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4th Annual Symposium Background |
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Small-scale agriculture has proven stubbornly resilient, despite
confident projections of demise. Over the past 20 years, as scholars
and politicians around the world alternately celebrated and bemoaned
the so-called death of the peasantry and the seeming irrelevance of
small farm production, people from Mexico to Brazil to Kenya, the
United States and the Philippines were organizing very different
celebrations. Movements of landless people, indigenous activists, rural
trade unionists, small farmers, urban consumers and others mobilized in
increasingly wide circles, and increasingly interconnected with one
another. They argued against the injustices of a global food system
that favored the wealthy, bolstered industrialized food production,
eviscerated local communities, and bankrupted farming majorities in
countries around the world. These movements have sought to create
alternative food production and distribution systems––ones with values
other than the gross maximization of shareholder profit. Moreover,
these alternative food systems are themselves often part and parcel of
broader efforts at developing visions of different futures that are
more energy efficient and socially nourishing. However, and despite
their successes at the local level, food activists are often rebuffed
by state institutions that have long promoted large-scale
agro-industries.
The SMWG, in conjunction with international partners, seeks to develop
a research project that is able to challenge technocratic common-sense
and help develop the alternative approaches and worldviews currently
under experimentation in a broad diversity of social and environmental
movements. We propose to focus on four intersecting axes of engagement
around the problematics of industrial agriculture: biofuels, genetic
modification, fair trade, and transnational peasant/small-scale farmer
networks. How do differing theoretical and cultural frameworks give
rise to different methods, and how do these methods highlight
alternative knowledges?
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