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FRIDAY,
APRIL 25
SESSION 1
Fighting It Out: Labor, Capital, and Consumers in the
World Food System
3:00 - 5:00pm, Saunders 220
Philip
McMichael, Professor of Development Sociology,
Cornell University
Roots
of the world food crisis: the food regime at large.
Food riots cascading across the world, from Italy
to Indonesia, are indicative of a 'perfect storm'
linking peak oil to rising animal protein consumption
and the agrofuels project. The new agflation suggests
new pressures on food supplies, but rising food prices
may express more fundamental restructuring of the
corporate agro-food system. This paper examines these
developments through a food regime lens.
Michael
Schulman, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished
Professor and Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor,
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, North Carolina
State University
Food Fights:
From the agrarian question to Animal House
Continued capitalist development
has transformed the classic Marxist agrarian question
about peasant differentiation and capitalist class
formation into a set of "Animal House" like
food fights across different social and spatial scales.
This paper summarizes issues and analyses in the sociology
of agriculture about the food fights concerning the
structure of agriculture, agribusiness, global commodity
chains, and consumption. While changes and trends
identified by previous researchers continue, new problems
and contradictions are identified. The fate of food
will involve a multiple "fights" across
different social and spatial scales with the intersecting
inequalities of production, consumption, and reproduction.
[Background
reading]
Community Garden Tour and
Demonstration
5 :00 - 7:00pm, Saunders 220
Christof
Den Biggelaar, Professor of Agro-ecology
at Appalachian State
University, will lead a soil-building workshop, discussing
the politics
of on-farm nutrient cycles, compost, bed preparation,
cover crops and
green manure in the context of the fate of food. Participants
will be
invited to help prepare a new garden bed at the campus
community garden.
Get your hands dirty
alongside students, professors, and community
members and learn about local food systems
Sponsored by Fair, Local, Organic (FLO) Food, Social
Movement Working
Group, and the Center for Integrating Research and
Action (CIRA)
SATURDAY, APRIL 26
BREAKFAST
9:30am - 10:00am, Fed Ex Global Education Center,
Room 1005
SESSION 2
The Contested Moral Economies of Transnational Food
Systems
10:00am - 12:00pm Room 1005
Discussant: Ted Mouw, Associate
Professor of Sociology at University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Catherine
Dolan, fellow at Templeton College and
lecturer at Oxford University
Virtual
Moralities: The Mainstreaming of Fairtrade in Kenyan
Tea Fields
Fairtrade was founded to alleviate poverty and economic
injustice through a market-based form of solidarity
exchange, one that aspired to embed alternative values
in North South commodity chains. Yet with the increasing
participation of transnational food corporations in
Fairtrade sourcing, new questions are emerging on
the extent to which the model offers an alternative
to the inimical tendencies of neoliberalism. Drawing
on a qualitative research project of Kenyan Fairtrade
tea, this paper examines how the process of corporate
mainstreaming influences the structure and outcomes
of Fairtrade, and specifically the challenges it poses
for the realization of Fairtrade's development aspirations.
It argues firstly that while the communities of Kiegoi
have experienced tangible benefits from Fairtrade's
social premium, these development 'gifts' have been
conferred through processes marked less by collaboration
and consent than by patronage and exclusion. These
contradictions are often glossed by the symbolic force
of Fairtrade's benevolence and the quixotic appeal
of its key tenets --- empowerment, participation,
and justice --- which simultaneously serve to neutralize
critique and mystify the functions that Fairtrade
performs for the political economy of development
and neoliberalism. Second, building on recent critiques
of CSR, the paper explores how certain neoliberal
rationalities are emboldened through Fairtrade, as
a process of mainstreaming installs new metrics of
governance (standards, certification, participation)
that are at once moral and technocratic, voluntary
and coercive, and inclusionary and marginalizing.
The paper concludes that these technologies have divested
exchange of mutuality, as the routinized exchanges
of codified information replace global partnerships
and affinities with the totemic features of neoliberal
regulation --- standards, procedures and protocols
that render north south partnerships ever more virtual
and depoliticized. [Paper
references]
Steve
Stiffler, Associate Professor of Anthropology
and Latin American Studies, University of Arkansas
The
Fruit of Neoliberalism: How the Banana became so Unhealthy
for Workers, Farmers, Consumers, the Environment,
and even the Banana Itself
This paper looks at the past
and present of the banana industry, focusing particularly
on how the rise of contract farming and the attack
on labor organizing have created an industry characterized
by the exploitation of workers and small-scale farmers;
an environmental disaster; a fruit that is unhealthy
for consumers; and a banana that is too smart for
its own good. The paper also looks at how popular
struggles have shaped and challenged the banana industry.
LUNCH
12:00pm - 1:00pm Atrium
SESSION 3
Cultivating Alternatives in a Neoliberal Field
1:00pm - 3:00pm Room 1005
Jeff
Boyer, professor of Anthropology and founder
of the Goodnight Family Sustainable Development Program,
Appalachian State University
Food
Strategies and Sustainable Agriculture Battles in
Neoliberal Honduras
This paper traces the demise of Honduras'
traditional role as Central America's larder for basic
grains and livestock with the neoliberal assault on
farmer first strategies and Mesoamerican diets. Since
the mid-1980s, U.S-led "agricultural modernization"
policies have privileged the entry of foreign agribusinesses
and industrial foods, the privatization of common
lands and cooperative marketing strategies, while
abandoning prior commitments to a peasant-centered
agrarian reform. The results include real hunger and
significant out-migration from the countryside, as
well as a simultaneous rise of obesity and heart disease
with increased consumption of processed and fast foods
in cities and towns. Current debates over food security
(the dominant discourse and strategy) versus food
sovereignty (the "progressive" response)
suggest that until the political will is found reunite
food and consumption issues with the fundamental agrarian
question (i.e. who controls the land and exchange
of locally rendered foodstuffs), popular sustainable
agriculture strategies for the select few will remain
little more than neoliberalism's "Janus face."
[Table 1,
Table 2,
Table 3,
Table 4,
Table 5,
Table 6,
Table 7]
Dorothy
Holland, Cary C. Boshamer Professor of
Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, with Leslie Hossfeld, Alice Brooke Wilson, Brady
Gordon, Mari Howe, Sara Safransky, and other members
of PLAN 823(2) and Leslie
Hossfeld, public sociologist, University
of North Carolina Wilmington University of North Carolina
Wilmington
A
Civil Society/University Collaboration to Rebuild
Local Food Systems in North Carolina: Assessing the
Potential
This presentation and its associated document describe
one component of the efforts of a community-university
collaboration to re-establish local food systems in
North Carolina. A graduate workshop class in City
and Regional Planning designed and carried out the
research in collaboration with the Center for Integrating
Research and Action, an interdisciplinary working
group at UNC-CH dedicated to addressing social problems
in partnership with civil society organizations, and
the Center for Community Action, a community-based
organization in Lumberton, North Carolina. Focusing
on a four-county region in Southeastern North Carolina,
the class assessed the current state of agricultural
production in the region, surveyed local institutions
on fruit and vegetable purchasing habits, and analyzed
the potential for increasing production, processing
distribution, and consumption of local food, and what
impacts this might have on the region’s community
and economy. CIRA and CCA will use the report to appeal
to local, regional and statewide policy and decision
makers to invest in local food initiatives. Besides
describing the project, which bears many similarities
to ones being undertaken elsewhere by the local food
movement and its quest to create alternatives to the
global food system, we ask, on a broader scale, whether
such efforts can ultimately assist the movement in
overcoming its class-based limitations and so escape
being part of, rather than a challenge to, neoliberal
designs on food.
FINAL ROUNDTABLE WITH ALL
PARTICIPANTS
3:15 - 4:00pm Room 1005
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