a broader political liberal model for building coalitions of interest groups. The intention of this symposium is to assess the nature of processes and outcomes of this model while paying particular attention to the forms of inclusion and exclusion they generate. In this introduction, we highlight the differences in theoretical approaches to analyzing MSIs and the manifestation of power through them. We distinguish between more traditional political–economy approaches and approaches concerned with ideational and normative power, such as convention theory. We discuss some of the main paradoxes of MSIs related to their willingness to be “inclusive” and at the same time their exclusionary or “closure” effects due in part to interactions with existing political economic contexts and embedded power inequalities, as well as more subtle manifestations of power linked to the favoring of some forms of knowledge and engagement over others.     

Dualisms shaping human-nature relations: discovering the multiple meanings of social-ecological change in Wayanad

This paper reflects on the impacts of agrarian change and social reorganisation on gender-nature relations through the lens of an indigenous group named the Kuruma in South India. Building upon recent work of feminist political ecology, I uncover a number of dualisms attached to the gender-nature nexus and put forward that gender roles are constituted by social relations which need to be analysed with regard to the transformative potential of gender-nature relations. Three main themes are at the centre of the empirical inquiry: gender subjectivities, rural off-farm employment and the human-nature nexus. I seek to show that, first, the production of gendered subjectivities cannot be simplified through essentialist assumptions that romanticise women’s relationships with nature; second, off-farm employment strategies both reinforce the social hierarchy in gender and contradict the Kuruma’s moral economies; and, finally, environmental and agrarian change redefine the use of agrobiodiversity and are related to ideas on progressive versus nonprogressive cultivation practices. The research is informed by qualitative research methods and offers a conceptual approach to the deconstruction of gender-nature relations from a poststructuralist feminist perspective.     

The poverty of sustainability: An analysis of current positions

A short time ago the idea of sustainable agriculture was accepted only at the extreme margins of the U. S. agricultural systems. Although sustainability has now become a major theme of many U. S. agricultural groups, there remains much under-explored terrain in the meaning of sustainable agriculture. A thorough examination of who and what we want to sustain and how we can sustain them is critical if sustainable agriculture is to be a practical improvement over conventional agriculture. In order to begin this effort, this article analyzes contemporary sustainable agriculture discourse and suggests alternatives for reconceptualizing sustainable agriculture. In particular we look at three arenas of sustainable discourse—family farm/rural community preservation, food safety, and agricultural science—and address issues of class, race/ethnicity, and gender found in current sustainability positions. We find that while advocates of sustainability have succeeded in pushing agricultural researchers and policy makers to address environmental issues, we need to go much farther both in theory and practice in order to deal with equally important issues of social equity.Patricia Allen is senior analyst with the Agroecology Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work concentrates on the political economic aspects of sustainability issues in food and agricultural systems. Her edited book,Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability, will be published this spring by John Wiley & Sons.     

A food politics of the possible? Growing sustainable food systems through networks of knowledge

There is increased recognition of a common suite of global challenges that hamper food system sustainability at the community scale. Food price volatility, shortages of basic commodities, increased global rates of obesity and non-communicable food-related diseases, and land grabbing are among the impediments to socially just, economically robust, ecologically regenerative and politically inclusive food systems. While international political initiatives taken in response to these challenges (e.g. Via Campesina) and the groundswell of local alternatives emerging in response to challenges are well documented, more attention is needed to the analysis of similarities between community approaches to global pressures. While we are not suggesting the application of a template set of good practices, the research reported in this paper point to the benefits of both sharing good practices and enabling communities to adopt good practices that are suited to their place-based capacities. The work also suggests that sharing community-derived good practices can support and reinforce global networks of sustainable community food systems, foster knowledge co-creation and ultimately cement collective action to global pressures. In turn these networks could enhance the sustainability and resilience of community food systems and facilitate wide scale food system transformation.     

(Bio)fueling farm policy: the biofuels boom and the 2008 farm bill

In the mid-2000s, rising gas prices, political instability, pollution, and fossil fuel depletion brought renewable domestic energy production onto the policy agenda. Biofuels, or fuels made from plant materials, came to be seen as America’s hope for energy security, environmental conservation, and rural economic revitalization. Yet even as the actual environmental, economic, and energy contributions of a biofuels boom remained debatable, support for biofuels swelled and became a prominent driver of not only US energy policy but of US farm policy as well. This paper asks why biofuels became such a powerful force in farm policy debates, and draws on policy windows theory and discourse analysis to analyze biofuels’ contributions to the passage of the 2008 farm bill. It finds that budgetary and political factors combined with a particular set of patriotic biofuels-oriented discourses to carry energy policy debates into farm policy. It also comments on the implications of biofuels policies for conservation and sustainable land use in 2008 and beyond.     

The logic of the gift: the possibilities and limitations of Carlo Petrini’s slow food alternative

The majority of literature on Slow Food focuses on the organization or actors involved in the movement. There is a dearth of material analyzing Carlo Petrini’s aspirations for Slow Food, particularly in light of his desire within Slow Food Nation (2007) and Terra Madre (2010) to make “freewill giving a part of economic discourse.” This essay corrects the literature gap through historicizing and critiquing Petrini’s alternative to global capitalism while rooting it in actually existing practices. First, Petrini’s problematic conceptualization of freewill giving will be compared to feminist theorizations and documentations of the gift economy. Second, Petrini’s avoidance of the toxic mimic of the gift, its subsumption to capitalism, will be amended by discussing how the gifting of food aid and emergency food networks actually reproduces inequality, poverty, and hunger. Third, Petrini’s example of gifting by a Trappist Monastery will be juxtaposed to the ongoing direct action strategies of Food Not Bombs, a much stronger example of an oppositional gift economy, one that is subsequently repressed by the state. In doing so, this essay seeks to expand discussion of the gift economy within the alternative food movement while amending many of the theoretical, historical, and political problems embedded within Petrini’s work, which performs a strong disservice to the politics of possibility embedded within gifting.     

Greening pesticides: A historical analysis of the social construction of farm chemical advertisements

Ideology is maintained anddriven by powerful symbols. Agricultural mediasuch as farm magazines achieve this byappropriating societal values of currency andincorporating them in imagery that accompanyadvertisements of agricultural products,including pesticides. Critical questionsrelating to environmental sustainability andsocial risks associated with the use of suchproducts are often masked as a result. Contentanalyses of two mid-western farm magazines fromthe 1940s to 1990s trace the socialconstruction of pesticide advertisements overtime, illuminating changing images ofpesticides in farm magazine advertisements inresponse to changes in the socio-culturalsetting. Changing images reflect how theagricultural industry strategically repositionsitself to sustain market and corporate profitby co-opting dominant cultural themes atspecific historical moments in mediaadvertising. Sustainability implications in thebroad context of agriculture and society areexamined.     

Sustainability and the moral community

Three views of sustainability are juxtaposed with four views about who the members of the moral community are. These provide points of contact for understanding the moral issues in sustainability. Attention is drawn to the preferred epistemic methods of the differing factions arguing for sustainability. Criteria for defining membership in the moral community are explored; rationality and capacity for pain are rejected as consistent criteria. The criterion of having interests is shown to be most coherent for explaining why all living humans belong to the moral community. This criterion allows inclusion of future generations as well, and extends to animals and plants membership in the moral community. Inferences are drawn that food sufficiency advocates hold only presently living persons to be full-fledged members of the moral community, but that this view is internally inconsistent. Stewards should agree that all living things are members of the moral community. A distinction between welfare interests and ulterior interests allows the steward to include the aims of those who argue for sustainability as community without committing some of their errors. Community advocates argue that essential values and virtues will be lost is the culture of agriculture is transformed. I argue that community advocates may fail to pass on our most important virtue — justice — without such a transformation.     

构建社会主义和谐社会应重视思想政治教育

在社会主义和谐社会的构建过程中,应充分重视思想政治教育工作。随着社会主义市场经济体制的逐步完善,人们的思想活动趋向独立化和多元化,在这种背景下完善和创新思想政治工作,既可以发挥其思想导向作用,保持主流意识形态的主导地位,有利于强化党的领导,维护社会政治稳定,又可以团结广大人民群众,凝聚人心,充分化解社会矛盾。     

New visions for addressing sustainability

Attaining sustainability will require concerted interactive efforts among disciplines, many of which have not yet recognized, and internalized, the relevance of environmental issues to their main intellectual discourse. The inability of key scientific disciplines to engage interactively is an obstacle to the actual attainment of sustainability. For example, in the list of Millennium Development Goals from the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg, 2002, the seventh of the eight goals, to "ensure environmental sustainability," is presented separately from the parallel goals of reducing fertility and poverty, improving gains in equity, improving material conditions, and enhancing population health. A more integrated and consilient approach to sustainability is urgently needed.     

运用法治逻辑推动环境审判体制改革

环境审判体制改革是在法治现代化建设和社会转型的大背景下,为实现环境司法专门化,推动环境正义,在法治正当性理念的指导下进行的一场环境司法改革。改革的逻辑起点在于加快经济发展方式的转变和保障人权,但实践中存在的良性违法现象带来的问题却是深刻的,长此以往,必不利于法治权威的维护。在社会主义法律体系形成之后,维护法治的权威是法治建设的主题,对改革也需要进一步的规范。对于环境审判体制改革,需要充分地运用法治逻辑的优势,以科学的法治思维和法治方式推动环境审判体制改革,维护司法的权威,强化司法的公信力。     

基于钻石理论的闽台传媒产业合作模式探析

ECFA的正式签署,开启了两岸经济共创双赢的大局,为两岸产业深入合作注入了强大的动能。福建传媒产业由于自身的特点,体现了两岸特色经济合作机制的特色,有利于两岸提升产业竞争力,促进经济共同发展,在两岸产业合作中先行先试的作用日益凸显。文章运用波特钻石理论,对闽台传媒产业合作要素进行科学分析,并提出产业合作新模式,将对两岸传媒产业合作,乃至对两岸文化产业合作有所启发。     

论市场经济条件下大学生的义利观教育

当代大学生义利观的形成正在受到市场经济的影响。当代大学生在义利观取向上的主要特点表现在主体意识增强,强调自我价值,追求物质利益,功利性强等方面。通过分析大学生义利观的变化和特点,对当代大学生义利观的教育问题提出了一些建议:正确评价大学生的义利观,坚持对大学生义利观教育的正确导向以及创新教育的方法和手段等。     

我国农业结构演变的驱动因素分析研究

综述各种自然、经济、社会因素对农业结构历史变化的驱动作用。相对来说,气候、环境等自然生态因素是自然经济阶段农业结构变化的主导因素,市场、政策等社会经济因素是商品经济阶段农业结构变化的主导因素。在当前的环境和资源压力下,农业生态价值必然会成为今后农业结构调整的重要指导原则。