This book, edited by Allison M. Loconto and Douglas H. Constance, explores controversies within agri-food system debates amidst rising concerns associated with the Anthropocene. It details current understandings of the Athropocene and outlines core issues within agriculture, food, and debates around the need for agri-food system transitions.
Summary
This book contributes to discussions of agriculture in the Anthropocene; an epoch defined by the role of human activity on the planet. The authors emphasise the social dynamics that must be considered alongside the technological issues when discussing sustainable agri-food transitions. Through analysis of case studies, this book investigates controversies within agri-food systems debates and contributes to core concerns related to agriculture, food, and the need for systems transformation.
Publisher’s summary
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.
Reference
Loconto, A.M., Constance, D.H., 2024 Agrifood Transitions in the Anthropocene. SAGE Publications Inc. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/agrifood-transitions-in-the-anthropocene/book287967
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