Abstract
Crop diversification can improve the sustainability of Western agriculture. In particular, pulses are crops that can help both agriculture and the food industry more ecological, as they reduce greenhouse gas emissions and offer opportunities to reduce animal-based food consumption. However, the development of those crops in Europe remains locked-in by major crops that have been co-developed to a greater extent both in farming and food systems. After recalling the major mechanisms that lead to this lock-in, this article proposes to adopt a co-evolution framework to tackle with a dual transition of both agriculture and food systems. We question how the current societal trends in the agrifood system offer new opportunities for pulses, and how simultaneous changes both in production and consumption can occur to facilitate this dual transition. Based on various insights from the literature, and some points of views from stakeholders in France - taken here as examples - we argue that to develop pulses, strong support is required from public institutions to coordinate and guide the multiple actors involved in the same direction.
Highlights
Over the last several decades, Western agrifood systems have created externalities affecting the ecosystem and human health (IPES-Food, 2017)
This strong crop specialization has occurred at the expense of agro-ecological principles such as greater crop diversity and especially nitrogen fixing-plants, which enable a reduction in synthetic inputs (Altieri, 1999; Stoate et al, 2009; Therond et al, 2017; Watson et al, 2017)
We adopted a co-evolution framework to consider simultaneously pulses’ primary production and their processing and consumption. This enabled us to select the main characteristics of innovation paths on pulses that we found to be fundamental for triggering new actions and breaking out of lock-in
Summary
Over the last several decades, Western agrifood systems have created externalities affecting the ecosystem and human health (IPES-Food, 2017). By exploring several innovations both upstream in agricultural systems and downstream in food systems, we examine whether those changes are sufficient to start a transition and we discuss how policies could reinforced the process Both our reflections and the stakeholders draw primarily on the case in France. Several authors have noted that a coherent organization of agricultural production and food consumption has progressively been woven and lockedin around a technological paradigm based on agro-chemicals (Cowan and Gunby, 1996; Wolff and Recke, 2000; Wilson and Tisdell, 2001; Chhetri et al, 2010) This lock-in favors major crops such as wheat and soya (Vanloqueren and Baret, 2008, 2009), marginalizing pulses (Magrini et al, 2016).
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