13 pages, An increasing number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the German organic agri-food sector involves citizens through different community financing models. While such models provide alternative funding sources as well as marketing opportunities to SMEs, they allow private investors to combine their financial and ethical concerns by directly supporting the development of a more sustainable food system. Due to the low level of financial intermediation, community financing is characterized by close relations between investors and investees. Against this background, we apply the proximity concept from economic geography to explore spatial and relational aspects of community financing in the German organic agri-food sector. Based on a qualitative multiple case study approach, we find that the relevance of proximity is twofold. While different forms of proximity between SMEs and their potential investors are key success factors, proximity is also considered as one desired outcome of community financing. Furthermore, our results reveal that the extent to which SMEs rely on particular proximity dimensions distinguishes two different approaches to community financing.
13 pages, The sustainability of milpa agriculture, a traditional Mayan farming system in southern Belize, is uncertain. For centuries, the milpa has been a sustainable agriculture system. The slash-and-burn aspect of milpa farming, however, has become less reliable and less sustainable over the last 50 years due to several factors, including forest loss, climate change, population growth, and other factors. The traditional milpa practices of slash-and-mulch and soil nutrient enrichment (nutrient cycling) are agroecological practices that produce food in a more sustainable way. Agriculture extension, a government service in Belize, can promote additional agroecological practices to address food and livelihood insecurities in milpa communities. This study examines perceptions of these practices from milpa farmers and agricultural extension officers in Belize using a socio-ecological systems (SES) framework. SES considers multidisciplinary linkages, including social, economic, environmental, cultural, and other factors in the agroecological system. The study finds several of these SES linkages between agroecological practices--specifically slash-andmulch and soil nutrient enrichment--and the sustainability of the milpa farming system in southern Belize. Milpa communities are part of the broader SES and therefore are affected by changes to it. Milpa communities can also be enabled and participate in solution-finding. The findings imply that increasing the use of agroecology practices in milpa communities is needed and that government involvement and action, particularly from agriculture extension services, can facilitate a more sustainable milpa farming system and therefore more food and livelihood security in milpa communities in Belize.
15 pages, The post-war Western world has seen a gradual shift from government to governance, a process that also concerned the issues related to agro-food sustainability, such as food quality, environmental impact, social justice, and farm animal welfare. Scholars believe that social media are a new site that reconfigures relations between various actors involved in the governance of these problems. However, empirical research on this matter remains scarce. This paper fills this gap by examining the case of Februdairy, a Twitter hashtag campaign to promote the British dairy industry, hijacked by animal protection activists. For this case, I employ the relational perspective on technology affordances—as operationalised by Faraj and Azad (in: Leonard et al. (eds), Materiality and organizing. Social interaction in a technological world, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012)—to highlight two distinct strategic modes of embracement of social media functionalities by the opposing groups: hashtag hijacking and crowdsourcing transparency. The analysis reveals also that a pre-existing social structure of the agro-food system conditions reconfiguration of social relations by technology in a way that actually strengthens the tendency to govern the issue of farm animal protection with market mechanisms.
https://link-springer-com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/content/pdf/10.1007/s10708-019-10024-2.pdf, 15 pages, Enhancing sustainable food security requires agricultural production systems to change in the direction of higher productivity and to mitigate lower output variability in the face of climate extreme related hazards such as land degradation. Adoption of resilient food production system capable of withstanding disruptive events is therefore needed to stabilize farmers' productivity. Consequently, participation in collective actions has been touted as an effective approach to enhance cooperation among individuals within a social system and to advance adoption of climate-smart farming techniques (conservation agriculture). This study investigated this perspective using heterogeneous treatment effects estimation to analyze the data collected from 350 smallholder farmers selected randomly from the South–West Nigeria. The average treatment effects on the treated estimate revealed that participation in collective actions had adoption-increasing effect for each unit variation in propensity score rank, although, negative selection effect was suspected. Similarly, information acquisition, access to extension service and frequency of visit by extension workers are significant features that predict adoption in the study area. However, rosenbaum sensitivity analysis test revealed that the increasing effect of participation in collective actions on conservation agriculture adoption is insensitive to unobserved bias that may double or triple the odds of exposure to treatment. Hence, the average treatment effect on the treated estimate is a pure impact of the participation in collective actions. The study concluded that farmers with high propensity to participate in collective action have high likelihood to adopt climate-resilient farming practices compared to the counterparts with a lower propensity of participation in collective action.
Authors examined the growth of meal kit delivery services. They advance three arguments to explore the cultural phenomenon of these services. "Despite their investment in the performative dimensons of cooking as a way to reconnect with the food system, they also miss opportunities to address gender, culture, and waste, which limits the radical potential of that performativity."
12 pages, Current food systems fail to directly link urban consumers with rural producers. City-regional strategies need to reconnect consumers with producers through sustainable local food systems. This research developed and distributed a survey questionnaire to 400 consumers in Bangkok. Findings prove that there is a statistically significant association between urban-rural relation and sustainable urban consumer behavior (Pearson’s Chi-square test for independence resulting in a significance level of p < 0.05). Sustainable consumer behavior is influenced by environmental, sociocultural, economic and health drivers, while lack of food traceability, lack of rural experience, lack of access to rural communities and negative social perception disrupt consumer-producer links. Community-based gastrotourism emerges as one of the best practices to link urban consumers with rural producers and plan sustainable food systems in mega-cities like Bangkok.
