The central disagreement between McMichael and Bernstein boils down to how each of them analyses food and agriculture in relation to capitalist dynamics. McMichael thinks the main contradictions of ...capitalism now stem from agriculture, and any positive future will be guided by farmers. Bernstein thinks capitalism has fully absorbed agriculture (including farmers not expelled from the land) into circuits of capital, turning agriculture into simply one of many sectors of accumulation and a major font of surplus labor. They have arrived by different paths to the same deeper question: Granted its illumination of the past, does the food regime approach remain useful for interpreting present contradictions, and if so, how? To invite a wider exploration of this very real and important question, I have tried to shift the debate towards a conversation about the complexity of the current transition. I start by widening the frame of the debate to include other writings by McMichael (his method of incorporated comparison) and Bernstein (his distinction between farming and agriculture). I conclude that food regimes and agrarian changes must be located in a wider set of analyses of agrarian and capitalist transitions, each of which misses something important. Older agrarian thought about urban society has much to offer but misses larger food regime dynamics; socio-technical transitions and new commons literatures offer critical analysis of technics, but lack appreciation of the centrality of food and farming; recent works recovering Marxist thought about human nature in a possible transition to a society of abundance and collaboration also ignore food and farming. Connecting with literatures outside the frame of food regimes and agrarian questions offers a way forward for those literatures and for ours.
Teodor Shanin's The Awkward Class helped to launch two immensely important research directions. First, resistance by Russian peasants to modernizing agricultural policies by both Tsarist and Soviet ...governments opened new questions about collectivization of agriculture, and made Russian history relevant to the study of 'developing societies.' Second, the idea of cyclical mobility of peasant households challenged the then widely held assumption that peasants were destined to disappear. Instead of explaining 'persistence' of peasants, Shanin explored distinct logics of peasant households and communities. This helped to define a new inter-disciplinary field called peasant studies.
I have been thinking for a while now about the intriguing concept of foodshed in changing urban food regions. As the world becomes more urban, North and South, new fora, such as the International ...Urban Food Network—with the Toronto Food Policy Council as partner—reflect this shift of reimagining relations between urban and rural. Canadian experience has a specific place in the practice of emerging city food regions, one it shares with other places of European colonial settlement (and displacement of indigenous land use), but also one in which urban food regions have pioneered policies bridging the rural-urban divide.
A review essay covering reports by 1)UNEP, Food Systems and Natural Resources. A Report of the Working Group on Food Systems of the International Resource Panel (2016) and 2) IPES-Food, From ...Uniformity to Diversity: A Paradigm Shift from Industrial Agriculture to Diversified Agroecological Systems (2016).
This paper reports on a relationship between the University of Toronto and a non-profit, non-governmental (“third party”) certifying organization called Local Flavour Plus (LFP). The University as of ...August 2006 requires its corporate caterers to use local and sustainable farm products for a small but increasing portion of meals for most of its 60,000 students. LFP is the certifying body, whose officers and consultants have strong relations of trust with sustainable farmers. It redefines standards and verification to create ladders for farmers, Aramark and Chartwells (the corporations that won the bid), and the University, to continuously raise standards of sustainability. After years of frustrated efforts, other Ontario institutions are expressing interest, opening the possibility that a virtuous circle could lead to rapid growth in local, sustainable supply chains. The paper examines the specificities of the LFP approach and of the Toronto and Canadian context. Individuals in LFP acquired crucial skills, insights, experience, resources, and relationships of trust over 20 years within the Toronto “community of food practice,” located in a supportive municipal, NGO and social movement context.
All authors in this symposium use a food regime perspective to ask questions about the present which—as these articles demonstrate—have several possible answers. History suggests a time perspective ...of 25–40 year cycles so far—a food regime 1870–1914, an experimental and chaotic era 1914–1947, and a food regime 1947–1973. It has been less than 40 years since 1973, when food regime analysts agree that a contested and experimental period began. There is no consensus on whether it has already ended or how it might issue into a new food regime. The conversation is more fruitful than the conclusions. I intend these comments as an invitation to join in.
Like all species, humans change our environments to get food.Foodgetting is the dimension of human history that links us directly and indirectly with all other beings. Inescapably and at once both ...historical and natural, human foodgetting can be understood both as natural history and as historical nature. It implicates our species being in the evolving web of life. In its complex embodied, encultured and social relations, human nature evolves. To embrace that recognition requires thorough revision of inherited ideas. I draw on specific contributions among many thinkers engaged in this project by following a foodgetting thread through several literatures: (1) approaches to reconnecting natural with social sciences of human nature; (2) a “deep history” (Shryock and Smail 2011) of agriculture, which connects prehistory to written history, by Mazoyer and Roudart (1997, 2006), and its limits; (3) ecological resilience theory, and its model of panarchy, which resonates with emergence, dissolution, and reconstellation of food regimes and food regime transitions. This sets the stage for (4) clarifying different paths taken by food regime analysts, including my differences with co‐founder Philip McMichael. (5) I conclude by suggesting an approach to intentional change of human institutions centred on emergence, and (6) an example of emerging ways of organising territory centred on foodgetting.
•We review the literature on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 from a food systems perspective.•Scholars referencing SDG 2 generally do not link ecology, nutrition, and policy science dimensions ...of food systems.•Future research should include stronger engagement with relevant concepts from ecology, nutrition, and policy science.•Achieving SDG 2 requires attention to institutional capacities, ecosystem-based management, and the quality of diets.•A social-ecological systems approach and the sustainable diets framework could inform effective SDG 2 policies.
Globally, industrial agriculture threatens critical ecosystem processes on which crop production depends, while 815 million people are undernourished and many more suffer from malnutrition. The second Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 2), Zero Hunger, seeks to simultaneously address global environmental sustainability and food security challenges. We conducted an integrated literature review organized around three disciplinary perspectives central to realizing SDG 2: ecology and agricultural sciences, nutrition and public health, and political economy and policy science. Within each discipline we first draw on a wide range of literature to summarize the state of knowledge on effective pathways to achieve food security while ensuring the sustainability of food systems. We then conduct a comprehensive review of articles in each of these disciplines that discuss SDG 2, using the pathways we outline initially to frame our analysis. In particular, we ask whether the framing of SDG 2 is appropriate given current understandings of transitions to sustainable food systems. By applying a food systems lens, our review identifies several limitations in the way SDG 2 is applied by researchers including a productionist perspective, limited attention to ecological processes on farms, a definition of food security that lacks a food systems perspective, and a lack of attention to historical and structural factors that shape opportunities for equity and food security in different contexts. Finally, we consider possibilities for expanding the research agenda and associated implications for development practice. We argue that the pathway to achieving Zero Hunger should center on place-based, adaptive, participatory solutions that simultaneously attend to local institutional capacities, agroecosystem diversification and ecological management, and the quality of local diets. Two conceptual frameworks – social-ecological systems and sustainable diets – offer systems-based lenses for integrated analysis of agriculture and food security, which could inform the development of effective policies.
1. Could you present the core propositions of your work? Its evolution both thematically and theoretically? Food regime analysis began with the ambition to understand systems of inter-state power in ...relation to changes in class formation and international division of labor. It also aspires to understand capital in its specific configurations in relation to land and bodies, that is, to nature, including human nature. Land and food are always foundations of human society; Marx defined a mode of...
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