What are Agro-Food Systems?

In this short essay by Colin Sage about Agro-Food Systems he defines “Agro” as the part of the term that implies that there is a greater importance in the primary foods in the food system. The essay discusses how in the past forty years farmers have been limiting and changing the biodiversity to create a farmed “agroecosystems.” The food system has become a global entity that has the power to influence many countries around the world. Since the 1980’s there has been a great increase in complications of intellectual property rights surrounding foods as well as many financial investments. The industry has become so focused on export revenues and less on domestic production, with a small number of corporations controlling a large market. This huge growth of mass farming is placing farmers at risk with many of these new technologies causing harm to environmental factors like soil erosion and biodiversity loss. Sage states that the solution to these harmful environmental factors should be solved with “local conditions with local resources.” Supporters of the agro-food system feel that it is widening peoples range of diets and lowering the price of food for consumers. The cheaper food in many cases is not helping to curb the problem of nutrition. Many countries are exploiting their resources to the point of collapse for the financial benefit of exploitation. Sage believes that it is necessary to take a holistic perspective to the problem of food systems, and that we need to be questioning what and why we eat the way we do. He also feels that everyone should be educated in a way that makes them more concerned about environmental sustainability, social justice and nutritional security. 

After reading this short summary about issues involving the agro-food system I felt that Sage was pretty vague about some of the solutions that he proposed. An example was when he continued to use the term “environmental sustainability” when talking about solutions for changing global agri-food production. I understand that it was a short paper, but I wished that he had given a few concrete examples of what exactly environmental sustainability ment. Another aspect of the paper that I had some issues with was when he suggests that a solution to agri-food problems should be the individual action of changing what we eat. I think that this is a privileged action, because for many who rely on cheap food it does not seem possible to change those habits. The paper would have been much stronger in my opinion if Sage had discussed more institutional solutions to the institutional problems that he described in such detail. 

In this paper I found many connections to my working framework of food system education. Sage did a great job of overviewing some of the critical problems that I see in our global food systems and reminded me of some of the issues that I had forgotten about recently. I think that in many ways Sage holds many of the same viewpoints as I do, believing that citizens need to be more informed about the realities of the food system in order to make changes and sustain themselves. One aspect of the paper that I did learn from, and will try to improve in my own work, is not sounding too dictatorial and making sure that I provide many examples of both individual and institutional solutions. 

 

Reference: 

Castree, Hulme, and Proctor 2018, 2018. Companion to Environmental Studies. New York, NY: Routledge.