Agro-food Studies Research Articles

Mass spectrometry imaging in plants, microbes, and food: a review.

Plant health, which affects the nutritional quality and safety of derivative food products, is influenced by symbiotic interactions with microorganisms. These interactions influence the local molecular profile at the tissue level. Therefore, studying the distribution of molecules within plants, microbes, and plant-based food is crucial to assess plant health, ensure the safety and quality of the agricultural products that become part of our food supply, and plan agricultural management practices. Within this framework, the molecular distribution within plant-based samples can be visualized with mass spectrometry imaging (MSI). This review describes key MSI methodologies, highlighting the role they play in unraveling the localization of metabolites, lipids, proteins, pigments, and elemental components across plants, microbes, and food products. Furthermore, investigations that involve multimodal molecular imaging approaches combining MSI with other imaging techniques are described. The advantages and limitations of the different MSI techniques that influence their applicability in diverse agro-food studies are described to enable informed choices for tailored analyses. For example, some MSI technologies involve meticulous sample preparation while others compromise spatial resolution to gain throughput. Key parameters such as sensitivity, ionization bias and fragmentation, reference database and compound class specificity are described and discussed in this review. With the ongoing refinements in instrumentation, data analysis, and integration of complementary techniques, MSI deepens our insight into the molecular biology of the agricultural ecosystem. This in turn empowers the quest for sustainable and productive agricultural practices.

Global Inequalities in the Bioeconomy: Thinking Continuity and Change in View of the Global Soy Complex

As a proposed pathway to societal transformation, the bioeconomy is aimed at providing a sustainable alternative to the fossil-based economy, replacing fossil raw materials with renewable biogenic alternatives. In this conceptual contribution, we argue that it is impossible to transform societies into sustainable bioeconomies considering the narrow boundaries of the bioeconomy as a policy. Drawing on approaches including agro-food studies, cheap food, and agrarian extractivism, we show that the bioeconomy is entangled in a broader context of social relations which call its claim to sustainability into question. Our analysis of the global soy complex, which represents the core of the current agro-food system, demonstrates how the bioeconomy perpetuates global inequalities with regard to trade relations, demand, and supply patterns, as well as power relations between the involved actors from the global to the local level. Against this background, we propose a fundamental rethink of the underlying understanding of transformation in bioeconomy policies. Instead of thinking the bioeconomy only along the lines of ecological modernisation, its proponents should consider studies on social-ecological transformation, which would entail radical structural change of the prevailing food regime to cope with the social-ecological crisis.

Governance in the Italian Processed Tomato Value Chain: The Case for an Interbranch Organisation

Collective action among producers is a corrective measure for power imbalance, which affects primary producers in agro-food supply chains. As associations of producers and processors, Interbranch Organisations (IBOs) promote dialogue, best practice, and market transparency. However, interbranch cooperation is still a less explored subject in agro-food governance studies. Therefore, the present paper aims to analyse the role of IBO North Italy for Processing Tomato (IBO NIPT) in the governance of the processed tomato value chain. The IBO for Processing Tomatoes of Northern Italy was chosen as a case study as it is one of the eight recognized IBOs in the country and Italy is the third biggest producer of tomatoes for processing worldwide. Semi-structured interviews with stakeholders involved in the processed tomato value chain were carried out to reach this aim. Abridged transcripts were analysed through thematic analysis by two or three researchers. The present study has three research steps: first, to explore the history of the IBO NIPT; second, to explore its current role as collective institution acting towards power imbalances; third, the IBO’s role in reference price streamlining. A multi-theoretical approach based on the following three theoretical frameworks was used to analyse the interviews: New Institutional Economics (NIE); Devaux’s framework for collective action; and Transaction Cost Economics. The paper highlights the role of local institutions in bringing innovations in the food supply chain and suggests that the future of IBOs in Italy has to be expanded beyond reference price streamlining and could benefit from the cooperation of retailers.

Production management as an ordering of multiple qualities: negotiating the quality of coffee in Timor-Leste

ABSTRACTThe emergence of close-knit global–local links in many agro-food production systems has necessitated rigorous coordination between the key stakeholders to ensure that quality and safety standards are met. To analyze this new supply chain configuration, agro-food studies inspired by convention theory have drawn significant attention to the plurality of quality conventions. In the literature specifically focusing on the inter-relationships between multiple quality conventions, the ways of interpreting a specific value orientation are perceived to have important implications. This view may lead to a questioning of how the configuration of multiple quality conventions can be stabilized if conflicting justification principles are not easily reconciled. The argument is further connected with an examination of situated plurality in a particular context, focusing on how the boundary among multiple quality conventions is stabilized on the ground. In this paper, through a case analysis of coffee quality management in Timor-Leste, I attempt to demonstrate that commoditization is to be reformulated as the process in which the qualification of objects and regularization of action are constituted through the differentiation of consumable quality as generality from heterogeneous cultural elements as particularity.

食のグローバル化に対応する米欧の農業・食料研究 : フード・レジーム論の方法論的意義

食のグローバル化に対応する米欧の農業・食料研究 : フード・レジーム論の方法論的意義

Enabling Sustainable Agro-Food Futures: Exploring Fault Lines and Synergies Between the Integrated Territorial Paradigm, Rural Eco-Economy and Circular Economy

What kind of futures does agro-food imaginaries enable and who can get involved in the making of agro-food futures? In this respect, what can the increasingly influential idea of circular economy potentially offer in terms of enabling more sustainable agrofood futures? We approach this task by first outlining the interconnected challenges that the agro-food system is facing related to environmental degradation, economic crises and social problems. Then we consider the way these challenges are being addressed in agro-food studies. We argue that agro-food research in recent years has seen important contributions in relation to studies of alternative food networks and the “quality” turn. These research agendas have challenged the current logic of the food system in terms of offering alternative visions of future development. We highlight two examples from the literature—the eco-economy and the integrated territorial agri-food paradigm—that develop broader frameworks for rethinking the future of the agro-food system and which have distinguished themselves in contrast to the industrialized and globalized conventional food system. We find that with respect to reorienting and reconfiguring economic structures and relations all three approaches share a common goal, but circular economy stands out in relation to the actors that are included by, for example, emphasizing collaborations and partnerships with extant agro-food businesses. Also with regards to scalar politics, it would be prudent to consider the potentials offered by the increasingly influential ideas around circular economy.

Negotiating Fairness in the EU Sugar Reform: The Ethics of European-Caribbean Sugar Trading Relations

All markets are embedded in ethical relations and moral discourses. This is often forgotten or ignored in alternative agrofood studies, where there has been a frequent assumption that ‘ethics’ can be inserted into markets (Trentmann, 2007), or are only acknowledged in products certified as ‘ethical’ and suchlike (Barnett, Cloke, Clarke, & Malpass, 2005). This paper takes a different approach, choosing to explore how a mainstream commodity, widely associated with the development of capitalist agriculture (Mintz, 1985), is unavoidably embedded in both a set of moral discourses and a web of ethical relations (Goodman, Maye, & Holloway, 2010). Specifically, I offer a critical reading of the moral discourses that circulated between the Caribbean Sugar Protocol signatories and the European Union in the context of the 2006–2009 European Union Sugar Reform. The paper looks at how both Caribbean and European actors negotiated ‘fairness’ and in doing so, reconfigured their historical relationship. I discuss how a relational—or ethical—approach to fairness was evoked in certain instances, disrupting the European Union's (EU) neoliberal rhetoric. Contributing to the literature around ‘moral geographies’ (Jackson & Ward, 2008; Proctor et al., 1999; Smith, 1999) and also to agrofood studies, I conclude by affirming the significance of a relational approach to how the ‘fairness’ of the EU Sugar Reform might be comprehended and to how the ethics of neoliberal market reform can be more generally understood and critiqued.

Shifting agrifood systems: a comment

Call me a grouch. But as much as I admire the energy, creativity, and insight of the work represented in this special issue, I am irritated by a word common to all these papers: system, and its plural form, systems. Somewhere along the line, agrifood studies (or agrofood studies, as we used to call it in the US before we finally started reading, and became captivated by, the excellent European literature) became the study of agrifood "systems." I have been part of this linguistic tide myself, along with my irreplaceable colleague at Madison, the late Fred Buttel. Back in 2003, we renamed our local weekly seminar on the topic SociETAS, for Sociology of Environment, Technology, and Agrifood Systems. Societas is Latin for fellowship, community, and society clever, we thought, certainly in comparison with the old name STARE, for Sociology of Technology, Agriculture, Resources, and Environment. We also liked having an S-word on the end to complete our acronym, I must admit. But we were also trying to update our seminar with the current lingo. And if this special issue is any measure, the word system is very much in vogue in agrifood research. It not only appears in the name of the issue but also in

WELCOME TO THE ACADEMY

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the rite of passage into the academic community, that fundamentally adds to knowledge, is not as frictionless as completing a PhD-publishing-theory building. The conventions which govern the process of knowledge extension are highly regulated and largely exclusive practises, and these have profound implications for how we write, what we say, and where we publish it. Newer academics find ourselves in a ‘community’ where researchers from the south often are either dependent on the theoretical formation of the northern gatekeepers, or are altogether left out of critical debates that extend knowledge stores or challenge existing theory. The rewards of being part of an arms-wide-open academic family are not equally felt by all members of the community. Across geographical space, there are territorial barriers to knowledge formation, where research which emerges from the north evolves into theory, while research from the south is viewed as case studies, unable to add to larger global theoretical debates. The paper has a particular focus on agrofood studies and the (dis)placement of the Southern African narrative. I argue that one of the implications of having to ‘jump though the hoops’ successfully and be valued as a productive researcher is to engage with debates established in the north, and to publish in international journals. As a result, there is a loss of both the richness of local empirical research and contextual utility, and the welcome may not be as free as imagined.

Things Becoming Food and the Embodied, Material Practices of an Organic Food Consumer

The challenge to study the embodied, practical experience of consumption is attracting increasing interest in agro-food studies (Lockie 2002). This paper argues for attention to be turned towards the bodies of animals, plants and humans, materially connected through the agro-food network, to enable a study of the embodied, practical experience of consumption. This paper apprehends the relationship between humans and nonhumans in two empirical examples from the agro-food network through applying a `relational materialist' (Thrift 1999) approach. This approach is worked through by drawing upon the concepts of `affordances' (Gibson 1979; 1982) and `intercorporeality' (Weiss 1999) and through introducing the concept of `things becoming food'. A live art performance of sushi being made is discussed to show how embodied practices materially transform the fish into sushi, from production to consumption. Excerpts from the video diary of an organic food consumer and his talk are compared to explore the practice of eating or not eating between potato and human. The findings contribute to debates on nonhuman methodologies, embodied consumption practices, food quality and the intimate material connections between bodies that eat and bodies that are eaten.

Just Values or Just Value? Remaking the Local in Agro-Food Studies

In this chapter, the authors take a close look at the current discourse of food system relocalization. From the perspective of theories of justice and theories of neoliberalism, food relocalization is wrapped up in a problematic, and largely unexamined, communitarian discourse on social justice. The example for California's localized governance of pesticide drift demonstrates that localization can effectively make social justice problems invisible. The authors also look at the EU context, where a different form of localization discourse emphasizes the local capture of rents in the value chain as a neoliberal strategy of territorial valorization. Examining Marsden et al.'s case study of one of these localization projects in the UK, the authors argue that this strategy does not necessarily lead to more equitable forms of rural development. In fact, US and EU discourses are basically two sides of the same coin. Specifically, in neoliberal biopolitical form, they both obscure politics, behind either the discourse of “value” in the EU or “values” in the US. Rather than rejecting localism, however, the authors conclude by arguing for a more “reflexive” localism that harnesses the power of this strategy while consciously struggling against inequality in local arenas.

List of Contributors

Citation (2006), "List of Contributors", Marsden, T. and Jonathan Murdoch†, J. (Ed.) Between the Local and the Global (Research in Rural Sociology and Development, Vol. 12), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. ix-x. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1057-1922(06)12016-8 Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing Limited Copyright © 2006, Emerald Group Publishing Limited Book Chapters List of Contributors Editorial Advisory Board Preface and Dedication Introduction between the Local and the Global: Confronting Complexity in the Contemporary Food Sector Network Theories and Political Economy: From Attrition to Convergence? Differentiated Standardization, Standardized Differentiation: The Complexity of the Global Agrifood System Audit Cultures and the Antipodes: The Implications of EurepGAP for New Zealand and Australian Agri-food Industries Neoliberalism and the Problem of Space: Competing Rationalities of Governance in Fair Trade and Mainstream Agri-Environmental Networks Post-Rural Processes in Wealthy Rural Areas: Hybrid Networks and Symbolic Capital Highlighting the Retro Side of Innovation and its Potential for Regime Change in Agriculture The Dynamics of Local Development: From Hunger to Quality Food Cases from Northeastern Brazil Slow Food's Presidia: What do Small Producers do with Big Retailers? Just Values or Just Value? Remaking the Local in Agro-Food Studies Exploring Dimensions of Qualities in Food Alternative Food Networks in the South West of England: Towards a New Agrarian Eco-Economy? The Strategic Turn of Organic Farming in Europe: From a Resource Based to an Entrepreneurial Approach of Organic Marketing Initiatives

Network Theories and Political Economy: From Attrition to Convergence?

This chapter reviews the recent polarisation of debates in agrofood and rural studies, in particular the opposition between network (social relations, actor-network) and political economy analyses. It explores the contributions of different network approaches and draws on the French convention and regulation traditions, which provide alternative guidelines for confronting micro–macro tensions. Networks have similarly assumed analytical centrality in the new institutional economics and subsequent elaborations of the Williamsonian transaction costs paradigm have involved an approximation to some of the central tenets of social network analysis. Alternative traditions of political economy analysis (Global Value Chains (GVC), Global Production Networks) are now making an important contribution to agrofood studies. A distinctive feature of these analysts is their overture to social networks, actor-network, transaction costs and convention theory in the effort to capture the multiple dimensions of economic power and coordination. The possibilities for a fruitful convergence between these apparently conflicting approaches are best captured in the emergence of the concept of the “netchain”. At the same time, the intractability of values to absorption within economic transactions suggests the need to move forward to a focus on the tensions between netchains and social movements and a different type of network, the global policy network.

Fields of Cultural Contradictions: Lessons from the Tobacco Patch

Why do tobacco farmers continue to produce tobacco in light of the bleak future of this crop? Given the changing political economy of tobacco, we might expect producers to respond by diversifying their enterprises. This study of Kentucky burley tobacco farmers finds that farmers express contradictory values toward the economic role of production and the social value of tobacco consumption. The economic value of tobacco is articulated by drawing upon experiential lessons with the crop. These, in turn, are used to inform production processes (reproduction of tobacco farming), all the while castigating the consumption of their commodity. Farmers persist in producing tobacco because of the structural and historical conditions of the region that have engendered a culture of tobacco production. The contradiction in production and consumption values suggests that the “cultural turn” in agro-food studies needs to move away from a linear approach of cultural values as determinants of social action and become sensitive to the differential ways commodity actors produce, use, and reproduce a culture of commodity production and a culture of commodity consumption. This unproblematic and linear association between values and economic activity misinforms social science research about seemingly “individual” motivations that are shaped by historical and structural conditions.

A Review of Approaches Used in Agro-food Quality Studies

A Review of Approaches Used in Agro-food Quality Studies

Debating Production‐Consumption Linkages in Food Studies

Recent contributions to the journal have commendably sought to extend agro‐food studies from production to consumption in line with the consumption turn across the social sciences. In doing so, and inspired by actor‐network theory, exception has been taken to the systems of provision approach to food studies. This approach is defended by suggesting that it has in part been misinterpreted as comprising an extension of agro‐food studies to consumption rather than a general approach to consumption per se applied to food in particular. In addition, the later turn of such agro‐food studies to consumption is shown to continue to lag behind the understanding of the culture of consumption that has evolved over the past decade. A plea is made for more constructive and informed dialogue with the literature on consumption.

Geographies of food: agro-food geographies making reconnections

There was a time, and not so very long ago, when research in the geography of agriculture had little to say about food other than as a raw commodity. By the same token, geographers of food were largely taken up with retail geography as a subspecialism within economic geography. In other words, both were about economic activity, but in separate compartments. Both focused on issues of production as against consumption. The emergence of an agro-food geography that seeks to examine issues along the food chain or within systems of food provision derives, in part, from the strengthening of political economy approaches in the 1980s. By directing attention away from the narrow confines of the farm business, hitherto examined largely through the lenses of either neoclassical economics or behaviourism, towards relations with ‘capital’ an important reorientation and reconnection was started. However, the process has been taken much further in recent years with the (re-)discovery of consumption, linked so strongly to the postmodern or poststructuralist trends in social science. Conceptualizing consumption is, in turn, linked to the discovery of ‘culture’ in economic geography, and this has had some positive impacts on agro-food studies (Goodman and DuPuis, 2002). However, Martin and Sunley (2001) have recently raised concern that ‘what these cultural economic geographers criticise as the myopic economism of ‘‘old’’ economic geography could simply be replaced by an exclusionary cultural essentialism in the ‘‘new’’ ’ (p. 152). To date, cultural essentialism has not taken hold in agro-food studies where the legacy of political economy is strong (e.g., Marsden et al., 1993). Consequently, economic realities and power remain important in many discussions of food consumption, as in Marsden et al. (2000). Nonetheless, a negative impact of the new cultural geography of consumption is perhaps apparent in how very few recent studies highlight the basic socio-economic and political issues of income inequalities which underpin and result from differential access to the process and Progress in Human Geography 27,4 (2003) pp. 505–513

Tension at the Nexus of the Global and Local: Culture, Property, and Marine Aquaculture in Hawai'i

Technological development in open-ocean mariculture has opened up the possibility of a new growth industry for Hawai'i, yet its introduction has not been without controversy. Marine aquaculture requires changes in property institutions that govern the ocean space, a key resource for marine aquaculture. This paper examines initial opposition to ocean leasing as a way of under-standing the contradictory technical and societal demands of a technological project. We incorporate insights from agrofood studies that emphasize the importance of building networks if the industry is to succeed within the globalized food systems. We argue that comprehensive and synthetic analysis at the ‘front end’ of a technological project is critical to identify strategic issues that need to be addressed; and that insights from planning literature bring in potential tools for organizing actions to negotiate the tension and to (re)contextualize a technological project such as this.

Authority, power and value in contemporary industrial food systems.

Within agro-food studies there is a growing appreciation that power is not limited to the interplay between actors engaged in production and consumption. Belatedly, actors in the spheres of distribution and exchange are being acknowledged, as is their role in the processes being enacted to constantly recommodify foods through reconceptualizing their values. The mobilisation of product branding and other “intangible assets”, including a corporate persona as authoritative, helps to explain the restructuring of contemporary industrial food systems. An examination of the Australian chicken meat commodity complex reveals how large food retail chains are positioning themselves as authority figures. The study confirms the emergence of a new form of authority in relation to food, i.e. market-mediated authority. The argument pivots around the activities of an ‘intermediary sector of the economy’, comprising experts and professionals who contribute to the setting of cultural standards around what is legitimate in food systems. This particular class fraction undertakes three activities in support of market-based authorities. First, it provides corporations with third party associations with more traditional authorities, especially health authorities; second, it mobilises symbolic capital to renew corporate charisma; and third, it brokers producer-consumer relations through providing expertise. The paper concludes that consumer authority is fleeting within a context of the corporate manipulation of intangible assets.

Knowing food and growing food: Beyond the production–consumption debate in the sociology of agriculture

What does the rise of organic food as a social phenomenon mean politically? What political impact does this form of consumption have on society? Is it a small and unimportant “blip” in the overall march of globalized, industrialized food and rationalized consumption systems. Is it even, perhaps, complicit in this process? Or is it a radical break ? The array of answers to these questions forms the “production–consumption debate” currently taking place in the examination of agro–food systems. If agro–food networks are conceptualized as interactive, socio–ecological metabolic circuits linking agricultural nature, social labor, the corporeal and the symbolic, then this paper argues that analytical concern in agrofood studies has focused overwhelmingly on the production ‘moment’ in these circuits. Despite the lessons of numerous ‘food scares’, anti–GMO movements and the mad cow disease pandemic, an asymmetry now holds sway in agro–food studies between production and consumption even though in other fields, as Jackson (1999) notes, consumption has been “duly acknowledged” (p. 95). As this asymmetry is addressed, a contemporary reformulation of the ‘agrarian question’ might investigate the potential for new forms of progressive food politics, ranging from ‘weak’ struggles over the modes of social orderings, such as knowledge systems, to more formal alliances between producers and consumers