Exploring Agrifood Transitions in the Anthropocene

Résumé En

While global governance bodies have seemed to agree that the world will need to feed a predicted nine billion people by 2050, the recognition of the Anthropocene reveals the need to reduce environmental externalities and inequalities in how these people will be fed. The surging push from social movements to foster more democratic food systems demonstrates that these sorts of debates must be social as well as technical, as the problems, as well as the solutions are highly contested. These contestations are often at the intersections of knowledge and governance as the ability to contest a proposed solution to a societal problem is often derived from the inability to find consensus in scientific and political definitions of the problem itself. This knowledge–environment–governance nexus in studies of agriculture and food is encapsulated in the term agrifood. This term has been used – since 1960 – to refer to the continuum of practices and relations between actors from agricultural production to food consumption. A specific programme within agrifood studies has been placing analyses of the dominant agrifood system actors in dialogue with alternative agrifood movements, which are actively co-constituting real utopias around the world. With the arrival of the global COVID-19 pandemic, it has become painfully obvious that our societies are ill-prepared to deal with the current conditions of life in the Anthropocene. The zoonotic virus that has crippled economies and exposed the weaknesses in democratic institutions is a direct result of how we produce and consume food. Thus, a volume that brings to light current societal struggles to transition towards more sustainable agrifood systems is particularly timely.