4th Annual Symposium Background PDF Print E-mail
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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