Dear Colleagues,
Agri-food economies are socio-technical systems converting natural resources into food and ecosystem services and distributing them to consumers mainly through supply chains and markets. This book considers agri-food economies as “economies on their own” distinct to economies in general since they deliver food, which is indispensable for the continuity and quality of human life, and they are located at the complex interface between nature and society.
Today, technological global agri-food economies dominated by vertically integrated, large enterprises are failing in meeting the challenge of feeding a growing global population within the limits of “planetary boundaries” and they are characterized by a “triple fracture” between agri-food economies and their three constitutive elements: nature, consumers and producers.
In parallel to this crisis, new eco-ethical driven agri-food economies are built around new farming and food distribution practices. By exploring these new emerging agri-food economies in both developing and developed countries, this book develops a multidisciplinary discussion on the re-construction of local and regional agri-food economies as a solution to existing global agri-food economy crises. At a farm level, in contrast with the specialization and productivism of the modernized farming model, new farming practices grounded in ecological and biocultural principles and multifunctional diversification have emerged. At the supply chain and market level, in the last twenty years, we have witnessed the emergence of alternative food networks (AFNs) and/or short food supply chains (SFSCs,): alternative arrangements to the more standardized or conventional food supply and distribution chains, which relies on the notions of ‘ diversity’ ‘equity’ ‘transparency’, ‘quality’, ‘place’, and ‘sustainability’ and ‘community’. In alterity to the deterritorialization of the global agro-industrial food chain, the reterritorialization processes of AFNs/SFSCs moves towards food re-localization and re-socialization.
