Version 3.2
Post-growth agrifood systems: now
Contemporary agrifood systems are infected with growth-thinking. Too often, food production is out of balance in all dimensions–relations to soils, animals, landscape ecologies, and relationships between producers and consumers. Bad agricultural policies prop-up fundamentally unsustainable agrifood systems. They produce too much of the wrong kinds of food, at the expense of human health, animal wellbeing, agricultural livelihoods, and rural communities and landscapes. Nature itself must pay the full costs in the end.
To detach food production from the growth model is to change the world. This session assembles examples of creative circuits of food production and consumption that exist now: some based on ancient cultural ways and others contemporary –all relevant to the ethics of post-growth human ecologies. Presentations feature cases of post-growth food production, distribution, business, culture, and/or governance, but also include analytical exploration of how post-growth food systems emerge, are maintained, or further developed in the face of myriad challenges. Re-embedding our food systems in bioregional agroecosystems and regenerating biocultural diversity, growing food cultures centered on sufficiency and stewardship, and establishing food commons and sharing networks are confronted by very real economic questions of securing livelihoods, ensuring just labor conditions, and balancing trade, access, and food security. The session will provide a window into post-growth food systems now and where they might be headed in the future. (McGreevy et al. 2022)
Info
Day:
2023-08-30
Start time:
10:45
Duration:
00:15
Room:
ZV-8-4
Type:
Special Session
Theme:
Alternative economies
