Local Food Movement

Within the context of the broader food sovereignty literature, and with a specific focus on notions of America Indian sovereignty, this article explores how members of thirty-nine different Native American community farming and gardening projects in the United States describe and define food sovereignty, as both concept and method. This article further distinguishes how principles of food sovereignty are being operationalized in the broader goals of promoting community health, sustainability, and local economic systems, and of reclaiming and maintaining tribal culture.

Ethnographic research approach is used to study how food collective movement organizations (FCMOs) organize and create markets for locally produced and organic food in Finland. Increased evidence related to unsafety, unsustainability and unjustness of contemporary food markets has resulted in the mobilization of various food movements over the world in order to challenge the current systems of food provisioning. These movements are striving towards creating more sustainable markets – practices of food production and consumption. This study elaborates on how social movement organizations make markets for good food by engaging in and managing market exchange of local and/or organic food.

Local and regional food has emerged as an important arena for economic development and for social change. The western Lake Superior region offers significant opportunities and unique challenges for the redevelopment of a robust regional food system. This article summarizes research on several key elements related to possibilities for expanding the local food system in the region. It presents data about the available land base that could contribute to food production in the region; insights based on in-depth interviews with farmers who already grow food in the region, including policy ideas that they offered to support the work of growing more local food; and findings from a regional survey of citizens regarding their willingness to purchase local foods. The author concludes with a discussion of policy possibilities for supporting the regional food system. The research upon which this article is based was supported by grants from CURA's Faculty Interactive Research Program and the University of Minnesota's Healthy Food, Healthy Lives Institute.

"Cet article apporte un éclairage sur la consommation alimentaire de produits locaux, qui serait privilégiée par 83% des français en 2010. Après avoir défini le concept, la perspective consommateur et les stratégies développées pour se positionner sur ce marché sont abordées autour de quatre motivations : la réduction des risques sanitaires, la redécouverte des saveurs, la volonté de consommer responsable et la recherche de lien social. L'analyse s'appuie notamment sur une étude qualitative menée auprès de 52 acheteurs de produits locaux dans différents circuits. Au final, l'accent est mis sur trois enseignements managériaux clés.

Local food: how and why?
This paper highlights local food consumption which was favoured by 83% of French people in 2010. After defining the concept, the consumer perspective and the positioning strategies on this market are developed around four motivations: reduction of health risks, rediscovery of taste, the desire for sustainable consumption and the search for social relationships. The analysis is based on a qualitative study conducted among 52 local food buyers in different channels. Finally, three key managerial implications are emphasized.
"

Emerging as an intersectional response to social inequalities perpetuated by the mainstream food movement in the United States, the food justice movement is being used by marginalized communities to address their food needs. This movement relies on an emancipatory discourse, illustrated by what I term intersectional agriculture. In many respects, the mainstream food movement reflects contention between marketization (corporate agriculture) and social protectionist (local food) discourses , while the role of food justice remains somewhat unclear as it relates to the mainstream movement. Each movement attempts to restructure the ways in which food is distributed, consumed, and produced, impacting the social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental dimensions of food. Using the lens of Nancy Fraser's triple movement framework, I construct an interpretation of food justice as the emancipatory pole of what I term the triple food movement to explore the role of food justice as it relates to the mainstream movement. Specifically, I draw upon the cases of black farmers and queer people in the U.S. creating and (re)creating spaces to address their community food needs and counter systems of domination constructed around race, class, gender, sexuality, agriculture, and food.

In a recent conference on the central role of food Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food and Terra Madre movements, stated that, " Food comes from Nature via the Earth and through it becomes culture ". Food, as the matter that connects humans to the soil, lands, regions, landscapes, water, climates, natural surroundings, cultures and histories, has been transformed by multinational corporations into an artificial, prepackaged , lifeless substance ready to be consumed or discarded, like any other commodity in the global market. How is Italian territory and culture related to the emergence and spreading of such movements throughout the world? This essay comprises two parts. The first part introduces the two international movements within the Italian historical and cultural context and their connection to global realities. This history also bridges the ideas of earth democracy as portrayed by Vandana Shiva, as well as the concept and practice of glocalism and food communities around the world, and the Manifesto on Food and Seeds. The second part focuses on a conversation with their founder Carlo Petrini on the role of ecology, rural traditions and new food cultures within contemporary reality of food crisis, land grabbing, environmental crisis and climate change.

Taken up by activists and academics alike, food sovereignty has now become a rallying cry for both established tribal programs and grassroots projects across Indian country. However, what is meant by the term often varies considerably. This essay will place the term within specific notions of America Indian sovereignty, as well as the context of the broader food sovereignty literature. Exploring in detail how Native American community farmers and gardeners describe and define food sovereignty as both concept and method, this article also examines how these definitions are being operationalized in pursuing community goals of promoting health and reclaiming and maintaining tribal culture.

We review several alternative food movements (AFMs) that have emerged in response to changing food production during the twentieth century. The shift from small-scale, family-owned operations to massive, corporatized factories has resulted in concerns about human health, environmental degradation, and animal welfare; and it is around these issues that AFMs have emerged. The rise in AFMs seems to signal a growing desire for more personal connections between consumers and producers, and between producers and their products. Here, we discuss some of the established AFMs as well as newly emerging ones.

Food is becoming an increasingly disputed issue, and food movements have emerged in both the Global North and Global South. Food security and food sovereignty are still influencing the everyday life of almost 1 billion people in the World. Indeed, the agro-industrial food system, based on the ‘Green Revolution’ aim to feed the World, presents several emergencies and negative externalities which have been affecting people, the environment, and both global and local economy. The ongoing financial and economic crisis has strengthened the corporate’s economic and political power and it has exacerbated inequalities. It has also reduced the citizens’ perception of security and the State’s policies effectiveness. To face this scenario, it appears necessary to study how global society is facing these negative externalities. Starting from the recent debate around these emergencies, the increasing industrialization of food production and the Great Recession’s consequences, this dissertation ill present several initiatives emerged over the last twenty years providing a sustainable alternative to this panorama.
Specifically, in the first part, through an interdisciplinary approach which overlaps the most recent international scientific contributions, food issues will be presented as the ‘new’ vehicle to re-embed the social within the Market and contention politics. Hence, the literature review allows to better understand the rise of Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) which can lead to a more sustainable way of living and buying food.
In the second part, the theoretical nodes opened by the international literature will be faced going beyond the findings gathered through the empirical research. Following a qualitative approach, the research has been developed in two different case-studies: a middle-sized town of Northern Italy (Bergamo), and a middle-sized town of Southern Brazil (Florianópolis).
The empirical body consists of four chapters, each focusing on a specific aspect of Alternative Food Networks and each one responds to a specific research question. The first empirical chapter focuses on the discussion of AFNs as a social movement. The attention is directed toward the AFNs as an example of what in literature is labelled as Sustainable Community Movement Organizations (SCMOs). The second chapter considers AFNs evolution during the economic, financial, and social crisis. By combining insights from AFNs literature, the contemporary economic, financial and social crisis, this chapter shows how AFNs are evolving in the Global World. The third empirical chapter displays the ongoing state of the sustainable agriculture within the two studied contexts. It shows the AFNs farmers’ profile, thus their claims, and their perspectives. The fourth chapter focuses on the processes of strengthening AFNs through a specific framework such as Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGSs). The study considers two examples of PGSs: the PGS of Lombardy (Northern Italy) and the Rede Ecovida’s PGS (Southern Brazil).
This dissertation aims to collect insights on how sustainable agriculture is shaping new economic social movement organizations and alternative forms of consumption and distribution within the urban areas of both the Global North and the Global South. It focuses on how AFNs were created, who takes part in, and through which pathway they are going to. The key-question behind this work is to investigate how the nature, the organizational form, and the alliances of (and among) different actors, who promote alternative forms of food consumption and distribution, are changing along the time in the urban areas, comparing the insights gathered in both Global North and Global South. This research highlights also how people get collectively engaged in AFNs initiatives, and how these networks are shaped by the economic, social, and cultural institutions. Moreover, this research investigates how the Great Recession has been encouraged or constrained these grassroots collective networks. Finally, specific adopted tools will be considered in a comparative way to understand whether and how they are fostering and strengthening the AFNs framework.

Food and agriculture are in the news daily. Stories in the media highlight issues of abundance, deprivation, pleasure, risk, health, community, and identity. Remaking the North American Food System examines the resurgence of interest in rebuilding the links between agricultural production and food consumption as a way to overcome some of the negative implications of industrial and globalizing trends in the food and agricultural system. Written by a diverse group of scholars and practitioners, the chapters in this volume describe the many efforts throughout North America to craft and sustain alternative food systems that can improve social, economic, environmental, and health outcomes. With examples from Puerto Rico to Oregon to Quebec, this volume offers a broad North American perspective attuned to trends toward globalization at the level of markets and governance and shows how globalization affects the specific localities. The contributors make the case that food can no longer be taken for granted or viewed in isolation. Rather, food should be considered in its connection to community vitality, cultural survival, economic development, social justice, environmental quality, ecological integrity, and human health.

As popular food writers and activists urge consumers to express their social, political, and ethical commitments through their food choices, the imperative to ‘vote with your fork’ has become a common slogan of emerging food movements in the US. I interrogate the conception of responsibility embedded in this dictate, which has become a de facto model for how to comport ourselves ethically with respect to food. I argue that it implicitly endorses a narrow and problematic understanding of responsibility. To contextualize this claim, I utilize Iris Marion Young’s critique of a “liability model” of responsibility to demonstrate that voting with one’s fork is insufficient as model for taking responsibility for food-related injustices. Instead, I suggest that Young’s social connection model of responsibility is best suited for taking stock of responsibility for food and agriculture related injustices since they are structural and systemic ones. I conclude that although consumer choices and purchases may be important dimensions of our conduct with respect to food and eating, imagining responsibility to be centered on this type of conduct—consumer behavior—is detrimental to attempts to develop a more just food system.

Gıdanın ticarileşmesi artık gıda güvenliğini tehdit ediyor. Özellikle gıda ithalatı başlı başına öncelikle çiftçiyi sonrasında tüketiciyi dört bir yanından çevirip sarmalıyor.
Artık market raflarında cici bici ambalajlarında kaplanmış, içinde ne barındırdığı belirsiz, farklı kıtalardan dev gemilerle taşınmış ürünlerle karşı karşıyayız.
Gıda ithalatı bir tek mevzuya odaklanmış durumdadır; düşük maliyetler.
Kayıplarımız ve geri döndürülemez varlıklarımız için tek bir can simidi kaldı; şehirli tüketicilerin seçimleri ve tüketmekten ileri gelen güçleri.


Ticaretin serbestliğiyle, yerel gıda üretiminin varoluşu birbirine taban tabana zıt. İpin ucu tüketicilerin ellerinde.

Cities are a locus for struggles over the ability for historically marginalized groups to feed themselves. These stratified spaces represent a distinct expression of the conventional agrifood system: the undernutrition/malnutrition paradox. By investigating the food politics of two organizations – Food Not Bombs in Orlando, FL and People’s Grocery in West Oakland, CA – this article advances scholarship on how activists are working to heal and prevent further individual and social metabolic rifts tied to urban food systems. Particularly regarding food access, strategies to resist and transform the conditions producing experiential and cognitive alienation and the commodification of land and labor often emerge from interstitial spaces. Yet, radical food politics is embedded within ongoing processes of neoliberalization that complicate and oftentimes blunt their transformative potential. In short, this article investigates the potential for and challenges faced by ‘actually existing radical projects’ working to lessen/end hunger and diet related health problems.

This paper analyzes 'food sovereignty' and the movements that work for it at local, national, and supranational levels and at the intersection of markets, governments, and civil society. The goal is to illuminate potential aspects of post-growth socio-ecological systems management regimes. These aspects include: (a) socially and ecologically embedded and politically engaged market activity, as evidenced by 'peasant' modes of food production and distribution; (b) deliberative and 'agonistic' democratic models for policy construction, as evidenced by internal organizational processes within the transnational food sovereignty network La Vía Campesina; and (c) multi-sited 'relational' forms of understanding and institutionalizing sovereignty, as evidenced by the complex of institutions engaged by food sovereignty movements and the ways that 'power over' aspects of classical sovereignty are combined with more 'power with' and 'power to' conceptions emergent in food sovereignty. Although this case relates fundamentally to issues of food and farming, the resulting aspects may be applicable to other realms of post-growth economic regimes. Fundamentally, it is argued that politically engaged movements of producers, whose productive surpluses are invested into non-growth ends with support of governments, will construct post-growth economies.

The food justice movement is a budding social movement premised on ideologies that critique the structural oppression responsible for many injustices throughout the agrifood system. Tensions often arise however when a radical ideology in various versions from multiple previous movements is woven into mobilization efforts by organizations seeking to build the activist base needed to transform the agrifood system.

The alternative food movement encounters many structural conditions as it strives toward more environmentally sustainable and socially just agrifood systems. One of the greatest challenges the movement faces is not turning its back on migrant farmworkers at the same time it creates and experiments with alternative agricultural models. This article explains why there is a gap between an expressed concern with the inequalities faced by migrant farmworkers and the actual advocacy practices necessary to overcome them. To help tease apart the drivers maintaining this gap, I call attention to the social and symbolic boundaries reproduced by a group of people farming organically in San Diego along the United States/Mexico border. I find that in the course of farming in the context of border politics, food activists internalize a number of structural and ideological conditions producing a racialized agricultural political economy, neoliberalism, and the security state. These include the hegemony of certain stereotypes of migrant farmworkers and inherent notions of difference, the hegemony of militarized borders and monitored immigrant bodies, and race and class privilege that manifests through idealizing nature and farming. At the same time, I find that these boundary maintenance practices are open to change, and call attention to the ambiguity expressed by well-meaning organic farming activists as well as more resistant socioecological imaginaries.

The localisation of food production, particularly in the form of urban/peri-urban agriculture, is only gaining increasing public and political attention in industrialised nations such as Australia amid growing concerns about urban sustainability. Small-scale family farmers on the peri-urban fringe of cities such as Sydney, Australia's largest city, are considered key actors in the creation of a more sustainable and just urban food system by those advocating for food system change. The assumed alterity of such small-scale farmers from the so-called ‘mainstream’ food system, however, has led to a focus on localised threats such as urban development and solutions such as alternative food networks. This localised focus risks neglecting the way in which small-scale family farmers, such as those on Sydney's urban fringe, are directly connected to and reliant on the mainstream for their economic viability. Emphasising the importance of issues such as supermarket power and consumer choice, this paper illustrates that it is necessary to examine the continuing connection between the mainstream system and ‘local’, small-scale producers to achieve food system change.

Dans le prolongement de l’éditorial de Décisions Marketing : « La proximité est-elle une nouvelle mode du marketing ? », cet article interroge la pertinence managériale du concept de proximité en vente directe de produits alimentaires. Via des études empiriques menées dans trois circuits - l’AMAP, le Point de Vente Collectif et le marché – nous montrons qu’il est pertinent de diagnostiquer la proximité perçue par les consommateurs car elle influence positivement la confiance à l’égard des circuits étudiés et permet de les discriminer. Une fois l’intérêt du concept démontré, des recommandations sont formulées autour de deux interrogations : quels types de proximité encourager et comment développer la proximité perçue en vente directe.

In line with the Editorial of Décisions Marketing “Is proximity a new marketing trend?”, the aim of this article is to question the managerial relevance of the concept of proximity within the context of direct selling of food products. Through empirical studies in three supply chains - French CSA (AMAP), farm shops and direct selling on markets- we show the interest of assessing perceived proximity since it has a positive influence on consumers trust towards the studied supply chains and allows to discriminate them. The relevance of the concept of proximity being supported, recommendations are then emphasized on two points: which kinds of proximity to encourage and how to enhance proximity in food direct selling.

There is a growing commitment by different parts of the alternative food movement (AFM) to improve labor conditions for conventional food chain workers, and to develop economically fair alternatives, albeit under a range of conditions that structure mobilization. This has direct implications for the process of intra-movement building and therefore the degree to which the movement ameliorates economic inequality at the point of food labor. This article asks what accounts for the variation in AFM labor commitments across different contexts. It then appraises a range of activist perspectives, practices, and organizational approaches. The answer emerges through a comparative analysis of three California social movement organizations enmeshed in the particularities of local contentious food politics. The cases include a labor union representing grocery store and meatpacking/food processing workers, a food justice organization working to create green jobs and independent funding models, and an organic urban farming and educational organization. Commitment to fair labor standards varies due to differences in organizational capacity, the degree of dedication to ending economic inequality in local activist culture, and the openness of local political and economic institutions to working class struggles. The article concludes with a discussion of how these findings inform our understanding of the process of cooperation and division in the AFM, particularly regarding the complexities and contradictions of using food labor to combat economic inequality. Movement building in the midst of varying institutional, organizational, and cultural contexts reinforces the value of a reflexive approach to this imperfect politics of process.

Motivated by an observation that new forms of organizing and alternative practices for exchange increasingly transpire outside formal organizations, this doctoral dissertation adopts a social practice approach to study how food collectives emerged as a new practice for exchange. In doing so it challenges the dominance of markets as the focal explanatory concept of economic organization and shifts attention from organization as an entity to organization as emergent order.
In studying the emergence of a new social practice, the dissertation draws on extensive, in- depth ethnographic fieldwork on Finnish food collectives conducted during 2010-2017. Food collectives comprise of groups of households that collectively procure local and organic food directly from farmers and other suppliers and distribute it among the participating members. The data originate from participant and non-participant observation, interviews, meetings, social media discussions, documents, and archival material.
The empirical findings of the dissertation suggest that the emergence of food collectives as a new practice for exchange was predominantly a tactical rather than discursive accomplishment requiring people to invent their ways of doing while engaging in a bundle of activities and continuously re-connecting different elements, including materiality, temporality, meanings, and embodied skills that were in constant flux (Essay 1). The findings further point towards temporal and moral ordering effects of emerging social practices. The study identifies rhythmic qualities that enable people to sustain their food collective’s web of practices (Essay 2) and evaluative work that anchors common values in food collectives’ practices (Essay 3).
Capitalizing on four distinct practice theoretical approaches this study advances organizational scholarship, particularly the emerging body of literature examining alternative forms of economic organizing, and contributes to practice theory. The study finds that in order to emerge, new social practices not only involve new ways of knowing and doing, but also require people to unlearn dominant ways of knowing and doing. The study brings further attention to a web of practices and shows how social practices emerge by transforming interactional orders of existing practices and by re-connecting them in new ways. The study also raises important questions on the relationship between people and practices and offers methodological guidance for studying phenomena on emergence.
As the market economy is being increasingly contested at grassroots, the challenge for policy- makers is to understand and better acknowledge the role of alternative forms of economic organizing in the transformation towards a more sustainable economic system.

Local food initiatives are steadily becoming a part of contemporary cities around the world and can take on many forms. While some of these initiatives are concerned with providing consumers with farm-fresh produce, a growing portion are concerned with increasing the food sovereignty of marginalized urban communities. This chapter provides an analysis of urban contexts with the aim of identifying conceptual barriers that may act as roadblocks to achieving food sovereignty in cities. Specifically, this paper argues that taken for granted commitments created during the birth of the modern city could act as conceptual barriers for the implementation of food sovereignty programs and that urban food activists and programs that challenge these barriers are helping to achieve the goal of restoring food sovereignty to local communities, no matter their reasons for doing so. At the very least, understanding the complexities of these barriers and how they operate helps to strengthen ties between urban food projects, provides these initiatives with ways to undermine common arguments used to support restrictive ordinances and policies, and illustrates the transformative potential of food sovereignty movements.

There has been an increasing focus on the local food movement and farmers markets that supply this food. Most studies have focused on profiling the consumer or motivations for purchasing local food however few have focused on the differences in those who frequent such tourism offerings. The purpose of this research study, therefore, was to examine differences between visitors and residents regarding motivations and preferences for buying local and organic food at farmers' markets. There has been an increasing focus on the local food market due to food security awareness, consumer responsibility and food trends such as the 100-mile diet and preference of local and organic. Using 322 completed surveys, responses were analyzed to examine significant differences. The results show a difference in motivations of visitors and locals in regards to their frequenting of farmers markets, as well as the frequency of their use. Increasingly within tourism there has been a focus on the local or authentic tourism experience and therefore understanding the differences in visitor preferences may assist both destinations and the markets themselves cater to different preferences among their clientele.

This research project case describes my investigation of the increasing collaborations among alternative food initiatives in Canada. Using a community-based participatory approach, I explored the efforts to foster and maintain alternative food initiatives networks by exploring the networks' history, structure, and processes of collaboration. I describe the research process and my role as an engaged researcher working in collaboration with the networks. Integrating my academic and community-based experiences as part of different and often overlapping networks was an integral part of this research process. I designed the research to triangulate data using a number of primary methods: a network survey, semi-structured in-depth interviews, background materials, site visits, and popular education workshops. I detail the way partnerships were developed and collaboration was maintained, and how the data were collected and used. This approach to the research produced a unique set of findings that might not have been possible using more traditional or singular methods. I maintain that, when done well, community-based research can increase the quality and validity of the research results as well as contribute to progressive social change efforts.

This article identifies a hitherto understudied element of local food communities, namely their potential as counter-movements to nationalist discourses, practices and policies. This potential should be particularly valuable in Eastern Europe, where European integration has been severely contested over the past years by political elites. We support our argument by a closer qualitative inquiry into two cases; one with urban-rural dimensions in the metropolitan area of Budapest and
one in a more sparsely populated cross-border region at the Slovak-Hungarian border. Based on 18 interviews with coordinators, producers and consumers, numerous visits to both sites, and studying the organisations’ documents we conclude that the growth of local food communities contributes to strengthened solidarity in local communities. Although nationalist discourses on buying domestic are rarely contested explicitly, the lack of any reference to national
movements and discourses testifies to the primary importance of the local.

Cet article apporte un éclairage sur la consommation alimentaire de produits locaux, qui serait privilégiée par 83% des français en 2010. Après avoir défini le concept, la perspective consommateur et les stratégies développées pour se positionner sur ce marché sont ...

How can we break away from a fixation on top-down power dynamics and track the impact of social movements in societies that do not easily fit with Western neoliberal theorisations? Building on Foucault's insights on governance, this article proposes an analytical lens of the 'biopolitics of existence' to address this problem. The term existence refers not simply to the 'corporeal' needs of survival (be it of an individual or an organisation) but also to the freedom to (self-) develop and the ability to interact with others. By examining how the Good Food Movement has transformed the bios of ordinary people into agency and reshaped the governing ethos in China's food system, this article demonstrates that to assess the gravity of social change is to first comprehend how actors calculated their action in a particular socio-political ecology. To speak of the politics of existence is to recognise that existence is simultaneously something to be defended and to be established. A 'biopolitics of existence' lens is instrumental in making visible social actors' logic in (re)forming socio-political norms while keeping in sight the entanglement of different stakeholders.

Ulrich Beck fundamentally transformed our way of thinking about human interdependence through his three core theses on risk, individualisation and cosmopolitanisation. However, two commonly observed deficiencies in Beck’s grand theory were its Eurocentric orientation and a lack of empirical grounding. Based on 5 focus groups and 14 interviews with participants of the emerging Good Food Movement in China, this paper extends the Beckian discussion outside Europe. Through examining how individuals understand both ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ risks associated with contemporary food consumption, this paper demonstrates that in the face of unpredictable and incalculable harms, risks are not seen as a ‘thing’, but are translated into ‘causal relations’. Subsequently, for Chinese stakeholders, the best way to safeguard food risks is to enact more visible and functioning interdependent relations in the food system. This in turn has given rise to new forms of communities which cut across conventional geographic, socio-economic and political boundaries. The paper deepens a Beckian theorisation in two ways. First, it demonstrates that the ‘enabling’ effect of risk towards a cosmopolitan society is not limited to obvious global crises, such as climate catastrophes and financial meltdown. In fact, the mundane yet intimate concern of putting ‘good’ food in one’s dinner bowl already presses actors to form new social solidarities that are cosmopolitan in nature. Second, it goes beyond Beck’s assertion that the risk society has culminated in a cosmopolitan moment, and explores how a performative cosmopolitan community reshapes the ‘relations of definition’ to mitigate risks on the ground.

Local sustainable food systems have captured the popular imagination as a progressive, if not radical, pillar of a sustainable food future. Yet these grassroots innovations are embedded in a dominant food regime that reflects productivist, industrial, and neoliberal policies and institutions. Understanding the relationship between these emerging grassroots efforts and the dominant food regime is of central importance in any transition to a more sustainable food system. In this study, we examine the encounters of direct farm marketers with food safety regulations and other government policies and the role of this interface in shaping the potential of local food in a wider transition to sustainable agri-food systems. This mixed methods research involved interview and survey data with farmers and ranchers in both the USA and Canada and an in-depth case study in the province of Manitoba. We identified four distinct types of interactions between government and farmers: containing, coopting, contesting, and collaborating. The inconsistent enforcement of food safety regulations is found to contain progressive efforts to change food systems. While government support programs for local food were helpful in some regards, they were often considered to be inadequate or inappropriate and thus served to coopt discourse and practice by primarily supporting initiatives that conform to more mainstream approaches. Farmers and other grassroots actors contested these food safety regulations and inadequate government support programs through both individual and collective action. Finally, farmers found ways to collaborate with governments to work towards mutually

Neste trabalho utiliza‑se o marco teórico de Seyfang (2009) para a avaliação da sustentabilidade do movimento dos GAS na Itália e em Roma. Esse marco teórico considera essenciais cinco dimensões do consumo sustentável: localização, sustentabilidade ambiental (redução da pegada ecológica), construção da comunidade, ação coletiva e construção de novas infraestruturas de abastecimento.

Today the relationship between food and cities is revitalizing urban areas, as food production practices transform locales one block and one neighborhood at a time. The key catalysts of this transformation include the commitment to address the root causes of inequalities within food systems and the desire to increase local control over food systems that have been increasingly industrialized and globalized. These goals, encapsulated by the terms "food justice" and "food sovereignty," play major roles in guiding local food initiatives in cities today. This study explores how justice-oriented urban agriculture projects transform city contexts in ways that reduce regulatory barriers-barriers that, when left in place, could perpetuate systems of oppression. The study ends with the argument that, by removing regulatory barriers, urban agriculture projects are transforming cityscapes in ways that cultivate justice at the system level.

Farm-to-hospital (FTH) programs can potentially improve the economy of local communities and preserve the environment. Research on adoption of farm-to-hospital (FTH) programs is extremely limited in the agricultural and applied economics literature. Using data from our 2012 regional FTH program survey of hospital food-service directors in the Northeastern United States and from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, this study estimates a logit model to determine factors that innluence a hospital's decision to adopt an FTH program. The empirical results indicate that speciiic hospital characteristics and agricultural factors signiiicantly innluence a hospital's decision to adopt.

This paper analyzes ‘food sovereignty’ and the movements that work for it at local, national, and supranational levels and at the intersection of markets, governments, and civil society. The goal is to illuminate potential aspects of post-growth socio-ecological systems management regimes. These aspects include: (a) socially and ecologically embedded and politically engaged market activity, as evidenced by ‘peasant’ modes of food production and distribution; (b) deliberative and ‘agonistic’ democratic models for policy construction, as evidenced by internal organizational processes within the transnational food sovereignty network La Vía Campesina; and (c) multi-sited ‘relational’ forms of understanding and institutionalizing sovereignty, as evidenced by the complex of institutions engaged by food sovereignty movements and the ways that ‘power over’ aspects of classical sovereignty are combined with more ‘power with’ and ‘power to’ conceptions emergent in food sovereignty. Although ...

Developing safe and sustainable food production for its population has been central to China's 'Modernisation Project'. Yet recent fieldwork in three Chinese cities suggests that there are two conflicting views on what a 'modern' agriculture should look like. For the government, modernisation implies a rational calculation of scale and a mirroring of global trends. But an alternative interpretation of modernity, promoted by civil society, has been gaining ground. For this camp, good food production is then established through a 'rhizomic' spread of new practices, which are inspired by world possibilities but are deeply rooted in the local context. Based on 14 interviews and five focus groups, this article investigates the ongoing social negotiation of 'good food' in China. It demonstrates how a non-western society responds to the twin processes of modernisation and globalisation and provides insights on the varieties of modernity in the making.

A report for Food Exeter-

Food security and Food Justice are complex issues in Britain facing consumers, producers, local authorities and policymakers alike in the 21st Century. There are urgent problems that require addressing at both national and local levels: from diet-related ill-health to hunger, from Agri-Industrial supply chains to supporting local production, from food waste to food poverty, food knowledge and more. In recent years government food policy has been criticised for failing to address these issues and enabling a market-driven approach to food policy based on agri-food systems. However inspiring, creative work is happening within communities to promote vibrant food cultures and increase opportunities to access ‘healthy’ food. Cities, it has been recognised, are ideally placed to promote localised food strategies and to join up the disparate actors working towards similar ends . From 2013 The Sustainable Food Cities Network have worked with localised food partnerships to transform food cultures and food systems. The network has rapidly grown from the first 6 cities in 2015 to the 47 that are working today towards common goals of implementing and supporting sustainable food systems that meet the needs of local communities. Relating firmly to this, Food Exeter (formerly Exeter Food Network), has been undertaking work on developing a food strategy for Exeter

This article draws on lessons from the Bracero Program to examine the problematic ideologies of race and citizenship that circulate in the alternative food movement today. It argues that a worker-centered transnational solidarity movement will better address the inequities and vulnerabilities that farmworkers continue to face than the conscious consumerism of the alternative food movement with its racialized discourse of Jeffersonian agriculture and its neoliberal investment in anti-obesity rhetoric.

Recently, growing numbers of interns, apprentices, and volunteers are being recruited to work seasonally on ecologically oriented and organic farms across the global north. To date, there has been very little research examining these emergent forms of non-waged work. In this paper, we analyze the relationships between non-waged agricultural work and the economic circum- stances of small- to medium-size farms and the non-eco- nomic ambitions of farm operators. We do so through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of farmers’ responses to two surveys we conducted of farmers using non-waged workers in Ontario, Canada. We situate our analysis within debates on the agrarian question, which we contend requires an account for both the economic and non-eco- nomic dimensions of new forms of non-waged work on farms. We suggest that many ecologically oriented farm operators are struggling financially and report low gross on-farm revenues and personal incomes. We argue that in addition to relying on off-farm incomes and self-exploita- tion, many farms are managing to persist in a challenging economic climate through their use of intern, apprentice, and volunteer labor. However, we also suggest that the growth of non-waged work on farms is not simply being driven by economic processes but also a series of non- economic relationships focused on non-institutional farmer training, the pursuit of sustainability, and social movement building. We suggest, the ‘‘economic’’ and ‘‘non-eco- nomic’’ dimensions of internships, apprenticeships, and forms of volunteerism sit uneasily alongside of one another, generating questions about the politics, ethics, and sustainability of non-waged work and ecological farming.