Agrifood Transitions in the Anthropocene: Challenges, Contested Knowledge, and the Need for Change

The greatest challenges of the twenty-first century stem from the fact that we are now living in a new epoch: the Anthropocene. The human footprint on the planet can no longer be denied.  One of the greatest and most essential human innovations, agriculture, is being increasingly recognised as a leading contributor to climate change.  According to global governance bodies, the world will need to feed a predicted nine billion people by 2050.  However, in this Anthropocene, we must address the environmental inequalities in how these people will be fed. This book explores our current societal struggles to transition towards more sustainable agrifood systems.  It suggests that debates around sustainable agriculture must be social as well as technical, exploring the growth of social movements campaigning for more democratic food systems.  However, as each chapter demonstrates, both the problems and the solutions in sustainable agriculture are highly contested. Using the term ′agrifood′ to capture the nexus between research, governance and the environment knowledge-environment-governance, this book provides an in-depth and wide-ranging account of current research around agricultural production and food consumption.

The book introduces the Anthropocene along with the fundamental question that it poses about human-nature interactions.  It outlines the core concerns related to agriculture and food and the debates around the need for agrifood system transitions. Each chapter investigates controversies in the field through case studies. These contributions offer a call for sociologists of agriculture and food to engage with the controversies unfolding in the Anthropocene.

Allison Marie Loconto (PhD, HDR in Sociology) is Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary
Laboratory for Science, Innovation and Society (LISIS) and a Research Professor at the
French National Institute for Research on Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE).
Dr. Loconto is Chief Editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Agriculture,
an Associate Editor for the Journal of Rural Studies and an editorial board member of
Agriculture and Human Values. Previously, she was a Science, Technology and
Society Fellow at Harvard University and a Visiting Scientist at the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Author of numerous academic and
practitioner oriented publications, she focuses on the governance of transitions to sustainable
food systems, specifically on the metrics, models, standards and systems of certification that
are part of emerging institutional innovations.

Douglas H. Constance is Professor of Sociology at Sam Houston State University in
Huntsville, Texas, USA. His degrees are in Forest Management (BS), Community
Development (MS) and Rural Sociology (PhD), all from the University of Missouri -
Columbia. His recent co-edited books are Alternative Agrifood Movements: Patterns of
Convergence and Divergence (2014) by Emerald Press and Contested Sustainability
Discourses in the Agrifood System (2018) by Earthscan Press. He is past president
of the Southern Rural Sociological Association (2003) and the Agriculture, Food,
and Human Values Society (2008), and past Editor-in-Chief of the Journal
of Rural Social Sciences. He is also past Chair of the Administrative Council
of the United States Department of Agriculture Southern Sustainable
Agriculture Research Education Program (USDA/SARE), where he served as the Quality of
Life Representative.