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What's Alternative about Alternative Food Networks?

2003; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 35; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1068/a3621

1472-3409

Sarah Whatmore, Pierre M Stassart, H. Renting,

Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development

What's alternative about alternative food networks?The landscape of agrifood studies and politics in advanced industrial countries has changed dramatically in the last ten years or so.The productivist research and policy agendas that dominated for most of the second half of the last century magnified an intensification of agriculture and globalisation of food markets that promised to accelerate the eradication of embedded food networks.These agendas came to be epitomised by the relentless march of the `golden arches' celebrated in George Ritzer's Macdonaldization thesis (Ritzer, 1996).What more fitting reminder of inadequacies of this familiar orthodoxy than the news at the close of 2002 of Macdonald's enforced retrenchment of its fast food outlets following a sustained decline in profits and sales.Far from disappearing, those diverse and dynamic food networks that had been cast as remnant or marginal in the shadow of productivism have strengthened and proliferated.This unexpected turn of events has garnered unprecedented interest from researchers and policymakers in, variously, `alternative' and/or `quality' and/or `local' food networks (see Murdoch et al, 2000).These overlapping but nonidentical collective nouns consolidate a multiplicity of food networks from organics and fair trade to regional and artisanal products that represent some of the most rapidly expanding food markets in Europe over the last decade (for example, Michelsen et al, 1999).What they share in common is their constitution as/of food markets that redistribute value through the network against the logic of bulk commodity production; that reconvene `trust' between food producers and consumers; and that articulate new forms of political association and market governance.In this sense, alternative food networks represent an archetypal case of what Michel Callon and his colleagues at the Centre Sociologie de l'Innovation at the E è cole des Mines in Paris call the `economy of qualities'.The term signifies a gathering moment in market relations in which the conditions and competences of production, consumption, and regulation become molten in the heat of intense social reflexivity and, thereby, subject to reorganisation or `qualification' (Callon et al, 2002, pages 194 ^195).It is no coincidence that the new-found research and policy significance attached to these so-called `alternative food networks' (AFNs) is greatest in Europe whether in theoretical, political, or economic terms.Indeed, their `alternativeness' has come to be associated with an intensification of differences between (North) American and (Western) European food cultures and politics.For example, these differences play through a stylised analytical opposition between `political economy' and `actant network theory' (ANT; see Goodman, 1999); popular mobilisations against US cultural and corporate food imperialism (Bove¨and Dufour, 2001), and regulatory disputes between commercial and government players, as in the case of genetically modified foods (Barry, 2001).But, as the papers in this theme issue illustrate, they are just as important markers of the telling fractures and frictions in the social disputation of the future of food and farming within Europe (Mormont and van Huylenbroek, 2001).In the wake of a litany of food scares that have shaken consumer confidence in industrial foodstuffs; ongoing trade wars over protectionist tariffs and precautionary barriers; and an increasingly insupportable agricultural subsidy regime, AFNs have nourished new market, state, and civic practices and visions.