Agriculture and Climate Change: Introduction

Abstract

Climate change poses new challenges to agriculture and society in general, in particular regarding land use and the supply of food. For years it has been out of the food policy agenda, both for policy-makers and social movements. However, the discussions of climate change in and after the 2009 united nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Copenhagen conference and the publication of data showing both the role of agriculture in climate change and the effect of climate change on agricultural production, increased the interest of climate change as inserted in the food system. together with other factors, such as increasing demand for food in many countries, peak oil and rising crude oil prices, bio-fuel production on agricultural lands, food market speculation and land grabs, climate change pushes agriculture towards a new era of major uncertainties and shocks. the instability and lacking resilience of the global agri-food system is apparent and new and radically improved solutions are urgently needed. this special issue of the International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food addresses these issues on several levels: structural, political, practical and conceptual. many observers, policy-makers and academics have agreed that the post-war ‘productivist years’ of global agriculture, which may have fed more mouths but also led to over-supply of agricultural goods and malnutrition and starving, not to mention major environmental disasters, should be brought to an end (Wilson, 2001; almas, 2004). to replace this productivist regime, governments developed agri-environmental programmes, focusing on the multifunctionality of agriculture in coexistence with greening exports from food-exporting countries (Ronningen et al., 2005; Potter and tilzey 2007). But the current situation introduces two major challenges for policy-makers: how to feed a growing world population under increasing conditions of uncertainty, whilst maintaining a vulnerable environment after decades of agro-ecosystems’ overexploitation. in such context, mitigation and adaptation strategies are proposed and improvization seems to be a common characteristic. One example of improvisation is bio-fuel policies. Bio-fuels were at first proposed as an alternative fuel to reduce CO2 emissions. this perspective was disputed later, because of social opposition and new scientific evidence showing inefficiency in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and land use (Cassman, 2007; mol, 2007; Runge