Industrial Agriculture

Last year, at this conference, I discussed how distinctions between nature and culture, and humans and animals, can arise from the technical processes of food production (see "Food as an object of cultural technical study "). Drawing on the work of cultural techniques (e.g. Siegert 2015; Vismann 2013) and Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked (1970), I argued that the relationship between humans and food is primary to how the human understands itself and forms part of the ground of human ontological systems. I'd like to take this argument further today, to a system-level perspective of food production and beyond, to a posthuman future where food no longer resembles what we know it as today, and because of this, where the human as such arguably ceases to exist, as the ground upon which it has defined self and species is transcended. I'm responding both to fictional future food visions and aspirations towards technical solutions to our current food-related crises.

This paper explores how industrial agriculture is a key contributor to many ecological problems and how redesigning agricultural systems using agroecological principles and methods could address many of these problems. Agriculture uses 85% of freshwater and, directly or indirectly, produces nearly half of all greenhouse gas emissions. Industrial agriculture accounts for a large proportion of these ecological costs and also depends on high energy use and toxic chemicals. Agroecology presents an alternative paradigm of production based on ecological principles such as recycling wastes, minimizing energy and water use, maximizing genetic diversity, regenerating soil and increasing its carbon content, integrating livestock and crops into a holistic system, and promoting other beneficial biological synergies. Moreover, agroecological methods have the potential to actually boost production and farm incomes, particularly in the global South. Permaculture, perhaps the most widely practiced form of agroecology, also provides an ethical framework and principles that serve as a basis for discerning actions that enable the design of diverse, sustainable systems suited to a wide variety of cultural and ecological contexts. Widespread adoption of agroecological methods and permaculture principles could significantly reduce energy, pesticide, and freshwater usage while simultaneously restoring degraded soil, sequestering large quantities of carbon, creating more biodiverse agricultural systems, and satisfying human needs for healthy, nutritious food. As well, engaging in ecological agriculture may encourage practitioners to develop genuinely ecological dispositions and worldviews that enable them to approach problems and discern actions from a perspective that systematically promotes sustainability and social justice.

Note: The uploaded file simply contains a link to the full paper at
http://markhathaway.org/files/AgroecologyAndPermaculture(mhathaway).pdf

As organic food becomes more widely available, great faith is placed on the seal or logo that certifi es organic status. Th is article treats the mark of certifi cation as a starting rather than an end point, critically reviewing literature from diverse national and regional contexts. Exploring questions concerning the extent to which organic cer-tifi cation assists or undermines the goal of ecological sustainability, abets the advance of large-scale agricultural capital, and supports the livelihood of smallholder farmers, the article considers the theoretical foundations, methodologies and modes of inquiry that have guided studies of organic agriculture and certifi cation. It brings this research into conversation with literatures on audit cultures, quality, and with ongoing nature-culture debates. Th rough critical review of the literature and the author's extensive fi eldwork with organic smallholders in northern India, the article suggests possible directions in which the literature may be expanded and advanced.

The assumption that globally, peasants are against land grabbing is dominant among many rural social movements, NGOs, and scholars empathetic with them. However, this is not always the case. Land grabs affect different rural groups in different ways, which creates a variety of reactions to it: from reckless enthusiasm, cautious acceptance, to outright resistance. This paper aims to rethink contemporary assumptions about rural resistance to large-scale land acquisitions. Analysing the context of Ukraine, the author argues that the politics of dispossessed groups depend on terms of inclusion in land deals; adaptive response strategies dominate over resistance; and peasants are more concerned with personal gains from land grabs than with benefits for the whole community.

Now available for pre-order from the University of Washington Press: https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295746500/roses-from-kenya/

Kenya supplies more than 35 percent of the fresh-cut roses and other flowers sold annually in the European Union. This industry—which employs at least 90,000 workers, most of whom are women—is lucrative but enduringly controversial. More than half the flowers are grown near the shores of Lake Naivasha, a freshwater lake northwest of Nairobi recognized as a Ramsar site, a wetland of international importance. Critics decry the environmental side effects of floriculture, and human rights activists demand better wages and living conditions for workers.

In this rich portrait of Kenyan floriculture, Megan Styles presents the point of view of local workers and investigates how the industry shapes Kenyan livelihoods, landscapes, and politics. She investigates the experiences and perspectives of low-wage farmworkers and the more elite actors whose lives revolve around floriculture, including farm managers and owners, Kenyan officials, and the human rights and environmental activists advocating for reform. By exploring these perspectives together, Styles reveals the complex and contradictory ways that rose farming shapes contemporary Kenya. She also shows how the rose industry connects Kenya to the world, and how Kenyan actors perceive these connections. As a key space of encounter, Lake Naivasha is a synergistic center where many actors seek to solve broader Kenyan social and environmental problems using the global flows of people, information, and money generated by floriculture.

By the late 1960s, it was becoming clear that the Green Revolution (GR) had succeeded only in part. Although crop yields, total production and food-per-capita were substantially higher, GR programmes were also increasing social inequality and damaging the environment, both of which began to attract attention in professional journals and the popular press. In this paper I examine the ways in which the GR’s advocates responded to criticism during the 1970s. Of particular interest is their defense that they were unprepared for the adverse effects of the new technology because these effects could not have been anticipated.  I argue, however, that this claim is untenable because the negative effects of the technology had been pointed out from an early stage but were largely ignored. That experts reacted in this way derived in part from the narrow scope of their training and experience but also from a professional tendency to oversimplify the nature of development problems.

In this paper, I define cultural techniques and discuss how food production may be analyzed from a cultural-technical perspective. Citing the work of Bernhard Siegert (2015; 2013) and Claude Levi-Strauss (1991;1970), I show that some of the same techniques which produce food have also been fundamental to the emergence of culture and the human as such: namely cooking, agriculture and animal husbandry, and techniques of eating. Though these techniques form the basis of what we know as food, they remain, to quote Levi-Strauss, “on the margin of the semantic field which embraces all food products” (1970:267). They escape representation, which arguably, is why food technologies are neglected by media studies, despite the rapid advancement of information and communication technologies in food production, processing, and distribution. This is what makes cultural techniques particularly suited to discussing food as an object of media theoretical analysis, food being something that is typically represented in the media, and not interrogated for its own ability to mediate, transmit, or reproduce culture on a technical level.

In recent years, food activists have condemned industrialized agricultural systems for contributing to pollution, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, economic insecurity, and political inequality. On the basis of such concerns, they have advocated abandoning these systems in favor of more agrarian alternatives. Meanwhile, defenders of industrialized agriculture have argued that their favored techniques are needed to address major challenges to global food security. In their eyes, abandoning industrialized food systems would be catastrophic. Given the depths of these disagreements, one might question how any agricultural policy regime could hope to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of all citizens. This chapter explores the theories of Thomas Hobbes, John Rawls, and Gerald Gaus in order to show how these controversial issues can be resolved without abandoning a commitment to public justification.

Economic growth in more developed countries has resulted in farms increasing their scale of production and becoming more specialized in their production. The sizes of farms have tended to increase, agricultural production has become more capital-intensive, and the percentage of the workforce employed in agriculture has shown a falling trend. This process has been brought about by the operation of market systems and has reduced the number of small-scale agricultural producers. Asia still has a huge number of small-scale agricultural producers. As Asian countries experience economic growth and as market systems become more established in Asia, the survival of Asia’s small-scale agricultural producers is likely to be threatened. Since these producers are poor, this is of concern to several international aid agencies. On the other hand, some Asian governments (such as Vietnam’s) want to encourage larger scale agricultural production units. This article presents arguments for and against government strategies to promote large-scale agricultural units in emerging economies and presents an economic theory that models agricultural supply in emerging economics as being dualistic in nature. It provides information about the predominance of small-scale units in agricultural production in Vietnam, particularly in pig production, and assesses policies proposed for by Vietnam’s Government for increasing the size of units producing pigs.

... Source: Vinson , Cartography by D. Drew Lucio, Barbara Trapido-Lurie, and Chris Lukinbeal) Page 12. colonias in the salt river valley  ... In  a local farmer subdivided his land into residential lots, creating the newest colonia, Victory Acres, on Tempe's fringe. ...

The Covid‐19 crisis has shed light on two structural problems that affect a large part of the European model of industrial fruit and vegetable production, mainly in Spain and Italy: excessive dependence on foreign labour and the appalling social and working conditions of these migrant workers. Despite the current intense debates that have arisen on this topic, this is not a new issue but a chronic problem, which has characterised much of the agricultural production in the EU for over two decades. In order to understand how and why this point has been reached, a historical review of the evolution of the primary sector, mainly in southern Europe, and its link to migration, is carried out to ascertain whether the pandemic has aggravated the terrible consequences, mainly for migrant workers, of a socially unsustainable model. The aim is to lay the foundations for a debate on the direction in which European agriculture is heading, and which contributions, such as reforming the CAP and conditioning its funds to decent working conditions can be made towards building a fairer and more sustainable model over time.

An exodus of young people from rural areas and agrarian futures can be observed globally. Yet, despite significant obstacles, some young people still aspire to become farmers. This chapter proposes the concept of ‘age-class’—the intersection of age and socioeconomic position—to analyse the limitations and differential impacts of policies and support structures aimed at helping young people start farming futures. The analytical discussion is illustrated and expanded via a case study of the eastern Canadian province of Nova Scotia. This case highlights the importance of collective agency demonstrated by the province’s young farmer community via the formation of organisations, in reaction to the absence of government policies that support all groups of (aspiring) young farmers regardless of their background.

Does the present socio-ecological impasse – captured in popular discussions of the ‘end’ of cheap food and cheap oil – represent the latest in a long history of limits and crises that have been transcended by capital, or have we arrived at an epochal turning point in the relation of capital, capitalism and agricultural revolution? For the better part of six centuries, the relation between world capitalism and agriculture has been a remarkable one. Every great wave of capitalist development has been paved with ‘cheap’ food. Beginning in the long sixteenth century, capitalist agencies pioneered successive agricultural revolutions, yielding a series of extraordinary expansions of the food surplus. This paper engages the crisis of neoliberalism today, and asks: Is another agricultural revolution, comparable to those we have known in the history of capitalism, possible? Does the present conjuncture represent a developmental crisis of capitalism that can be resolved by establishing new agro-ecological conditions for another long wave of accumulation, or are we now witnessing an epochal crisis of capitalism? These divergent possibilities are explored from a perspective that views capitalism as ‘world-ecology’, joining together the accumulation of capital and the production of nature in dialectical unity.

Music and agricultural work have a long and varied relationship across cultures and throughout history. Activities such as planting, hoeing, herding and harvesting are frequently accompanied by song, while life in the fields has been documented, shared and passed on through varied musical forms. Agricultural songs range from joyous celebrations, odes to nature and the marking of seasons to those that offer biting social commentary, political critique and calls for resistance and revolution. This article explores the complex relationship between musicians and music production in industrial agricultural settings. It examines how the musical rhythms developed by Almería's agricultural industry's workers have evolved as the industry's modes of production have intensified and mechanised, and how music serves as a means to communicate and share worker's feelings and experiences, often leading to forms of connection, rebellion or resistance across time. By exploring how social and political context have been reflected through musical production, performance and the affective relations built around 'sonic images', namely "the set of postures, body movements, expressions, gestures inherent in musical creation" (D'Amico, 2015:2), it analyses the process of co-creating music videos with a local agricultural worker rock band, and how this uses new media to build on long standing popular forms of musical expression in the regional traditional agriculture. The article suggests localized musical production among workers serves to disrupt "comfortable [visual] boundaries and encouraging transgression of rules" (Mitchell 1992:223), but most importantly, to create empathy in shared feelings of social immobility and entrapment, creating affective bonds between the musicians and their audiences while recognising the role of the musicians as writers of intersubjective histories of the industrial reality.

Over the last sixty years, industrial agriculture has expanded in the United States and throughout the world, including in Brazil. Any benefit this expansion has brought comes at significant environmental and social costs. Industrial agriculture is a leading contributor to global climate change, air and water pollution, deforestation, and dangers in the workplace. This Article discusses the impact of industrial animal agriculture in the U.S. and Brazil. It also examines the laws pertaining to industrial agriculture in both countries and provides a comparative analysis of the two legal regimes. Finally, this Article concludes with the observation that although the price to the U.S. and Brazil of remedying these impacts are high, the costs to humans, animals, and the environment by failing to do so is immeasurable.

This article examines how many Saskatchewan farmers came to think of themselves as independent farmer-entrepreneurs who had to control nature and the market by using the latest agricultural technology and by becoming astute players on the world-market. The article draws on Innis’ ‘staple theory’ to understand how large-scale export agriculture structures farmers’ ‘fields of possible action’ in a thoroughly intervened and produced nature and on Foucault’s writings on neo-liberal governance to comprehend their subjective responses. Beyond the classical enquiry of anthropological political economy this article focuses on the relationship of farmers to nature as an intensely political one.

The care and upkeep of animals raised for human consumption has devolved into an industrial operation focused on maximizing economic return while paying little or no heed to the needs of the "stock." Discussions of the nature of factory farming inevitably include issues of ethical treatment of nonhuman animals and often segue into apologies for or against "animal rights." This article takes a different tack, asking instead how and why the factory-farm industry could grow ascendant in an era when the notion of the human-animal divide has become increasingly blurred.

o presente artigo analisa as construções espaço-temporais presentes nos textos de três documentários que abordam a questão agrária contemporânea, sendo eles O mundo segundo a Monsanto, Soluções locais para uma desordem global e O veneno está na mesa. A abordagem tem como centro o conceito de formações discursivas (FDs) desenvolvido por Foucault.  Inicialmente, é traçado um breve histórico da chamada revolução verde e é mostrada a oposição que se criou entre os discursos que sustentam as práticas trazidas por ela e aqueles que a rechaçam. A partir de uma análise do léxico dos documentários analisados, percebe-se que os três filmes se alinham discursivamente e que criam uma oposição entre inovação e tradição, oposição essa que é fundamental no desenvolvimento teórico do artigo. A partir disso, são distinguidas duas formações discursivas distintas: a primeira, combatida pelo discurso dos documentários, é uma FD ligada a uma ideologia do progresso. A segunda é uma FD que permite o contraponto aos discursos do progresso através, principalmente, da validação do conhecimento tradicional.

Desde la decada de 1970 se empezo a operar un cambio en Argentina, que modificaria su estructura social y economica, pero tambien su configuracion territorial. Se trata de una gran transformacion en las territorialidades, pero principalmente en su espacio agro-rural. Nuestra hipotesis senala que se esta desplegando en los mundos rurales una racionalidad productiva que instaura territorialidades excluyentes, entrando en conflicto con otras formas de territorializacion, como aquellas que �entre otras� desenvuelven las agriculturas familiares y las comunidades originarias.

Le post-modernisme agronomique est issu de crises environnementales et sanitaires de la fin du XX e siècle. Ce mouvement post-moderne a provoqué une polarisation philosophique, voire idéologique, entre l'agriculture industrielle et les modèles alternatifs d'agriculture de type agroécologique. Il plonge sans doute aussi ses racines dans des visions plus générales des relations de l'humain à la nature qui ont évolué depuis la préhistoire en parallèle avec l'anthropisation de la planète et l'évolution de l'agriculture depuis le Paléolithique. Un rappel historique en est tracé ainsi qu'une synthèse comparée des éthiques philosophiques en comparaison avec la posture épistémologique classique et Darwinienne. L'idée est défendue d'une possibilité de convergence philosophique entre l'agroécologie et l'agriculture industrielle "responsable" par la similitude entre un anthropocentrisme faible et l'écocentrisme au travers du concept d&#...

Outlines major social and ecological issues involved in the coevolution of social and ecological systems by initially reviewing relevant aspects of the recent literature relating to economic development and their implications for agricultural development.  Coevolutionary qualitative-type models are presented.  There has been a failure amongst advocates of structural adjustment policies (involving the extension of markets and economic globalisation) to take account of coevolutionary principles and allow for historical differences in the evolution of communities and their varied circumstances.  This lack of sensitivity has had unfortunate social and ecological consequences for some communities eg  The Russian Federation and subsistence agriculturalists in some less developed countries.  The evolution of globalized market systems involving industrial/commercial agriculture (largely dependent on inputs external to the farm) under the 'patronage' of oligopolistic suppliers is seen to increasingly threaten the balance between social and ecological systems and as undermining the sustainability of both.  Capitalistic processes of technological change eg advances in biotechnology, play a major role in this evolution.