Agriculture and Human Values最新文献

Geographical indications (GIs)—product labels linked to geographic origin—may benefit local farmers and preserve place-based value. However, a growing body of scholarship reveals that powerful value chain actors frequently co-opt GI governance, capturing the majority of economic benefits, decreasing product quality, and marginalizing farmers. We examine the Kona coffee GI as a unique case in which smallholder farmers increased their influence over their GI governance system, redefining the GI through the 2024 passage of House Bill 2298. This bill mandates that coffee labeled as “Kona” must contain at least 51% Kona coffee, a significant increase from the 10% minimum previously required for the last three decades. We draw on 40 interviews and event ethnography at two major coffee industry conferences to trace the long power struggle over the Kona coffee GI. We find that farmers achieved this unprecedented legislative change through a confluence of factors: 1) gaining political influence through organizing, alliances, and legal victories, 2) capitalizing on consumer shifts in the growing specialty coffee market, and 3) leveraging technological advancements to decrease dependence on intermediaries. The Kona coffee case provides a compelling example of farmer-led GI reform. However, the aftermath of HB2298’s passage also reveals limits to farmer leverage, as possible market retaliation and deeply embedded supply chain inequities continue to threaten the legislation’s long-term gains. Our findings highlight the complex and contingent nature of farmer empowerment in GI systems and underscore the need for deep attention to the power dynamics that govern alternative food labeling schemes.

How do women and men farmers in Kenya situate, form, and pursue varietal choices amidst unequal gender relations, seed markets, and climate variability? Drawing on 67 individual interviews and focus group discussions across five Kenyan counties—Bungoma, Busia, Meru, Tharaka Nithi, and Makueni, we apply a feminist political ecology (FPE) lens to examine women and men smallholder farmers’ varietal choices and use in rural Kenya. We show that varietal choice is neither linear nor a simple shift toward ‘newness’ but rather a gendered, intersectional, and bioculturally embedded process of negotiation by farmers to maintain seed diversity and meet multiple short-term and long-term needs, including consumption, marketability, agroecological adaptation and cultural drivers such as labor demands and culinary values. While production traits were prioritized by both women and men, women also highly valued processing and consumption traits. Men (adults and youth) prioritized market traits such as yield potential and market potential. Varietal availability, trust, price, and agroecological fit shape women and men’s perceptions about a variety, choice and use. Gender and age differences shape varietal awareness, with young men and women’s access to information through digital platforms, while adult women relied on interpersonal and local networks. Adult men used radio and mobile phones. Findings illuminate farmers’ strategic maintenance of varietal portfolios spanning both local landraces and breeding varieties. We conclude that seed policies should integrate local knowledge and gendered realities, availability, and access to preferred varieties. Strengthening farmer-researcher crop technology co-creation through participatory breeding, on-farm seed conservation and multiplication is essential.

Recent years have seen increased scholarly interest in how to “scale” agroecology through institutional mechanisms, however little research has examined the gendered dynamics of such institutional scaling. This paper attempts to build this research through examining how state agencies and NGOs in India use women’s Self-Help Groups (SHGs) as shared infrastructure for promoting natural farming. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork across two districts in eastern Madhya Pradesh, this paper identifies two interrelated governance dynamics from using women’s institutions as platforms of implementation. First, constrained participation refers to how women are recruited as frontline agents of agricultural change yet lack the household authority, time, and material support necessary to ensure its adoption. Second, redistributed liability describes how when interventions falter, accountability can travel downward through domestic relationships, community reputation, and SHG social networks, settling on the women tasked with delivery rather than institutional actors responsible for intervention design. We situate these findings within feminist scholarship on development and debates on agroecology governance. Overall the paper’s main argument is that SHGs in India increasingly work as infrastructures of state and NGO governance, and that routing natural farming through SHGs has the potential to shift the risks of agricultural transition onto SHG members.

Thirty-five years ago, the Farmer First movement presented a new paradigm for agricultural R&D, making the case for a more prominent role for farmers in the design, development, and dissemination of agricultural technologies and practices. Since then, a diverse range of projects have been implemented with explicit attention to the engagement and participation of farmers and farmer-based organizations. After nearly four decades, it is worth reflecting further on the full extent of this paradigm’s impact on research and innovation policy. Specifically, has the movement led to the institutionalization of meaningful farmer engagement and participation in national policy formulation and implementation? To answer this question, we adopt a case study approach and combine project and public policy document analysis with key informant interviews held with actors in government, research institutions, donor agencies, and farmer organizations. We select three farmer-first-oriented projects in Honduras, Mali, and the eastern Africa region, each of which have had long exposure to the participatory principles we expect to see reflected in the agricultural policies of the country. We document the specific interactions between project actors and the policy space. We then analyze common policy trends across case studies. First, we find that change is often driven by highly motivated individuals who operate with a lack of buy-in from policy-relevant institutions. Second, we observe change when organizations practicing farmer-first approaches partner with more influential organizations, which may not have internalized those principles but have a common interest in the dissemination of technologies and practices. Third, we find that national agricultural policies in the case study countries are not codifying well-established participatory practices. We discuss pathways toward greater farmer participation in light of these findings.

How to develop knowledge that addresses the ecological crisis, within epistemic cultures shaped by a productivist world? This paper analyses the development of a digital decision-support system (DSS) by a French agricultural technical institute. The tool aims to promote agroecology by using Bayesian networks to model complex combinations of agricultural practices (agronomic “levers”), filling a gap where traditional randomized controlled trials fail to measure multi-variable interactions. Traditionally trained in the rigor of controlled experimental data, these experts must generate probabilistic models based on their own experience and expertise, in the absence of reference datasets. Based on a two-year ethnographic inquiry within the institute, we analyse what we call the epistemic discomfort experienced by agronomists. We describe the material techniques used by experts to handle epistemic discomfort in the making of the software, and show how the digitisation process brings into tension divergent epistemic cultures as well as competing imperatives, that is, the greening of production and the retaining of high yield objectives. As a consequence, it does not subvert the dominant agronomic culture but rather hybridises it.

International agricultural initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa have evolved over time to develop and disseminate crop varieties that deliver performance on yield, nutrition and climate resilience. Many of these activities are part of the New Green Revolution for Africa (GR4A), which promotes demand-oriented programs that pay attention to women and marginalized households that have not previously benefited from earlier Green Revolution initiatives. At the same time, critics view the GR4A as enabling the commercial formalization of seed systems in ways that marginalize smallholder farmers and dispose of their agency in agricultural decision-making. This paper presents research findings from an international collaborative rice partnership in Kenya to showcase the nature and impact of its activities. The study findings demonstrate how the promotion of Komboka rice variety (IR05N221) garnered success through concerted efforts to foster horizontal partnerships, based on joint decision-making and mutual respect with a diversity of key national actors, including farmer organizations. The research also found that Komboka is appreciated by women for household consumption in Kirinyaga and presents a viable alternative in Tana River where it appears to be the only rice variety that is adapted to local agro-ecological conditions. Yet, there remain gaps in realizing wider benefits from promising crop technologies such as Komboka, particularly for women rice farmers. Addressing some of these constraints would require fostering more context-sensitive and gender-responsive approaches that broaden perspectives around seed systems’ performance, to incorporate indicators, such as capacity of seed technologies to reach, benefit and empower different groups of women and men farmers when determining the success of seed system interventions.

Drawing on the case of Romanian short-term agricultural workers in Germany, this article brings together scholarship on migrant health with work on infrastructure and transnational social protection to examine how bodily harm is produced and experienced across borders. Within the EU framework, it analyzes specifically the interaction between mobility and labor regulations, the resulting healthcare access, as well as harvest rhythms and employer control. As a result of the regulations governing short-term employment in Germany and workers’ frequent lack of insurance coverage in Romania, seasonal workers face a double exclusion from healthcare, leading to the long-term costs of their injuries being passed on to their country of origin. The bodily harm they experience is intensified by the productivity demands of agricultural work and by employer control. The article further shows that while some workers embrace the productivity logics of farms, others navigate a double bind between maximizing immediate income and preserving long-term health.

The meat industry is characterized by precarious employment, hazardous working conditions, and a strong reliance on migrant labor. Combined, these dynamics generate systemic health risks for migrant workers, as exemplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. In an effort to improve working conditions, the German government enacted the Occupational Safety Control Act (OSCA), which banned intermediated work in the industry’s core activities from 2021. Five years on, this article examines how different stakeholders assess the impact of the OSCA through the lens of a migrant labor regime. Empirically, the study draws on qualitative interviews, complemented by ethnographic engagement within a transdisciplinary research network. Conceptually, it links a political-economy perspective on migrant labor regimes – which foregrounds structural relations shaping migrant employment - to an analytical focus on how these structures materialize in, and are reproduced through, workers’ bodily and psychosocial experiences of harm. The findings suggest that workers’ transition into direct employment has led to improvements in employment conditions and certain aspects of occupational safety. However, long-term health harms, informal control practices, and limited worker voice persist. The article argues that these outcomes reflect the continued operation of a precarious migrant labor regime, in which injury and ill health are not merely unintended consequences but integral components of an infrastructure that disciplines and renders migrant labor exploitable. By linking structural regulation to embodied experience, the paper highlights both the limits of legal reform and the importance of addressing injury and inequity as constitutive features of precarious migrant labor regimes.

This paper critically examines the emerging sociotechnical visions of biochar within UK agriculture, focusing on its potential role in greenhouse gas removal (GGR) and the broader net zero agenda. Agriculture is framed as both a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions and a unique sector capable of acting as a carbon sink, positioning it at the heart of debates about climate change mitigation. The paper adopts a sociotechnical visions framework to illuminate how stakeholders align with, contest, and propose alternatives to the dominant net zero sociotechnical imaginary. We identify two overarching sociotechnical visions of biochar in UK agriculture. The first is a sociotechnical vision of greenhouse gas removal through biochar produced at scale and applied to agricultural land, detailing both farmer alignment with and contestation of this approach. The second is a sociotechnical vision of biochar for multiple on-farm benefits, including farm business benefits, enhanced agricultural production and improved on-farm biodiversity. The analysis shows that the future of biochar in UK agriculture is characterised by diversity and contestation, requiring governance frameworks that accommodate multiple, sometimes competing, sociotechnical visions. This pluralism offers opportunities for more just, inclusive, achievable, and transformative pathways for biochar in UK agriculture. Additionally, the paper contributes to the literature on sociotechnical imaginaries and sociotechnical visions by foregrounding the dynamic interplay and negotiation between top-down institutional imaginaries—such as net zero—and emergent, grassroots visions developed by farmers and other agricultural stakeholders.

In Mexico, agroindustrial enclaves are hyper-segregated landscapes where transnational business groups build and restore overcrowded barracks, militarized bunkhouses, and other precarious housing developments for seasonal agrarian laborers. Disguised as employment benefits, corporate social responsibility practices, and social development initiatives, these agribusiness housing policies have functioned for decades as labor and spatial control measures against migrant farmworkers. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic and historical research in Mexico, the article questions these apparently stateless landscapes and policies by spotlighting the systematic actions of government agencies in reproducing agribusiness housing models of precarity, rule, and isolation. The article presents two case studies, a segregationist barracks system in a sugarcane valley and a captivity model of agricultural fields in a grape-exporting desert, to analyze the essential presence of the Mexican state in legitimizing and subsidizing these regional agribusiness housing policies. Bridging anthropological studies of state formation, critical border studies, and the tradition of studying the segregation and settlement of migrant farmworkers in Mexico and worldwide, this article contributes an ethnographic analysis showing that the state is neither absent nor negligent in the everyday operation of violent corporate housing policies. On the contrary, government agencies at different levels administer, monitor, and make legible the segregation and captivity of workers within contemporary agrarian capitalist geographies.