Suchergebnisse

Report of the controversy over (non) GMO labeling in the political and market movement. This included consumer, food, and environmental organizations along with the countermovement involving major food, agriculture and biotech companies.

Since 2012 the anti-GMO (genetically modified organism) movement has gained significant grassroots momentum in its efforts to require mandatory GMO food labels through state-level ballot and legislative efforts. Major food and agriculture corporations are opposed to mandatory GMO labels and have successfully defeated most of these initiatives. Nevertheless, these battles have garnered significant media attention and re-energized the debate over GMO crops and foods. In this paper, we argue that one of the most significant outcomes of this fight is efforts by food retailers and value-based food companies to implement voluntary non-GMO labels and brands. We draw on the governance and political consumerism literature to explore (counter) movement efforts for mandatory labels and how these efforts are being institutionalized through private voluntary governance institutions. Our assessment is based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with key informants from consumer and environmental organizations, agriculture and biotech companies, and government regulatory agencies, as well as a content analysis of food industry websites. A growing number of food retailers recognize the reputational and economic value that new niche markets for non-GMO foods can offer, while the anti-GMO movement views these efforts as a step in the direction of mandatory GMO labels. We conclude that voluntary labels may act to settle the labeling debate by mollifying agri-food industry concerns about mandatory labeling and meeting the desire of political consumers for greater choice and transparency but without addressing the broader social and environmental sustainability concerns that drives the anti-GMO movement in the first place.

Gender-based inequalities constrain women's ability to participate in efforts to enhance agricultural production and reduce poverty and food insecurity. To resolve this, development organizations have targeted women and more recently "mainstreamed" gender within their agricultural aid programs. Through an analysis of agricultural-related development aid, we examine whether funded agricultural projects have increasingly targeted women and/or gender. Our results show that the number of agricultural aid projects and the dollar amounts targeting women/gender increased between 1978 and 2003. However, the increase was modest and, as a percentage of all agricultural development aid, has declined since the late 1990s. Significantly, this decline occurs at a time when there are an increasing number of women engaged in agriculture. Our findings suggest that the rhetoric of gender mainstreaming outstrips efforts to develop projects aimed at women and gender inequality and that the concept may be being used to legitimize a decline in focusing explicitly on women.

Abstract  The last decade has witnessed a dramatic rise in global trade in food and agricultural products. While much analysis has focused on the role of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in this process, we argue that other forms of regulation are of far greater consequence. In this paper, we examine changes in the agrifood system made possible by the WTO and we assess the rise of global private standards. We argue that the new global rules, regulations, and institutions implemented by the WTO have facilitated the ability of the private agrifood sector to consolidate and expand internationally. Of particular importance is the growing influence of food retailers as they rapidly become more global and oligopolistic. The article concludes that today it is the private sector, and retailers in particular, together with private standards that are at the center of the transformation of the global agrifood system.

AbstractThis study investigates how proponents and critics of gene editing in agriculture and food (GEAF) employ expectations—discourses with future‐oriented impacts—as they compete to secure desired futures and mobilise social processes and resources towards their goal of influencing GEAF (re)regulation and agro‐food systems within the EU. We draw on 27 semi‐structured interviews and 53 Euractiv media articles to identify and analyse GEAF proponents' and critics' responses to the 2018 European Court of Justice regulatory decision that GEAF will be regulated as genetically modified organisms. Despite similar themes of environmental sustainability, food security and winners and losers in agricultural innovation systems, proponents' and critics' discourses reflect divergent expectations of GEAF. We argue that both groups link their expectations with concerns about path dependencies in technological innovations and agro‐food systems, which serve to influence emerging political, public and elite perspectives on GEAF. Although to some extent performative, these concerns offer important insights that should be problematised and engaged within GEAF governance spaces. This study is conceptually framed by the socio‐technical futures, path dependency and political economy of food and agriculture literature.

AbstractWomen are increasingly the target of agricultural development programs aimed at reducing poverty and food insecurity, especially in sub‐Saharan Africa. Some feminist scholars argue that such efforts are driven more by concerns about the efficient use of resources than the rights of women and do little to transform gendered power relations. We examine how development interventions that target women affect household well‐being, especially food insecurity, empower women, and transform gendered power relations. Our study uses the case of the Gates Foundation funded East Africa Dairy Development (EADD) program in Uganda. Our methods include the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index survey and in‐depth interviews of women farmers and key informants, within the EADD program. We argue that the livestock sector provides critical insights into women's empowerment because livestock are not "socially neutral" in their gendered effects. Our study found that: (1) ownership of dairy cows enhanced important dimensions of women's empowerment and gender equity that benefited women and households; (2) women's labor responsibilities for dairy cows disempowered some women by increasing their time poverty and; (3) ownership of dairy cows provided a means for women to disrupt entrenched social norms related to gender roles within the household and agriculture.

The articles in this second special issue of the International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food on private agri-food standards consider key issues involved in the shift from government to governance within agri-food systems. The first special issue, published in February 2013, focused on 'the contestation, hybridity and the politics of standards' (Bain et al., 2013, p. 1). The articles in the first issue complicated our understanding of the relationship between public and private standards by examining the politics associated with their formation, implementation, and outcomes. At the same time, the first special issue drew attention to the diversity of private standards, and the spaces that exist – or get created – for actors to contest the values, content or outcomes of such standards. These are important themes, revisited in the second special issue. However, the concern with the politics of standards is extended through more systematic attention to the relationship between standards, certification, and the governance of agri-food supply chains.

Standards are an omnipresent yet generally taken-for-granted part of our everyday life (Higgins and Larner, 2010a; Timmermans and Epstein, 2010; Busch, 2011). Until recently, standards within the agri-food sector were typically dismissed (if thought of at all) by social scientists as rather benign, technical tools, primarily of interest to specialists concerned with facilitating markets and trade. Over the past decade, however, this assessment has changed considerably and many agri-food scholars now view standards as a useful entry point for analysing and understanding our social and material world. The degree of interest today is reflected in the fact that our call for papers on private agri-food standards attracted so many high-quality submissions that we are publishing this special issues in two parts. In part, this shift in interest reflects the influence of science studies and its concern with studying 'mundane' and taken-for-granted objects and practices (Higgins and Larner, 2010b). Here scholars take inanimate objects seriously, to understand, for example, how non-human actors such as standards allow humans to 'act at a distance' (Latour, 1987), thereby ordering relations across time and space. Many agri-food researchers are also concerned with the rise of private food standards developed by global retailers and non-government organizations, including understanding the role that these standards might play in coordinating and governing production and consumption relations within the context of globalization (Giovannucci and Ponte, 2005; Hatanaka et al., 2005; Mutersbaugh, 2005; Tallontire et al., 2011).

AbstractDrawing on data from six communities in Kansas and Iowa, we explore the factors that are related to community members' current levels of overall support for local ethanol plants. What are residents' opinions about the benefits and drawbacks of local ownership of ethanol plants? How does that awareness lead to overall support of plants? Our interest is to understand how perceptions of the negative effects of the plant on the local infrastructure and environment and positive effects on the local economy influence the relationship between local versus absentee ownership and people's overall support of the plant. We use chi‐square to test whether respondents' overall support is associated with the ownership of the plant (local versus absentee), and cumulative logit mixed‐effects models to explore the factors that explain the association between ownership and overall support. Findings suggest that community members are less likely to show high support for locally owned plants, and that the greater perceived negative effects of locally owned plants on the local infrastructure and environment helps explain residents' lower support of locally owned ethanol plants in their communities. We posit several explanations for why this might be the case.

Agrifood scholars working within a political economy framework increasingly draw upon the concept of governance to analyze the regulation of global agricultural and food systems. An important limitation of this approach is that it fails to explain how governance strategies are legitimated. Drawing on three diverse cases that span three continents, our paper examines how standards makers appeal to technoscientific norms and values to establish both credibility for their standards and their authority in constructing them. These cases explore the development and implementation of a standard requiring complete elimination of a tart cherry insect pest in the United States; the process of establishing and maintaining red meat hygiene standards in the processing and retail sectors of South Africa; and the role of GLOBALGAP standards for pesticide residues in protecting worker health and safety in the Chilean fresh fruit export sector. These cases illustrate how appeals to technoscience mask controversy and vested interests and allow actors to exclude, conceal, and mystify possible alternatives; and they demonstrate the value that science and technology studies can bring to bear in understanding agrifood governance.

Technology has played a central role in development programming since the inception of development assistance. Recent development organizations, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, believe technological innovation can improve development outcomes. Development ethics, a field of study focused on the ethical questions posed by development policies and practices, has yet to fully appreciate the ethical dimensions of the science and technology. Addressing this important research and policy gap, we contend that science and technology studies (STS) offers important insights that can be used in combination with development ethics to influence development policies and practices. Utilizing a case study of a private development program in Uganda, we illustrate how STS offers important insights for understanding how a sociotechnical ensemble placed pressure on already scarce water resources. Two dimensions of STS scholarship, the power asymmetries of technological development and the incomplete or partial nature of technoscientific knowledge, are examined and help us to understand how sociotechnical ensembles in development increase the likelihood of the emergence of publics who are negatively impacted by sociotechnical ensembles in development programs. Leveraging STS insights, we argue for the importance of situated ethics—a pragmatic approach to ensuring responsiveness to the emergence of these publics.

This special issue reflects a variety of methodological and critical perspectives on contemporary issues regarding social concerns, public engagement, and governance of gene editing in agriculture.