S21. THE MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF AGRICULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY: ECONOMIC VIABILITY, SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL SUSTAINABILITY AND THE FUTURE OF FOOD SYSTEMS

S21 THE MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF AGRICULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY: ECONOMIC VIABILITY, SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL SUSTAINABILITY AND THE FUTURE OF FOOD SYSTEMS

Coordination:
Patricia Homs Ramírez de la Piscina

Universitat de Barcelona

patihoms@ub.edu

William La Fleur

University of Helsinki

william.lafleur@helsinki.fi

This panel aims to discuss the situation of territorialized food systems (agroecological farming, regenerative agriculture, Community Supported Agriculture-CSA, Alternative Food Networks-AFN etc.) in the present context of polycrisis in the primary sector around the Global North. Small and medium-sized farms have been shown to harbor greater agro-biodiversity and even higher yields than conventional or large-scale agriculture (Ricciardi et al. 2021). Yet, year after year the number of small and medium-sized farms is dwindling globally, exacerbated by land-grabbing processes and financial non-viability, exacerbating a consistent trend in which populations move to urban centers and a reduction in the number of people engaged in small-scale agri-food production. While there have been movements of younger people into rural areas in recent years, the sector is nonetheless grappling with a high rate of aging, as well as a loss of purchasing power due to low prices at origin and rising prices of raw materials.

Despite being financially non-viable on paper, many new territorialized farming projects, including such farms that continue to persist, consider monetary value as but one value amongst other, often deeply rooted social and environmental values. These values are often associated with reproductive tasks and care, and are crucial for such networks pursuing a range socio-ecologically sustainable practices such as traditional knowledge recovery, the recovery of disused land, increasing on and off-farm biodiversity through the recovery of heirloom and landrace crop varieties, community creation through the formation of direct relationships with consumers or collective decision making through assemblies. Although such practices can be broadly viewed as sustainable and necessary for an agricultural transition, they are almost completely un(der)valued in the global capitalist market.  That is, these practices are generally unpaid and resistant to monetary valuationin part because they are difficult to measure from capitalist and extractivist logics. Ultimately, this means that farmers dedicate a significant amount of hours to care work that is largely uncompensated when selling into markets. In this light, and in relation to the ongoing financialisation and consolidation of land (Clapp & Isakson 2018; Ouma 2020), small-and medium scale farms are feeling continuously squeezed, leading to analysts (and in some cases farmers themselves) to talk about self-exploitation (Galt 2013) and burnout, while the number of such farms continues to decrease.

This panel addresses contributions that provide ethnographic and place-based data and analysis regarding, but not limited to, the following issues:

• What tools are farmers/food activists using to fight, resist, or challenge the constraints of their positions?
• How do they talk about and represent the challenges, successes, and limitations of their viability and continuity?
• How can we take into account other values beyond the monetary value? What are the processes of valorization involved in these other values? When are they measurable and when are they incommensurable? What tools do we have to measure these values?
• What is the role of land, infrastructures and services in better supporting such communities?
• What is the role of food and agricultural policies in improving the viability of these communities? And what are members’ demands to policymakers?
• What are key challenges, limitations, or potentials when thinking and imagining alternative agro-food futures?

Finally, the panel invites committed researchers to the transformation of food systems towards sustainability and justice, to critically reflect on the terminology used by academics and scholar-activists when referring to the unsustainability of small and medium-scale farming. For example, what are the consequences of labeling farmers as self-exploiting when their predicaments are structured by socio-ecological, economic and political forces far beyond their farms? In what ways does the land question affect what is happening on the ground?