Annie Shattuck

Food crises, food regimes and food movements: rumblings of reform or tides of transformation?

This article addresses the potential for food movements to bring about substantive changes to the current global food system. After describing the current corporate food regime, we apply Karl Polanyis ‘double-movement’ thesis on capitalism to explain the regimes trends of neoliberalism and reform. Using the global food crisis as a point of departure, we introduce a comparative analytical framework for different political and social trends within the corporate food regime and global food movements, characterizing them as ‘Neoliberal’, ‘Reformist’, ‘Progressive’, and ‘Radical’, respectively, and describe each trend based on its discourse, model, and key actors, approach to the food crisis, and key documents. After a discussion of class, political permeability, and tensions within the food movements, we suggest that the current food crisis offers opportunities for strategic alliances between Progressive and Radical trends within the food movement. We conclude that while the food crisis has brought a retrenchment of neoliberalization and weak calls for reform, the worldwide growth of food movements directly and indirectly challenge the legitimacy and hegemony of the corporate food regime. Regime change will require sustained pressure from a strong global food movement, built on durable alliances between Progressive and Radical trends.

Agrobiodiversity and Shade Coffee Smallholder Livelihoods: A Review and Synthesis of Ten Years of Research in Central America

We used households as the primary unit of analysis to synthesize agrobiodiversity research in small-scale coffee farms and cooperatives of Nicaragua and El Salvador. Surveys, focus groups, and plant inventories were used to analyze agrobiodiversity and its contribution to livelihoods. Households managed high levels of agrobiodiversity, including 100 shade tree and epiphyte species, food crops, and medicinals. Small farms contained higher levels of agrobiodiversity than larger, collectively managed cooperatives. Households benefited from agrobiodiversity through consumption and sales. To better support agrobiodiversity conservation, our analysis calls for a hybrid approach integrating bottom-up initiatives with the resources from top-down projects.

We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People … and Still Can't End Hunger

A new a study from McGill University and the University of Minnesota published in the journal Nature compared organic and conventional yields from 66 studies and 316 trials (Seufert et al. 2012). Researchers found that organic systems on average yielded 25% less than conventional, chemical-intensive systems—although this was highly variable and context specific. Embracing the current conventional wisdom, authors argue for a combination of conventional and organic farming to meet “the twin challenge of feeding a growing population, with rising demand for meat and high-calorie diets, while simultaneously minimizing its global environmental impacts” (Seufert et al. 2012, 3). Unfortunately, neither the study nor the conventional wisdom addresses the real cause of hunger. Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2009a, 2009b) the world produces more than 1 /2 times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s already enough to feed 10 billion people, the world’s 2050 projected population peak. But the people making less than

The Agrofuels Transition Restructuring Places and Spaces in the Global Food System

2 a day—most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating un-viably small plots of land—cannot afford to buy this food. In reality, the bulk of industrially produced grain crops (most yield reduction in the study was found in grains) goes to biofuels and confined animal feedlots rather than food for the one billion hungry. The call to double food production by 2050 only applies if we continue to prioritize the growing population of livestock and automobiles over hungry people. Actually, what this new study does tell us is how much smaller the yield gap is between organic and conventional farming than what critics of organic agriculture have assumed. Smil’s (2001) claim that organic farming requires twice the land base has become a conventional mantra. In fact, when we unpack the data from the Nature study, we find that for many crops and in many instances, the reported yield gap is minimal. With new advances in seed breeding for organic systems, and with the transition of commercial

The role of rangelands in diversified farming systems: innovations, obstacles, and opportunities in the USA.

Despite recent critiques of agrofuels, the industry is booming, signaling transformations in the worlds food and fuels systems. International financial institutions, biotechnology firms, governments, and agribusiness are restructuring control over land, genetic resources, economic space, and market power. These moves prefer transnational capital at the expense of farmers in the North and extensive areas vital to the livelihoods of small producers in the Global South. This article suggests that the agrofuels boom may be a new—and particularly destructive—stage in industrys extractive transformations of agriculture. The movement-based logic of food sovereignty—peoples right to define their own food and agriculture systems—suggests a rollback of the “agrofuels transition” is possible.

Translating the Politics of Food Sovereignty: Digging into Contradictions, Uncovering New Dimensions

Discussions of diversified farming systems (DFS) rarely mention rangelands: the grasslands, shrublands, and savannas that make up roughly one-third of Earths ice-free terrestrial area, including some 312 million ha of the United States. Although ranching has been criticized by environmentalists for decades, it is probably the most ecologically sustainable segment of the U.S. meat industry, and it exemplifies many of the defining characteristics of DFS: it relies on the functional diversity of natural ecological processes of plant and animal (re)production at multiple scales, based on ecosystem services generated and regenerated on site rather than imported, often nonrenewable, inputs. Rangelands also provide other ecosystem services, including watershed, wildlife habitat, recreation, and tourism. Even where non-native or invasive plants have encroached on or replaced native species, rangelands retain unusually high levels of plant diversity compared with croplands or plantation forests. Innovations in management, marketing, incentives, and easement programs that augment ranch income, creative land tenure arrangements, and collaborations among ranchers all support diversification. Some obstacles include rapid landownership turnover, lack of accessible U.S. Department of Agriculture certified processing facilities, tenure uncertainty, fragmentation of rangelands, and low and variable income, especially relative to land costs. Taking advantage of rancher knowledge and stewardship, and aligning incentives with production of diverse goods and services, will support the sustainability of ranching and its associated public benefits. The creation of positive feedbacks between economic and ecological diversity should be the ultimate goal.

Conservación de Agrobiodiversidad y Medios de Vida en Cooperativas de Café Bajo Sombra en Centroamérica

Abstract Food sovereignty, as a movement and a set of ideas, is coming of age. Rooted in resistance to free trade and the globalizing force of neoliberalism, the concept has inspired collective action across the world. We examine what has changed since food sovereignty first emerged on the international scene and reflect on insight from new terrain where the movement has expanded. We argue that to advance the theory and practice of food sovereignty, new frameworks and analytical methods are needed to move beyond binaries—between urban and rural, gender equality and the family farm, trade and localism, and autonomy and engagement with the state. A research agenda in food sovereignty must not shy away from the rising contradictions in and challenges to the movement. The places of seeming contradiction may in fact be where the greatest insights are to be found. We suggest that by taking a relational perspective, scholars can begin to draw insight into the challenges and sticking points of food sovereignty by training their lens on shifts in the global food regime, on the efforts to construct sovereignty at multiple scales, and on the points of translation where food sovereignty is articulated through historical memory, identity, and everyday life.

Food Rebellions!: Crisis And The Hunger For Justice

Rodriguez Martinez, N., Bordas, P., Pineiro, J., Garcia de Castro, N., Martin, P., Mendez, M. (2013). Meta-analysis of the effects of burnt wood removal on Mediterranean forest regeneration: a step towards an evidence-based management. Ecosistemas 22(1):71-76. Doi.:10.7818/ECOS.2013.22-1.15 Many environmental managers base their decisions on previous field experience, but not on primary scientific literature or advice by academic scientists. Evidence-based management, based on primary scientific literature and meta-analysis, to decide among environmental management options is very infrequent. This paper illustrates this approach using as an example salvage logging in Mediterranean forests. Traditionally, forest management after fire has included salvage logging, i.e., harvest and removal of burnt wood, based on economic, ecological and esthetic grounds. However, salvage logging has also been criticised due to, among other reasons, its potential detrimental effects on forest regeneration. A meta-analysis of the relevant Mediterranean literature suggested no (seedling density and height) or negative (survival) effect of salvage logging on forest regeneration. Although a meta-analysis based on such a small sample size as the one possible in this study does not allow strong conclusions, it suggests that: (1) current management is not consistent with the (scarce) available evidence, at least regarding forest regeneration after fire and (2) stronger evidence should be gathered about this kind of forest management.