Category Archives: Food

Notes from the ESRS conference (2)

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At the bi-annual conference for rural sociologists in Europe  at this moment going on at Crete, we organised a working group to compare food and farming strategies in the rural and the urban. We discovered confusing (see blog 1) and potentially clarifying concepts while listening to the many interesting presentations. As an example of sustainable rural development Ignacio Lopez Moreno presented the concept of co-production as ” the ongoing interaction and mutual change of human and living nature”  (after van der Ploeg 2008) while explaining the case of quality production under the Waddengoud label in the north of the Netherlands. This definition fitted the presentation of Esther Veen and myself too who saw the urban residents in urban agriculture initiatives as co-producers in the sense of this definition.

Although co-production and co-producership also have contested meanings in the academic debate these terms are potentially bridging rural and urban studies on the way people grow food as alternative to buying in regular retail outlets of the agro-industrial complex. Both rural dweller and urban residents interact with and change nature while becoming active in growing food.  Food provisioning strategies that involve co-production open the dichotomy between producer and consumer and perspectives which start (implicitly) from one or the other side.

Notes from the ESRS conference (1)

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Today we had the last session of our working group ” Comparative perspective; governing semi-subsistance food and farming strategies in the countryside and city” . In this group we deliberately were seeking to contrast  cases of food and farming in urban and rural contexts. Can urban agriculture be compared with small-scale farming in rural areas? What has peasant farming literature to offer in how we can look at what is going on with food growing in cities?

We discovered useful and potentially bridging concepts and concepts which may confuse more than they reveal. To start with the latter, “semi-subsistance farming” may not be a useful concept. One reason is the many definitions as Imre Kovach showed us. But another is the meaning of the separate terms in the different rural and urban contexts. Is the ” semi”  in subsistance referring to selling surplus or buying the remaining part of the food supply if you only produce some of your vegetables? And is ‘ farming’  the appropriate term for growing food in allotments or community gardens?  From a rural perspective food production as a side, or part time activity is easily seen as farming and the person foremost as a producer and only in second instance as consumer. In city initiatives it is the reverse. Consumers usually do not ‘ farm’  but ‘ grow food’  or ‘ garden’  and hence are only a ‘ producer’  after their identity as a consumer. This while a rural hobby farm may be as intense in land use as an allotment at the city fringe. The focus on food provisioning strategies  seems therefore better since it refers to the activities one undertakes to eat, which may include growing activities too.

Internship possibility with Stroom Den Haag

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 In 2009 Stroom Den Haag (www.stroom.nl) kicked off the program Foodprint. Food for the city. The program takes place over the course of several years and focuses on the influence food can have on the culture, shape and functioning of the city, using The Hague as a case study. The program invites artists and designers to develop appealing proposals on the subject, while at the same time establishing a clear connection with entrepreneurs, farmers, food experts and the general public. 

Foodprint as a project ends in 2012. To mark the end of the three year project, a book will be published and a symposium organised around the same theme: How do we feed our cities of the future (2050) in a sustainable way? Stroom is looking for a student to assist them with the organisational work but also to do additional research. For instance, there is an idea to create a visual essay with a timeline starting around 2050 B.C. (Sumerian clay tablets being the oldest judicial document, communicating about barley) with on it the most important laws and inventions in the field of production and trade of food in urban areas.

If you are curious about the possibilities, please contact Els Hegger (els.hegger@wur.nl).

Moonlight farmers and Lump suckers; The ICRPS Summer School in Norway

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This Summer School about policies for rural development took place from June 25th to July 9th 2011 on 2 locations in Norway, in Oslo and in Sogndal. The course involved a variety of lectures, discussions and group word on issues such as natural resources, community development, rural services, renewable energy, food & agriculture, policy and climate change. The diverse group of students (some of them already working in rural development), faculty members and two OECD researchers included mainly people from Europe and the US (especially Canada) and discussed not only rural development in Norway, but compared this with interesting cases in their own countries. I only attended the second week in Sogndal, a town located between Bergen, Oslo and Trondheim, at one of the most beautiful fjords in Norway. Sogndal is located near the largest glacier in Europe.
Moonlight farmers refers to the agricultural situation in Norway: only 3% of the land is used as arable land, the average size of a farm is small and many landowners have a job which they attend in the daytime, while doing farm work during ‘moonlight’ (in fact in summer the daylight lasts very long in Norway).
Lump suckers refers to innovation in aquaculture in the Norwegian fisheries. Norway is a large exporter of fish, especially salmon. In aquaculture farms salmon is produced under controlled conditions. One of the biggest problems is lice-infection on salmon. An ex-professor which runs a research station and aquaculture farm in Sogndal is developing some important innovations: he grows a special type of fish, called lump suckers, which suck the lice of the salmon. He also experiments with improving the immune system of salmon.

More information can be found on the ICRPS website: http://www.umb.no/icrps2011. The papers and presentations are on the X-drive of the Rural Sociology Group. For a report with some impressions of the lectures or other information you can  mail to lummina.horlings@wur.nl . There is also a special Linked in group: International Comparative Rural Policy Studies Consortium.

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Conference Call – Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society

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A major demographic milestone occurred in May 2007. For the first time in the history of mankind the earth’s population became more urban than rural. This process of urbanization will continue in an accelerated pace in the forthcoming decades: the growth of the world population from 6 billion people in 2000 to 9 billion people in 2050 will mainly occur in urban areas. By 2050 the urban population will approximately be twice the size of the rural population.

However, this does not mean that urban areas are or will become of greater importance than rural areas. On the contrary, the urban and the rural have always heavily relied on each other and will do so even more in an era characterized by rapid urban population growth. Cities will continue to need resources such as food, fibre, clean water, nature, biodiversity, and recreational space, as well as the people and communities that produce and provide these urban necessities and desires. Hence, key questions for the next decades are how, where and by whom these urban necessities and desires will be produced and provided and if and how this can be done in manner that is considered to be socially, economically and ecologically sustainable and ethically sound.

In recent years the concept of multifunctional agriculture has emerged as an important reference in debates on the future of agriculture and the countryside and its relations with the wider and predominantly urban society. This is an expression of the fact that agriculture is not only valued for its contribution to food and fibre production and the economic development of the agro-industry, but needs to be assessed according to a much wider range of social, environmental, economic and ethical concerns. At farm level multifunctional agriculture is characterized by a variety of entrepreneurial strategies and activities, such as processing and direct marketing of food products, energy production, care for elderly and disabled people, and tourism. But multifunctional agriculture is also expressed at higher scales, such as the regional level (e.g. collective nature and landscape management schemes and regional branding) and the national level (e.g. policymaking and implementation).

Due to the multiplicity of activities, the multi-scalar character of multifunctionality and the geographical contextuality of expressions of multifunctional agriculture, research on multifunctional agriculture and changing urban-rural relations is highly fragmented, disciplinarily as well as geographically. Hence, this conference aims to advance the scientific state of the art in research on multifunctional agriculture and urban-rural relations by bringing together scholars of different disciplines (sociology, economics, spatial planning, land use planning, regional planning, urban planning, crop sciences, animal sciences, soil sciences, architecture, etc…) from all parts of the world.

Working group themes
The conference facilities allow for a maximum of 21 parallel working group sessions. The scientific committee has proposed 21 working group themes (see http://www.agricultureinanurbanizingsociety.com/UK/Working+group+themes/)   and is inviting prospective working group convenors to submit a short (max 500 words) call text for the theme they would like to convene. Proposals for a working group call text can be send to the chair of the scientific committee by email (han.wiskerke@wur.nl) before the 1st of September 2011. The deadline for submission of abstracts will be 1st of December 2011. Abstracts will have to be submitted to the convenors.

More information

Please check the conference website for more information.