Since the food price hikes of 2007–08, and the continuing volatilities in global food supply and demand, there has been a significant growth in policy reports and statements regarding the problems of global food security.1 This has rightly reinforced the Research Councils’ (RCUK) decision to make this one of their ‘grand challenges’, and has recently led to a new synthesis published by the United Kingdom Government Office for Science entitled The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and Choices for Global Sustainability.2 It is not necessary here to reiterate all of the main arguments as to why this is now a renewed and pressing international policy issue, but it is a good moment to begin to assess the general policy landscape and framing of the debates, given, as I shall argue below, some significant gaps or missing links are emerging in the ways in which main arguments and solutions are being posed. One key question (which I and Ina Horlings have recently posed in an article in Global Environmental Change),3 is why is it proving so difficult to arrest the twin problems of resource depletion and climate change vulnerabilities by developing more sustainable and ‘place-based’ agricultures? To answer this question we have to go beyond the rhetoric of many of the major reports now before us and address the more prosaic question of what are the obstacles to adaptive change necessary within the agri-food sector? Once we more clearly identify these, it may be easier to see how we might then begin to examine the potentialities and opportunities for adaptive changes which could lead to both more sustainable and productive agri-food systems. It is argued here that these opportunities and potentialities indeed will have to be ‘place-based’, and as such will not lend themselves to generic or globalised ‘onesize- fits-all’ solutions associated with genomic technological fixes or generalised notions of ‘sustainable intensification’. 4
One of the problems with most of the recent policy statements is that they have not addressed the issue of contextdependent sustainable ‘place-making’, and they have tended to assume, albeit with scattered attention to some selected case studies of ‘good practice’, that the answers as well as the solutions to the current unsustainability of agri-food lies in addressing the aggregate problems rather than those which are more spatially specific. Agriculture will have to return to being what it was: a more embedded, connected and localised activity largely serving and being served by its city regions. If one of the obstacles in our thinking about both the problems and solutions concerning unsustainable food lies with the dominant aggregated conceptualisations of the problems—a sort of ‘ecological fallacy’—another is the failure to really appreciate agriculture as an interdependent and integrated component in complex human, cultural and ecological systems. For too long, and in the advanced world especially, we have, both in policy and academic terms, tended to treat agriculture as a separate and independent sector. This secular way of seeing agriculture is now coming back to haunt us as we now witness how it is inextricably linked to the wider ecologies and cultures of place. It is constantly articulated, for instance—not least by the now disbanded Sustainable Development Commissions’ final statement on food policy5—that global agriculture accounts for about 70 per cent of all fresh water extracted for human use (via irrigation systems), and that the food system is a major source of land, forestry, fisheries and water degradation, with 15 out of the 24 world’s ecosystem services being degraded or used unsustainably according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. 6 Livestock farming gets an even worse press in these debates as it accounts for 40 per cent of the United Kingdom citizens’ agriculture water footprint and 57 per cent of agriculture carbon and methane emissions. These sort of aggregated and sectoralised statistics certainly indicate the size and proportional nature of the problem of the unsustainability of many conventional agricultural practices. But they should also indicate the inherent multifunctional role in which agriculture could play in potentially adapting to these unsustainabilities. Such ‘facts’ about the negative contribution of conventional agricultures to the wider and severe problems of resource depletion and carbon emissions should indeed serve as a significant ‘wake-up’ call for scholars and policy makers in that these demonstrate the explicit interdependence and integrative potentials of agriculture to affect its wider ecologies and social systems in profound ways.
As empirical evidence suggests from many parts of the world (see below), sustainable agricultural systems can provide far wider sets of positive social, economic and ecological benefits for more sustainable communities and regions. In this sense we should reject the assumption that agriculture is in any sense a ‘declining industry’. Hence any ‘solutions’ to these unsustainabilities will indeed need to adopt a much more integrative as well as spatially based approach. We thus can no longer divorce agriculture from the wider social and ecological spaces in which it is created, or the complex interdependencies it helps to sustain. I thus want to argue here that we now urgently need to move beyond these aggregated and sectoralised ecological fallacies in our attempts to deal with creating more sustainable, diverse and place-based agri-ecological systems. Whilst we clearly must not lose sight of the macro-global picture, we also need to realise that in order to imagine and plan realistic alternatives it is necessary to adopt a more creative eco-economy paradigm which re-‘places’, and indeed relocates, agriculture and its policies into the heart of regional and local systems of ecological, economic and community development. This is no more clearly exposed at the moment than in the ‘Arab Spring’ in the Middle East, where the current uprisings are underlain by growing food and water shortages, price hikes and fast growing populations in countries like Yemen and Syria. Saudi Arabia is actively purchasing land and water rights elsewhere in order to cope with pending water and food shortages.7 Some regions of China are following this course of action, leading to internationalised ‘land and resource grabbing’ as palliatives to impending shortages. The irony is that the more governments and scholars recognise the need to make a transition in agri-food to low carbon alternatives, the greater the international ‘race-to-the-bottom’ competition intensifies to find exploitable palliatives for the agri-food ‘growth machine’. Yet, as the saying often goes about charity, the solutions and priorities should start at home by recalibrating and reframing more integrated and embedded notions of agrifood into regional and local systems. The current food debate is thus dominated by aggregated and sectorialised ‘bio-economical’ solutions which still tend to side-step and deny the embedded nature of agri-food. This is a sort of active process of ‘unknowing the known’ and creates and maintains a set of key ‘missing links’ in the framing of policy debates. What is underestimated, are the social, cultural, political and spatially embedded aspects. These include: Socially, we have seen a large decrease in recent decades of agricultural employment, farm enterprises, and a loss of farmers’ freedom with more dependency upon privately regulated global markets, retailers, privatised research and policy measures. This means in many regions that at just the point when a sustainable transition is necessary in their agri-food systems, many local communities have lost or reduced the social and skill capacity to mobilise such changes. Rebuilding the social and knowledge/skill capacities to create sustainable alternatives becomes limited and, in many cases, constrained by generic techno-science solutions. Culturally, ‘the environment’ has been reduced to a series of concerns about resource inputs, waste and pollution emissions, reducing cultural needs and non-anthropocentric values (such as reflected in the concept of ‘wilderness’), to monetary terms (as can be seen as reducing these inputs into different packages of ‘environmental goods and services’). The culture of ‘agri-culture’ itself, expressed in craftsmanship and a large variety of farming styles, has become more marginalised as the influence of external agencies such as privatised extension services and bio-economic scientific research became more dominant. Politically, a ‘hygienic mode of regulation’ has become dominant in agri-food in the form of bureaucratic forms of environmental safeguards, risk management and instruments. Private and public forms of regulation have led to a schematisation which creates new regulatory barriers to market entry for many smaller producers and processors. Such regulatory costs tend to stifle cooperative innovation and ecological knowledge sharing, whilst creating market barriers for smaller producers. . Spatially, agricultural production has been decoupled from space and place. This is visible in the form of more footloose production systems (for example, ‘mega-farms’), internationalised food transport, ‘lean’ logistics and traceability, and the deconstruction and fragmentation of food into different but standardised, valueadded components. This gives the super intensive producer, processor and corporate retailer the power to exchange their commodities worldwide, using globalised standards, and making many small farmers more vulnerable to global markets.