Lucy Jarosz

Understanding agri-food networks as social relations.

Actor network theory and supply chainmanagement theory provide suggestive researchdirections for understanding regional agri-foodnetworks. These theories claim that relationshipsbased upon trust and cooperation are critical to thestrength and vitality of the network. This means thatexploring and detailing these relationships among thesuppliers, producers, workers, processors, brokers,wholesalers, and retailers within specific regionalgeographies of these networks are critical forfurthering cooperation and trust. Key areas ofcooperation include resource sharing andapprenticeship programs. Employing food networks as akey unit of contextual analysis will deepen ourunderstanding of how to enhance their resiliency andvibrancy. Important questions can be raised about thedifference gender makes for farmers, brokers,entrepreneurs, and workers in local food networks.

“Sophisticated People Versus Rednecks”: Economic Restructuring and Class Difference in America’s West

In this paper, we argue for the importance of constructing a human geography of white class difference. More particularly, we present a theoretical framework for understanding the cultural politics of class and whiteness in the context of rural restructuring. We theorize these politics through an examination of the national discourse of redneck that has emerged in the US. We analyze the term “redneck” as one of several rhetorical categories that refer to rural white poor people. We argue that while various terms are employed in geographically specific ways and cannot be used interchangeably, they nonetheless function similarly in positioning the white rural poor. Our examination of redneck discourse exemplifies these processes and points up the need for a broader analysis of representational strategies that reinforce class difference among whites. Drawing upon three case studies of white rural poverty, we deconstruct these imagined rural spaces by situating discourses about white rural poor people in the context of geographically specific political economies of power and social relations in Kentucky, Florida, and Washington. These case studies, as well as the national discourse of redneck, represent rural poverty as a lifestyle choice and as an individualized cultural trait. Abstract rural spaces are construed as poor, underdeveloped, and wild; rural, white poor people are represented as lazy, dirty, obsolescent, conservative, or alternative. A focus upon the political economy of community resource relationships and the construction and reproduction of redneck discourses reveals how exploitative material processes are justified by naming others and blaming the persistence of rural poverty upon the poor themselves.

Comparing food security and food sovereignty discourses

This essay conceptualizes food security and food sovereignty as fluid and changing discourses that define the problem of hunger. I trace the discursive geohistories of food security and food sovereignty in order to identify oppositions and relationalities between them. I argue that the interpretations of, and relations between, food security and food sovereignty vary by geography and scale, as well as by the conceptual and theoretical differences within the discourses themselves. When and where these discourses develop and emerge is central to understanding their oppositions and convergences. How scale is constructed within particular discourses is also important to understanding how they co-exist relationally or in opposition. Food security and food sovereignty discourses are tied to distinctive political and economic histories, ecologies, and identities at the national and local levels. They are differentially deployed depending upon geographic context and the political economy of development and underdevelopment. Both discourses are dynamic and changing in relation to the wider political and cultural economies of food system dynamics across scale. Uniform definitions of each term should be resisted. The point is to understand the geographies of their relational overlap and their continual difference.

Defining World Hunger

Abstract Through a reading of policy texts centering upon food security published by the World Bank and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, I problematize the concept of food security by showing how its definition and its scale have changed over time. I use scale as an analytic frame to highlight how changing definitions of food security serve neoliberal ideology. The scaled definitions of food security move from an early emphasis upon the attainment of food security at the international and national levels to a micro-level focus upon households and gendered individuals. The most recent changes link individuals to global modalities of governance with an emphasis upon the instrumentality of agricultural productivity in economic development strategies. Considering the contested and dynamic construction of scale in relation to the changing definitions of international food security reveals the political and ideological dimensions of these dynamics and their contradictions with the material history of hunger over the last thirty years.

The geography of Washington's world apple: global expressions in a local landscape.

Abstract This article explores how the globalization of food and agriculture is linked to local processes of agrarian transformation in the case of the apple industry in the United States. The local, regional history concerning environmental, technological and social change in the apple industry reveals the ways in which the local landscape has changed as this agro-industry has developed and globalized over the last century. Our focus embraces three themes: the social construction of value in fresh apples, the changing structure of the apple industry, and the changing social relations of production as they concern transnational wageworkers. The social constructions of value ascribed to apples in the industrys advertisements aimed at national and international consumers exist in sharp contrast with the local level intensification of farming practices. Changes in farm structure, production technology, labor process and relations, and the composition and settlement patterns of farm labor reflect both the industrys regional development as well as how the globalized apple industry is manifested in the regions development history and geography.

Articulations of Place, Poverty, and Race: Dumping Grounds and Unseen Grounds in the Rural American Northwest

This project extends poverty research by addressing the lack of knowledge about place and race differences in poverty processes (Blank 2005). Rural places experience a range of modes of articulation within the global division of rural labor and we observe three distinct modes of articulation in the American Northwest: “playgrounds,” “dumping grounds,” and “unseen grounds.” We attend to the recursive relations between political-economic restructuring and the discursive production of social difference across class and race lines. Poverty is produced in the reciprocal relations among local historical, ecological, and social processes and the articulation of those places with new rounds of capital accumulation under neoliberal restructuring. Our empirical investigation focuses on white and Latino poverty across nonmetropolitan counties of the American Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana). We first map county-level patterns of white and Latino poverty in relation to county-level economic restructuring during the 1990s across the region. We then employ in-depth comparative case study research to explore the intersections of specific forms of neoliberal restructuring with place-based historical, ecological, and social processes to understand rural white and Latino poverty in the region.

Building economies from the bottom up: (mis)representations of poverty in the rural American Northwest

This paper examines interconnected processes of economic restructuring and representations of poor subjects that rely on imaginaries of race, ethnicity, class and rural space. We argue that poverty and privilege are mutually produced and so we focus on the representational practices of White leaders in persistently poor counties across the American Northwest. We draw from case study research to understand region-wide material and discursive processes that are contributing to economic distress and social marginalization. We interrogate the range of representational practices that White leaders employ to explain, deny and/or racialize poverty in their communities. We also draw attention to how poverty emerges from the intersection of political, economic and cultural processes operating across a range of scales and sites. We further analyze how representations of the poor and poverty rest on a host of imaginary landscapes about who belongs, who is an outsider and who has a right to a place and its services. We argue that these representations serve to invigorate neoliberal policies and silence a more critical debate about poverty in the USA.

Growing inequality: agricultural revolutions and the political ecology of rural development

This article argues that the case studies to be published in a special issue together with this article make three arguments about the deployment of Green Revolution technologies in development strategies. These arguments identify the importance of context in understanding sustainable outcomes, and the claim that technical fixes such as the increasing use of synthetic fertilizers and increased yields do not necessarily alleviate hunger and poverty over the long term. The third argument is that interventions built upon existing social, political and economic inequalities will only deepen unequal access, distribution and control of food and food-producing resources for rural people. In the second half of this essay, these arguments frame responses to the world food crisis of 2007–2008 as exemplified in the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development report. These responses are overshadowed by the large-scale foreign land acquisitions currently underway in many countries where hunger and malnutrition are pressing social and moral issues. Working towards sustainable futures in food and agriculture involves the construction and development of food networks that are contextualized, reliant on agro-ecological paradigms, the provision of dignified and decent livelihoods for food producers, democratically controlled provisioning for surrounding communities and regions as well as secure land rights for small-scale farmers. This is the vision of political ecology of rural development that moves beyond technical fixes and market regulation to considerations of justice and equity in resource access and control.

Agents of Power, Landscapes of Fear: The Vampires and Heart Thieves of Madagascar

Vampires and heart thieves have, it is said, inhabited the island of Madagascar for the last century. These mythic figures signify relations of identity tied to the global processes of colonial capitalism, modernism, and imperialism as they relate to a colonized Africa, and more specifically, to the island of Madagascar. The vampire and heart thief express the array of extractive processes rooted in the social relations between colonizer and colonized, political subjects, empire, church, and state. These mythic figures are manipulated by various groups to fulfil specific local political agendas and invoke difference based upon race and class. Rumors and sightings of vampires and heart thieves create a landscape of fear which enables or constrains complicity with, or rebellion against, agents of the state and the church.

Women as rice sharecroppers in Madagascar

Abstract This case study, drawn from a rice‐growing region in Madagascar, demonstrates how gender and class differences shape individual access to and control of productive resources. Production strategies differ among the women and men who crop rice on shares and are primarily distinguished by class position and gender. Single women invariably share out the land they own to male croppers, whereas men of all classes may sharecrop land from or to other men. Only wealthy male farmers implement sharecropping as an accumulation strategy. Wealthy female farmers are concerned with mobilizing male labor power in their sharecropping strategies. Poor, landless, female heads of households are the only persons in this study who cannot and do not crop rice on shares and are the most disadvantaged and poorest.