The industrial agrifood system is in crisis regarding its negative ecological, economic, and social externalities: it is unsustainable on all dimensions. This book documents and engages competing visions and contested discourses of agrifood sustainability. Using an incremental/reformist to transformation/radical continuum framework for alternative agrifood movements, this book identifies tensions between competing discourses that stress food sovereignty, social justice, and fair trade and those that emphasize food security, efficiency and free trade. In particular, it highlights the role that governance processes play in sustainability transitions and the ways that power and politics affect sustainability visions and discourses. The book includes chapters that review sustainability discourses at the macro and meso levels, as well as case studies from Africa, Australia, Canada, Europe, South America and the USA.

Scholarship and high-level diplomatic reports alike, including that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2021, have highlighted the negative material and bodily inequities of our globalized industrial food system, one that is fuelled by a hegemonic politics of food access and availability. The effects of industrialized food systems on public health, human rights, food sovereignty, ecological sustainability for land and water, as well as for climate change are increasingly obvious. These ongoing challenges, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, have exacerbated existing social, economic, and political inequalities and vulnerabilities and placed them in the spotlight. The crisis in the Ukraine has also underscored how connected global industrialized food systems are to nation state geopolitical interests, international alliances, trade relations, and conflicts. The current industrialized resource-intensive food system has persisted because of a complex set of power relations, despite its continuing and deepening social, ecological, and cultural costs.

The greatest challenges of the twenty-first century stem from the fact that we are now living in a new epoch: the Anthropocene. The human footprint on the planet can no longer be denied. One of the greatest and most essential human innovations, agriculture, is being increasingly recognised as a leading contributor to climate change. According to global governance bodies, the world will need to feed a predicted nine billion people by 2050. However, in this Anthropocene, we must address the environmental inequalities in how these people will be fed. This book explores our current societal struggles to transition towards more sustainable agrifood systems. It suggests that debates around sustainable agriculture must be social as well as technical, exploring the growth of social movements campaigning for more democratic food systems. However, as each chapter demonstrates, both the problems and the solutions in sustainable agriculture are highly contested. Using the term ′agrifood′ to capture the nexus between research, governance and the environment knowledge-environment-governance, this book provides an in-depth and wide-ranging account of current research around agricultural production and food consumption. The book introduces the Anthropocene along with the fundamental question that it poses about human-nature interactions. It outlines the core concerns related to agriculture and food and the debates around the need for agrifood system transitions. Each chapter investigates controversies in the field through case studies. These contributions offer a call for sociologists of agriculture and food to engage with the controversies unfolding in the Anthropocene.

Financialization is the increased influence of financial actors and logics on social and economic life, and is one of the key drivers transforming food systems and rural economies around the world. The premise of this book is that the actions of financial actors, and their financial logics, are transforming agri-food systems in profound ways. It is shown that although financialization is a powerful dynamic, some recent developments suggest that the rollout of financialization is contradictory and uneven in different spaces and markets. The book examines cases in which state regulation or re-regulation and social movement resistance are setting roadblocks or speed bumps in the path of financialization, resulting in a ‘cooling off’ of investment, as well as the other side of the argument where there is evidence of a ‘heating up’. The authors address not only the limits to financialization, but also the mechanisms through which financial entities are able to penetrate and re-shape agri-food industries. This book provides both a comparative analysis of financialization blending, and empirical findings with conceptual insights. It explores the connection between financialization, food systems, and rural transformation by critically examining: the concept of financialization and how food and farming are being financialized; the impacts of financialization in the food industry; and financialization in farming and forestry – along with the impacts this has on rural people and communities. This is a timely book, bringing together concrete case studies, from around the globe, to reveal the operations and impacts of finance capital in the ‘space’ of agri-food.

Knowledge of Africa’s complex farming systems, set in their socio-economic and environmental context, is an essential ingredient to developing effective strategies for improving food and nutrition security. This book systematically and comprehensively describes the characteristics, trends, drivers of change and strategic priorities for each of Africa’s fifteen farming systems and their main subsystems. It shows how a farming systems perspective can be used to identify pathways to household food security and poverty reduction, and how strategic interventions may need to differ from one farming system to another. In the analysis, emphasis is placed on understanding farming systems drivers of change, trends and strategic priorities for science and policy. Illustrated with full-colour maps and photographs throughout, the volume provides a comprehensive and insightful analysis of Africa’s farming systems and pathways for the future to improve food and nutrition security. The book is an essential follow-up to the seminal work Farming Systems and Poverty by Dixon and colleagues for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and the World Bank, published in 2001.

Taking a social science approach, this book explores the governance of sustainable seafood, which is fundamental to food and nutrition security as well as being an important source of income and employment in many regions. Due to the importance of protein and other fishery and aquaculture by-products, many wild fisheries are coming under pressure, and this increasing demand has created a strong driver to expand aquaculture. As a result, the social and environmental sustainability of these production systems have come into question. The authors of the book explore the governance of sustainable seafood, taking into account the rise of social movements through environmental non-governmental organisations, the nature and perceived limits of government regulation within and beyond the state, and the promise of market-based approaches to governance such as ecolabelling. The book focuses on how concern over sustainable seafood has been translated into different current forms of governance. It then assesses what alternative governance approaches are starting to emerge that combine movements, states and markets for sustainable seafood production and consumption, and their effects. The book concludes with a vision for the future through key principles for evaluating the collective impact of governing sustainable seafood. This timely volume will be key reading for researchers interested in fisheries and aquaculture governance, as well as coastal and marine policies and sustainable food movements more broadly. It will also be of interest to practitioners and policymakers engaged in creating fishery policies and sustainable fishery development.

​​This book explores the philosophical thought and praxis of Paul B. Thompson, who planted some of the first seeds of philosophy of agriculture and whose work inspires interdisciplinary scholarship in food ethics, biotechnology, and environmental philosophy. Landmark texts such as The Spirit of the Soil, The Agrarian Vision, and From Field to Fork revealed the fertility of food systems for inspiring reflection on our relationships to technology, the land, and one another. Rooted in philosophical traditions ranging from pragmatism to post-phenomenology, Thompson’s work nourishes projects in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and social and political theory, not only in academic philosophy departments but also in the social and natural sciences. This volume collects this diversity of thought in a tour of the many fields of food systems; from theorizing the sustainability of agroecological systems, to appreciating the quotidian practice of agrarian communities, to anticipating the impacts of emerging biotechnology, and to savoring the roles that food plays in forming our identities. Composed by an international crop of scholars working on the future of food ethics, the volume is a vital contribution to scholars and practitioners thinking through our relationships to the food systems that sustain us.