In June I published a post about the upcoming conference ‘Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society: International Conference on Multifunctional Agriculture and Urban-Rural Relations’, which included a call for Working Group proposals. The deadline for submitting Working Group proposals was 1 September 2011. This post is to announce that the deadline for submitting Working Group proposals has been postponed to 15 september 2011. If you would like to convene a working group but don’t have time to write a proposal, you can also express your interest by sending me an e-mail (han.wiskerke@wur.nl). Have a look at the conference website for an overview of the working group themes that have been proposed by the scientific committee. The deadline for abstracts will also be postponed by 2 weeks to 15 December 2011.
Category Archives: Research
Notes from the ESRS conference (5)
Back in Wageningen, I am still digesting all the inspiration, material and knowledge that was floating around freely last week at the ESRS conference in Chania, Greece. For example, related to the earlier blog on the conference (2) the Working Group “New forms of citizen-consumer engagement in food networks: diversity, mechanisms and perspectives” had much to offer in addition to our own working group. Indeed, of all the types of consumer driven initiatives, such as food coops, CSA, consumer purchase groups, adoption schemes and landshares, the grow-it-your-own was largely absent. We concluded that a fusion of self-provisioning strategies and consumer driven engagement initiatives are necessary to understand the full spectrum of engagement with food growing. Another conclusion of the Working Group was that the driving force behind an initiative does not need to correspond with the nature of the initiative. Examples from Czech Republic showed how citizens had set up a farmers market, which is usually seen as a producer initiative. Also here, new terms and definitions were considered such as “civic food networks” or “pro-sumers” to move away from the consumer – producer dichotomy, a distinction which obscures more than it reveals.
The enormous differentiation in initiatives was another key finding when one looks across the presentations in this Working Group. We concluded that it is difficult to discover ‘hidden realities’ and that we most likely underestimate the number of alternative food networks around. Initiatives have different names across countries or sometimes do not want to be known in statistics and databases as they deliberately try to operate outside ‘the system’. The last point includes a tension. We would like to show and make visible the size of the alternative food networks, also to show its significance. But it also reminded me of a paper which I use in a course on political sociology on “Governmentality and territoriality” by Jonathan Murdoch and Neil Ward (1997). Statistics are a useful instrument to govern at a distance and one of the technologies of government now widely used and abused, but which we take for granted now. The paper, however, showed how the collection of statistics of Britisch agriculture from the 19th century onwards failed “not least because of a relunctance on the part of many farmers and landowners to cooperate, based on their belief that the exercise was an interference in their private affairs” (1997: 314). All governments depend on modes of representation by which the domains to be governed become visible. Freedom, according to Foucault, is “the art of not being governed quite so much” (Oksala 2008). A careful approach to visibility sounds healthy to me.
Notes from the ESRS conference (4)
One of the first concepts under what is maybe now the umbrella of Alternative Food Networks was the notion of Short Food Supply Chains where producers tried to find niches at the fringe of the consolidated agro-industrial complex to market their products differently, often with labeling or direct marketing techniques. Since these early studies, more and more variety can be seen in food networks. The question was raised during a working group, when you know if a AFN is beyond being a mere niche? And when do you know the AFN has produced regime change? Interesting questions. I had to think of the classic hour glass picture depicting the large quantity of producers and consumers versus the small amount of retailers and buying desks. Then I thought about the fact that a 100 years ago, there were all kinds of long and short food supply chains, just an enormous diversity not divided in the dichotomy of long or short and conventional versus alternative. So if we collapse the hour glass and put a time scale to it, then we may see the other end of it coming again? Just a diversity of supply chains, short, long, fair and unfair, local or hybrid, direct sales or internet, human interaction or completely without… The diversity we are now beginning to see is moving beyond the niche. Not as a single initiative but as a collective of initiatives is it much more than a niche already. A bit like the below slide maybe?
Notes from the ESRS conference (3)
At the ESRS conference, currently ongoing, there are a few working groups situated around empirical and theoretical work on ” Alternative Food Networks (AFNs)” . Different studies have identified many different alternative food initiatives and networks which are situated outside the consolidated agro-industrial complex both physically and in their socio-political organisation.
The working groups show different cases from Europe and beyond in which participant involvement is being analysed. How participants of AFNs frame their involvement varies. The frames are often overtly political referring to marxist ideologies and anarchist principles or quite the opposite. The latter – no overt political statements – can be found in the cases presented by Esther Veen on two urban agricultural initiatives in the Netherlands.
Participants were extremely hesitant to frame their membership in political terms and were outright rejecting ‘ oppositional’ language. They were downplaying the significance of their membership, not prepared to place it in broader ideas of societal change, but framed it instead as a personal choice, as something nice to do and as their little contribution to make the world better.
Particularly in one case, this contrasted starkly with the initiator of that case who strongly voiced his political statements and discontent with the agro-industrial system. The audience to the presentation suggested that one of the explanatory factors could be Dutch culture which generally avoids politization but focuses on the ‘ tolerance’ of leaving you to do your thing while I do mine. Certainly, so far food has not underwent the same level of politization as is the case in Britain. But further unpacking is needed of these initiatives in order to firmly conclude at this point.
Notes from the ESRS conference (2)
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.
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 