The shift from the conventional agri-food system to alternative practices is a challenging transition for agricultural producers, yet surprisingly under-studied. Little research has examined the social and cultural processes in rural communities that mobilize producers and construct and sustain producer-driven alternative food networks (AFNs). For AFNs to go beyond just offering “alternative foods” or “alternative networks” and to be constructed as “alternative economies”, this transformation in the producer community is indispensable. This paper presents a case study of a rural cooperative (...) in Shanxi, China. The discontent with both productivist agriculture and the social decay in communities motivated a group of women to engage in a decade-long process of social mobilization, cultural reconstruction, and learning by experimentation. Through this, they developed an alternative vision and successfully created a localized alternative socio-economic model, which I call “anti-productivism”. It prioritizes ecological sustainability, self-reliance, reciprocity, and cultural values over output maximization, productivity growth, commodity exchange, and monetary gains. This case contrasts sharply with the urban-initiated, consumer-driven AFNs studied in the China literature, which mostly just offered alternative foods but brought little change to the producer community. It shows that the alternative economy must be embedded in an alternative community united by strong social bonds and shared cultural values. (shrink)

Food justice scholars have criticized alternative food networks (AFNs) for lacking concern about gender, class, race, and ethnicity, thus not addressing structural inequalities. This paper further suggests that the incorporation of social justice into AFNs’ on-the-ground operations is critical in creating a more sustainable and just agri-food system that challenges the industrial and corporate-controlled food system. By exploring an urban–rural mutual aid cooperative in southwest China, this paper highlights a localized AFN that has successfully cultivated close social ties between ethnic (...) minority small farmers in remote areas and urban consumers. Through these ties, consumers’ desires for safe food are satisfied and some small producers’ livelihoods have improved. Yet, competing values between supporting small farmers and satisfying consumers’ needs create tensions in the co-op’s daily operation. Importantly, I demonstrate that failing to incorporate social justice into its construction of social embeddedness, existing inequalities of gender, class, and ethnicity within the co-op not only go unchallenged but rather underlie consumers’ trust in food quality and make women farmers all but invisible. Developing a situated and feminist framework of AFNs, this paper contributes to existing literature on AFNs by challenging and complicating the assumption of social embeddedness derived from Anglo-American contexts, as well as by focusing on women’s perceptions and lived experiences. (shrink)

Drawing on an exploratory study of urban food self-provisioning (FSP) in China, this article argues that progress in sustainability scholarship can be accelerated by embracing a greater diversity of framings of sustainability. It brings four important empirical findings concerning the prevalence of Chinese urban FSP, the social diversity of its practitioners, their primarily non-economic motivations, and production methods meeting the criteria for organic food that are deployed by more than a third of urban food growers. On this basis, the article (...) highlights the importance of greater attention to identifying and valuing ‘already existing sustainability’ in non-Western contexts, rather than privileging Western conceptualizations of sustainability that promise sustainability innovation in the future. (shrink)

Despite increasing attention to the sensors, drones, robots, and apps permeating agri-food systems, little attention has been paid to social media, perhaps the most ubiquitous digital technology in rural areas globally. This article draws on analysis of farming groups on Myanmar Facebook to posit social media as appropriated agritech: a generic technology incorporated into existing circuits of economic and social exchange that becomes a site of agrarian innovation. Through analysis of an original archive of popular posts collected from Myanmar-language Facebook (...) pages and groups related to agriculture, I explore the ways that farmers, traders, agronomists and agricultural companies use social media to further agrarian commerce and knowledge. These activities evidence that farmers use Facebook not only to exchange market or planting information, but also to interact in ways structured by existing social, political and economic relations. More broadly, my analysis builds on insights from STS and postcolonial computing to disrupt assumptions about the totalizing power of digital technologies and affirm the relevance of social media to agriculture, while inviting new research into the surprising, ambiguous relationships between small farmers and big tech. (shrink)