Author Archives: Dirk Roep

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About Dirk Roep

I have retired as Assistant professor at the Rural Sociology Group of Wageningen University. I continue though to be involved in various initiatives and research on different modes of regenerative agriculture, food provisioning and place-based development.

5 DERREG films: Dresden (G), Roscommon (Irl), Comarca de Verin (Sp) and Westerkwartier (NL)

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Students from the University of Aberytswyth, assigned by DERREG coordinator Michael Woods and instructed by the respective partners, made video clips of four case study areas to highlight some of the particular developments in these rural regions. The video clips of Comarca de Verin (Spain), Roscommon (Ireland), the Westerkwartier (NL) and the two video clips of Regierungsbezirk Dresden Part 1 en Dresden Part 2 (Germany), are accessible at You Tube. Earlier Wiebke Wellbrock already posted a blog on the Westerkwartier film. Have a look at the DERREG Channel:

The DERREG project has come to an end. Results are published at the resource centre of the DERREG website www.derreg.eu. The online Journal European Countryside will soon publish two special issues on DERREG findings. Ashgate will publish a book based on the case study areas.

Scriptieprijs Slow Food uitgereikt aan Elisa de Lijster

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Tijdens een debatavond onder de noemer ‘Slow or cheap: that is the question‘ over de aanstaande hervorming van het Europees gemeenschappelijk landbouwbeleid georganiseerd door de Youth Food Movement (zie korte toelichting hieronder) is: 

de Jan Wolf scriptieprijs uitgereikt aan de 2 scripties die volgens de jury het meest bijdragen aan het verder ontwikkelen van het SlowFood gedachtengoed. Juryvoorzitter Michiel Korthals (hoogleraar in Wageningen) beloonde de bachelor-scriptie Sanne de Wit over de gezondheidseffecten van gemeenschappelijke stadstuinen en de master-scriptie van Elisa de Lijster over vergroening en vermaatschappelijking in het Gemeenschappelijk Landbouw Beleid, met de prijs van 500 euro en een publicatie op de website van SlowFood.

We hebben het afstudeeronderzoek van Elisa de Lijster mogen begeleiden. We zijn dus niet de enigen die lovend zijn over haar sciptie. Zie een post van Elisa voor een korte toelichting op haar MSc-thesis. 

De Youth Food Movement is een jongerenbeweging die zich inzet voor een eerlijker en gezonder voedselsysteem. De manier waarop voedsel tegenwoordig wordt geproduceerd en geconsumeerd is namelijk verre van duurzaam. In het Westen consumeren we te veel en te ongezond. Tegelijkertijd zijn er delen van de wereld die kampen met ernstige voedseltekorten. De huidige productie brengt schade toe aan mens en milieu. Steeds meer mensen raken vervreemd van hun voedsel en hierdoor verliezen we waardevolle kennis en cultuur.

Een van de projecten van de Youth Food Movement betreft de GLB-hervorming: CAP2013. Samen met het Nederlands Agrarisch Jongeren Kontact (NAJK) heeft YFM een videoblogserie ‘GLB – De toekomst van ons voedsel’ van gemaakt. In zes aflevering worden jongeren bezocht die dagelijks met het GLB te maken hebben.

Bruno Benvenuti – in memoriam

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Bruno Benvenuti

 On the 15th of September 2011 we received the sad news that Bruno Benvenuti has passed away. For several of us working in the Rural Sociology Group, Bruno Benvenuti has been a professor who left a strong imprint on our academic formation and research work. Benvenuti enriched the body of rural sociological theory with his analysis of the Technological-Administrative Task Environment (TATE) within which farmers have to operate – an analysis that proves to be even more valuable today than at the moment it was formulated for the first time. 

For Benvenuti the interest in TATE relations and the way they ‘discipline’ farmers, whilst simultaneously standardizing farm practices, represented a wider concern, i.e. the general relations between structure and agency. This wider interest resulted in a range of scientific papers, some still very well known. The same interest reflected, on its turn, part of the complex biography of Benvenuti. After the horrors of war and fascism (being an adolescent he lost his father during a bombardment after which he had to take care of the family) he met, as angry young man who was extremely worried about the agricultural situation in Italy, the later EU commissioner for agriculture, Sicco Mansholt. After considerable quarrels about the role of politics, the latter invited Bruno Benvenuti to come over to the Netherlands in order to get acquainted with Dutch agriculture and the Dutch agrarian policy. He came to know Evert Willem Hofstee, the founding father of rural sociology in the Netherlands who invited Benvenuti to study the ‘modernization’ of agriculture and to write a Ph.D. about it. 

The successful defence of his thesis was followed by a career, first in the then emerging European Commission, then in Mogadishu. This was followed by path-breaking research in the North of Italy where Vito Saccomandi, who later became Minister of Agriculture, was one of Bruno’s young research assistants. This was followed by a period of teaching, first in Italy, then again in Wageningen and finally, before his retirement, in Viterbo in Italy. 

Bruno Benvenuti experienced, as it were, in his own life, the overwhelming powers of e.g. fascism, neo-colonialism (in his Mogadishu period) and the supra-national state. At the same time he knew, from his own experiences, that differences could be made: that agency matters. This turned him into a very serious and dedicated man, permanently worried about the big contradictions of our time. Superficiality was a horror to him and as a teacher he made us feel, time and again, our responsibility in this ‘age of extremes’.

Bruno Benvenuti died in the Italian village Pietrasanta, where he spend the last years of his life in joy. We lost an important and thoughtful colleague. Several of us also lost a very good friend and a source of inspiration.

Che la terra che ha amato tanto, gli sia lieve.

On behalf of my colleagues,

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg

DERREG – Final conference and proceedings

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Two weeks ago, from October 12-13, we had our final conference of the EU-funded research project DERREG (www.derreg.eu)  in Murska Sobota, Slovenia. Here the major findings of the project were presented.

DERREG coordinator prof. Michael Woods first presented (see presentation) an overwiew of the project and an interpretative model (see below) on how regions are affected by and respond to forces of globalisation mediated by various catalyst and he ended with a typology of regional responses based on the research done in the 10 case study regions. See also the DERREG Summary Report by Michael Woods.

 

Successively the coordinators of the four Work Packages presented the main findings along four themes:

  1. Rural Businesses, Global Engagement and Local Embeddedness (presented by Andrew Copus)
  2. International Migration and Rural Europe (presented by Birte Nienaber)
  3. The Global Environment and Rural Sustainable Development (presented by Joachim Burdack & Michael Kriszan)
  4. Rural regional learning (presented by Dirk Roep and Wiebke Wellbrock)

Each overview was illustrated with findings for two case study areas presented by the respective partners.

A separate session was dedicated to policy perspective on globalisation and rural development in Slovenia and in particular the Pomurje region in the north of Slovenia were Murska Sobota is located and the Final conference took place.

At the end, guest speakers from the Goriška region in Slovenia, the Övre Norrland in Sweden, the Westerkwartier region in the Netherlands and the Steirische Mur-Drau-Bioenergie-Region in Austria highlighted four good practices of how regions can respond to global processes and benefit from it.

All presentations can be downloaded from the DEREG website: http://www.derreg.eu/content/events/final-conference-derreg-project (at the bottom of the webpage).

At the DERREG resource-centre other proceedings are made accessible too, such as the WP reports, the case study context reports and case study summary reports. Look at http://www.derreg.eu/content/resource-centre.  Finally, a database of good practice across the WP theme’s and case study areas has been built and made accessible: look  at http://www.derreg.eu/content/good-practice-database.

Last but not least: video clips are made for each of the ten case study regions and when ready these will be published on You tube and announced at the website.

The project will finish by the end of this year. The partners are now working on several scientific publications in journals and books. By the end of this year and beginning of 2012 DERREG related articles will be published in two special issue of the European Countryside, an online journal (see the content of latest issue). Next will be an edited book published by Ashgate titled ‘Globalization and Europe’s Rural Regions‘  which will capitalise the findings for the 10 case study areas.

Publications will be announced at the resource-centre of the DERREG website, as for the video clips, and information will be posted on this blog.

Vacture PhD Sociologie bij ILVO (Vlaanderen)

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Het Instituut voor Landbouw- en Visserijonderzoek (ILVO) in Vlaanderen heeft een vacature voor een PhD (Rurale) Sociologie. Zie de website van ILVO voor nadere toelichting van de vacature. Contact persoon bij ILVO is Joost Dessein (joost.dessein@ilvo.vlaanderen.be).