Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Developing Agrihoods: The Context For Petersburg, Brandon L. Archer

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Capstone Projects

Petersburg has an extensive history of navigating through challenging times. From its inception, African Americans have played an important role in the development of the city, and today that spirit is still present. As evidenced by an extensive network of community support and stakeholders, the Petersburg Youth Farm has matured into a resource for not just the residents of the neighborhood but of the city as a whole. By incorporating some innovative planning techniques and building a housing development truly dedicated to community needs, we can improve lived experiences in the city.

By adopting the recommendations set forth in this …

“Where Food Grows On The Water”: Anishinaabe Wild Rice Restoration, Food Sovereignty, And Decolonization, Rachel Sabella

Senior Theses - Anthropology

In this project I argue that the wild rice restoration projects in the Great Lakes region contribute to the reversal of direct effects of colonization brought on as a result of the Columbian Invasion of the Americas. In doing this, I ask this question: How does this unique array of projects contribute to Indigenous food sovereignty? Wild rice has been a staple of Anishinaabe diet and culture for over two thousand years, but the industrialization of the region led to the decline of wild rice populations and severely diminished the availability of wild rice to the communities that depend on …

Urban Food Sovereignty: Urgent Need For Agroecology And Systems Thinking In A Post-Covid-19 Future, Ali Loker, Charles A. Francis

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

The current COVID-19 pandemic has brought attention to challenges associated with our dominant industrial food system in the U.S. The general public now has more appreciation for farm workers and meatpacking employees, as well as those in grocery stores and in food transportation who are suddenly recognized as essential frontline workers. It apparently takes a crisis for us to focus clearly on the fragility of this system and the lives of people on whom we depend. In this commentary we discuss the definition of food sovereignty, how it manifests in urban areas, and how the COVID-19 pandemic can trigger viable …

Justice Served Fresh: Associations Between Food Insecurity, Community Gardening, And Property Value, Micajah Daniels, Courtney Coughenour Ph.D

McNair Poster Presentations

Numerous stakeholders in Nevada have used a variety of efforts to combat the growth of food insecurity facing Nevadans. The purpose of this research project is to understand the association between food insecurity, community gardens, and property value. Following the wealth of scholarship on these topics and data collected from community garden agencies in Southern Nevada, the research questions for this project include: (1) Where are community gardens located in SNV? (2) What efforts community gardens agencies are doing to address food insecurity (most interested in their efforts using community gardens)? (3) What are the perceptions of supports and barriers …

Fair Trade, Daniel Jaffee

Sociology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Chapter 16.

This lesson begins by discussing the dynamics behind the structural inequity in the global trade in agrifood products. We then take a brief look at fair trade’s history, the basic mechanisms of the fair trade model for food products, and the current state of fair trade. Two case studies of fair trade in action will give a taste of the social benefits that participating in this alternative market can generate for producers, but also the limits to fair trade’s impact and the contradictions that can arise. We will also examine some key controversies that have caused major divisions …

Seed Policy In Pakistan: The Impact Of New Laws On Food Sovereignty And Sustainable Development, Amna Tanweer Yazdani, Nosheen Ali

Institute for Educational Development, Karachi

This paper highlights the challenges that genetically modified (GM) seeds pose for farmers, citizens and the land itself in Pakistan. It explores the history of agricultural policy in Pakistan from the Green Revolution to what is now being dubbed the “Gene Revolution”, and analyzes how harmful effects of both are being amplified by two recently passed laws: the Seed (Amendment) Act 2015 and the Plant Breeders' Rights Act 2016. The analysis of these laws is done from a food sovereignty perspective on sustainable development, where food sovereignty represents “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through …

Can Hunger End? (Book Review), Sandra F. Joireman

Political Science Faculty Publications

In 2007 and 2008, food prices jumped sharply worldwide: wheat more than doubled in price, and rice was up by over half. In many parts of the world, people living on one or two dollars a day were simply unable to purchase the food they needed to survive. David Rieff’s book is framed by that unexpected spike in prices.

Rights For Resilience: Food Sovereignty, Power, And Resilience In Development Practice, Marygold Walsh-Dilley, Wendy Wolford, James Mccarthy

Geography

Even as resilience thinking becomes evermore popular as part of strategic programming among development and humanitarian organizations, uncertainty about how to define, operationalize, measure, and evaluate resilience for development goals prevails. As a result, many organizations and institutions have undertaken individual, collective, and simultaneous efforts toward clarification and definition. This has opened up a unique opportunity for a rethinking of development practices. The emergent consensus about what resilience means within development practice will have important consequences both for development practitioners and the communities inwhich they work. Incorporating resilience thinking into development practice has the potential to radically transform this arena …

What Does It Mean To Do Food Justice?, K. Valentine Cadieux, Rachel Slocum

College of Liberal Arts All Faculty Scholarship

'Food justice' and 'food sovereignty' have become key words in food movement scholarship and activism. In the case of 'food justice', it seems the word is often substituted for work associated with projects typical of the alternative or local food movement. We argue that it is important for scholars and practitioners to be clear on how food justice differs from other efforts to seek an equitable food system. In the interests of ensuring accountability to socially just research and action, as well as mounting a tenable response to the 'feed the world' paradigm that often sweeps aside concerns with justice …

The Native American Organic Garden: Using Service Learning As A Site Of Resistance To The Boarding School Tradition, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

As educators, we owe it to our students to enable them to transgress structural impediments and to create sustainable alternatives from the margins of the industrial agro-food system. Policies of assimilation, allotment, and enclosure of the Native American commons and ecosystems brought devastation to Native cultures. Dependence on government commodities replaced Native food sovereignty and contributed to malnutrition, obesity, and diabetes as diets responded to corporately produced and processed foods. Young people often feel disempowered and ask how they might confront such formidable forces as corporate control of our agro-food system, destruction of natural resources, and threats to human health. …

Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm For Poverty Reduction And Biodiversity Conservation In Latin America, M Jahi Chappell, Hannah Wittman, Christopher M. Bacon, Bruce G. Ferguson, Luis García Barrios, Raúl García Barrios, Daniel Jaffee, Jefferson Lima, V. Ernesto Méndez,, Helda Morales, Lorena Soto-Pinto, John Vandermeer, Ivette Perfecto

Environmental Studies and Sciences

Strong feedback between global biodiversity loss and persistent, extreme rural poverty are major challenges in the face of concurrent food, energy, and environmental crises. This paper examines the role of industrial agricultural intensification and market integration as exogenous socio-ecological drivers of biodiversity loss and poverty traps in Latin America. We then analyze the potential of a food sovereignty framework, based on protecting the viability of a diverse agroecological matrix while supporting rural livelihoods and global food production. We review several successful examples of this approach, including ecological land reform in Brazil, agroforestry, milpa, and the uses of wild varieties in …

Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm For Poverty Reduction And Biodiversity Conservation In Latin America, M. Jahi Chappell, Hannah Wittman, Christopher M. Bacon, Bruce G. Ferguson, Luis Garcia Barrios, Raúl Garcia Barrios, Daniel Jaffee, Jefferson Lima, V. Ernesto Méndez, Helda Morales, Lorena Soto-Pinto, John Vandermeer, Ivette Perfecto

Sociology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Strong feedback between global biodiversity loss and persistent, extreme rural poverty are major challenges in the face of concurrent food, energy, and environmental crises. This paper examines the role of industrial agricultural intensification and market integration as exogenous socio-ecological drivers of biodiversity loss and poverty traps in Latin America. We then analyze the potential of a food sovereignty framework, based on protecting the viability of a diverse agroecological matrix while supporting rural livelihoods and global food production. We review several successful examples of this approach, including ecological land reform in Brazil, agroforestry, milpa, and the uses of wild varieties in …

Diversified Farming Systems: An Agroecological, Systems-Based Alternative To Modern Industrial Agriculture, Claire Kremen, Alastair Iles, Christopher M. Bacon

Environmental Studies and Sciences

This Special Issue on Diversified Farming Systems is motivated by a desire to understand how agriculture designed according to whole systems, agroecological principles can contribute to creating a more sustainable, socially just, and secure global food system. We first define Diversified Farming Systems (DFS) as farming practices and landscapes that intentionally include functional biodiversity at multiple spatial and/or temporal scales in order to maintain ecosystem services that provide critical inputs to agriculture, such as soil fertility, pest and disease control, water use efficiency, and pollination. We explore to what extent DFS overlap or are differentiated from existing concepts such as …

Food Security And Smallholder Coffee Production: Current Issues And Future Directions, Martha Caswell, V. Ernesto Méndez,, Christopher M. Bacon

Environmental Studies and Sciences

In recent years, there has been growing discussion within the specialty coffee industry about the preva- lence of seasonal food insecurity in coffee growing communities. The idea that coffee producers lack re- sources to feed themselves and their families flies in the face of Fair Trade and other sustainable coffee ini- tiatives, which were designed to ensure a viable livelihood and improved conditions for small-scale coffee farmers around the world. Though these certifications represent an important step toward delivering better prices to farmers, they are inadequate tools to stand alone against the formidable and entrenched barriers faced by this population. …

Fair Trade And Development: A Changing Paradigm, Daniel Jaffee

Sociology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Book chapter.

By the time the fair trade movement celebrated the 20th anniversary of its founding in 2008, it had been transformed virtually beyond recognition. From a marginal European movement characterized by small ethical companies, non-profit charities, solidarity groups and alternative trading organizations (ATOs) selling coffee and handicrafts to a small group of politicized consumers through alternative world shops, fair trade has become an international market system with annual sales of nearly US $5,000m. (€3,500m.) (FLO 2010), reaching mass audiences of mainstream shoppers across the global North with a wide range of food and non-food products originating from both small …

Medicinal Plant Use And Health Sovereignty: Findings From The Tajik And Afghan Pamirs, Karim Aly Kassam, Munira Karamkhudoeva, Morgan Ruelle, Michelle Baumflek

Sustainability and Social Justice

Medicinal plants are indicators of indigenous knowledge in the context of political volatility and socio-cultural and ecological change in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Medicinal plants are the primary health care option in this region of Central Asia. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate that medicinal plants contribute to health security and sovereignty in a time of instability. We illustrate the nutritional as well as medicinal significance of plants in the daily lives of villagers. Based on over a decade and half of research related to resilience and livelihood security, we present plant uses in …

Agroecological Transition In Cuba: Towards A Better Way Of Life, Donna Chollett, Bruce Ferguson, Koyu Furusawa, Mari Furusawa, Stephen Hollis, Audrey Hollis, Alley Kent, Sheehy Skeffington, Masuru Sugai

Anthropology Publications

The current financial and fuel crises threaten food security in poorer nations and among the poor in wealthier countries. Sustainable food production benefits communities and their food supply and can maintain farming systems in less developed agricultural regions. Many small farmers have long practiced organic agriculture, but face pressure to adopt green revolution farming, using chemicals and commercial seed. Some are resisting this, but lack the technology to apply organic methods on a larger scale. Cuba provides an instructive example of a nation that confronted a sudden food and fuel crisis by adopting organic agricultural technologies across production systems that …