New Food Courses and Update -- Spots in Faculty Workshop on Transitions to Sustainable Food Systems
Sally Smyth
Finally, we want to alert you to a new workshop that the Berkeley Food Institute is sponsoring this fall. This research-oriented workshop is NOT a course and is primarily aimed at faculty. It meets 12-2 pm on seven Tuesdays. We will have several spots free for advanced graduate students from all schools and disciplines who would like to participate in the workshop. Participants must be able to attend every meeting. If you are interested in the workshop, please email to Alastair Iles (il...@berkeley.edu) a couple of paragraphs describing your background and interests in food/agriculture. We will send these details to the workshop director, Prof. Olivier de Schutter, in order to choose student participants.
BERKELEY FOOD INSTITUTE
FACULTY WORKSHOP :
TRANSITIONS TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS
The workshop is conceived as a platform for exchanges and shared learning between researchers from different disciplines including ecology, environmental science, social science, law, policy, public health, and nutrition, whose combined perspectives can contribute to the understanding of how to transform food systems at regional, national, and international levels for greater environmental and human health, social equity, and resilience.
The workshop is convened every Tuesday at 12-2 pm in 112 Hilgard Hall between September 3rd and September 17th and between October 29th and November 19th.
Seven sessions in total are planned. They will be led by Olivier De Schutter, visiting professor during the Fall semester, in collaboration with Alastair Iles and Claire Kremen, the Faculty co-directors of the BFI.
The workshop, it is hoped, will help generate ongoing discussions, learning, and perhaps set the stage for future projects and/or publications. It will encourage interdisciplinary dialogue by focusing on the ability of food systems to adapt to a new set of expectations and to a dynamic environment -- in other terms, their ability to learn --, and how these can be connected to institutions, scientific research, policies, or social movements.
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The global food regime that has been dominant since the post-Second World War era has defined increasing food availability and reducing the cost of food to the end consumer as its primary objectives. The insufficiencies of this approach are now widely acknowledged. This productivist paradigm has led to a range of negative environmental consequences, contributing to soil degradation and soil and water pollution, to the erosion of genetic diversity, loss of biodiversity, and to the acceleration of climate change. It has led to repressed wages in the food sector, and to encourage concentration of farms as less competitive family farms have been driven out of business in large numbers. It has also contributed to the current surge in overweight and obesity and to associated non-communicable diseases, with the emphasis on calorie availability leading to a neglect of the links between agriculture, food and health, and the need for sufficiently diverse diets. Instead, the system of subsidies for major cereals, particularly corn, and for soybean, has favored the growth of the processing food industry which benefited from the availability of cheap inputs. The long-term sustainability of the current system is severely jeopardized by its considerable dependency on fossil energies, on the farm but also in the transport, processing and packaging stages of the industrialized food chain. Finally, the dominant food regime has had severe impacts on developing countries, which gradually increased their dependency on foodstuffs originating in OECD countries where overproduction has been the rule, reducing any incentive for poor countries to invest in producing for themselves.
Change is needed. But how to achieve this? The workshop will build on the various strengths within and around the Berkeley Food Institute, to build a common understanding of the opportunities for change, of the obstacles to be overcome, and of how to succeed in a transition toward sustainable food systems -- or systems that are healthy, just and resilient.
We will first aim to clarify what sustainability means to food systems, and how it can be measured -- which raises issues of definition, but also of indicators and trade-offs between the various components of sustainability (session 1). We hope that, collectively, the participants can cover all the components of sustainability (related to environmental sustainability, social equity, public health, but also the impacts on international markets and in the global South of our production and consumption patterns in the North), and identify the most relevant indicators associated with each of these dimensions.
We will then contrast two versions of how to succeed in the "transition" to sustainable food systems (session 2). The first version aims at reforming the dominant regime, by changing the behavior of the various actors of that regime. This can be done at the initiative of the State, at the initiative of the market actors themselves, or by consumers, who may express certain expectations by their purchasing practices. However, because the dominant regime is characterized by the combination of various components (socio-technical, socio-cultural and socio-economic) that have co-evolved and that mutually reinforce each other, a deep transformation is extremely difficult to achieve, and most changes will instead be of an incremental nature. Another version oftransition therefore may be required. This second version sees the transition as the result of citizens' initiatives, building various alternatives to the dominant regime, often through local initiatives, and gradually disseminating them by inspiring similar experiments in an often uncoordinated, context-specific manner. Such initiatives are not simply "niches" in which experiments take place, that aim to be coopted in the dominant regime and thus remain experimental only during a first, "maturing" stage, before helping to improve the dominant regime: instead, they often aim at remaining independent, broadening the range of choices for actors, encouraging the actors to question their roles in the food systems. These initiatives lead to the emergence of alternative food systems, coexisting with the dominant regime. They promote a form of "sociodiversity", thus contributing to a collective search for solutions to the challenges of sustainability.
In order to understand both the potentials and the limitations of the first of these two versions of transition, sessions 3 and 4 will review some of the tools that public authorities (at multiple levels, from municipalities to federal government) and market actors have developed in order to take into account the demand for sustainability. For example, we will discuss the added value of planning transition through national strategies and how such planning can be designed; public purchasing practices by public entities; the use of economic incentives (subsidies and taxation); as well as the problems associated with these various tools that public authorities have traditionally relied upon. We will then review some of the tools relied upon by the agrifood sector, including codes of conduct, the adoption of private standards, multistakeholder initiatives, etc. We will also discuss the respective advantages of a territorial approach, that public authorities could conduct at various levels (local, state, federal), and of a chain-wide approach, led by market actors through supply chain management. We will ask about the kind of learning that such approaches have allowed or facilitated, and in particular whether such approaches have led the actors concerned not only to improve their policies in the light of their objectives (single-loop learning), but also to adopt new values or set new objectives for themselves (double-loop learning).
Sessions 5 and 6 will explore the potentials of transition through citizens-led initiatives, such as CSA schemes, community gardens, experiments such as "Food Revolution" or proposals such as the "Food Commons". We will ask whether generalizable lessons can be drawn from the success or failure of such initiatives; what are the potential obstacles to such initiatives developing on a larger scale, and how such obstacles could be overcome; how such initiatives relate to the dominant food regime; and what roles other actors (such as the State, collaborations between States and communities or NGOs, or food policy councils) could play in supporting them. A new theory about transitions could emerge from this exploration, that would insist on "triple-loop" learning, understood as the ability of actors to change not only their values, but also their identities and the roles they play in the food systems, questioning the existing, specialized differentiation of roles that the dominant food system imposes on its various actors. We will also discuss the types of scientific research that a diagnostic monitoring of such social innovations requires. For instance, participatory action research, in which the relationship between the actors and the researcher becomes dialectic for the benefit of both, may be especially useful in understanding the motivations of actors and the obstacles they face, and in designing solutions that will be truly useful. But other methods of research could also be designed, with a view to mapping and critically assessing alternative food systems.
Session 7 will draw some provisional conclusions and identify the next steps in what could be a joint endeavour of faculty members working through the BFI.