Entangled alternatives: political-economic conditions constructing farmer training programs as solutions to the farming crisis
Abstract
This article contributes to debates about the potential of alternative food networks and their contradictions using sustainability-oriented farmer training programs as a case study. I provide an empirical account of the political-economic structures at play in the construction of farmer trainings as a solution to the farming crisis, as well as the possibilities and tensions herein. I argue that that the main rationale framing the farming problem in the public-institutional discourse – namely the apolitical production of a scarcity of farmers – and its discursive usage in popular and institutional circles directs the solution towards the urgent production of more farmers who will farm sustainably and independently of the current structural conditions in which farming is embedded. On the ground, this apolitical ecology is sustained by philanthropism and consumption elitism. In addition, the making of FTPs as an intervention to solve the farming crisis is determined by neoliberal governance structures that promote the devolution of power into the NGO sector and responsibilization of individuals. I finally call for a broader and non-binary vision to alternatives, in which political ecology perspectives bring relevant tools and insights. The case of FTPs throws light into the particular governmentalities, forms of governing at-a-distance, and whiteness associated with sustainable farming and agriculture, and the way society thinks of it.
Keywords: farmer training programs, emergent farmers, sustainable agriculture, alternatives, alternative food networks, NGOization of farming, power, privilege, California
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https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1823202
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Alkon, A.H. and J. Agyeman (eds.). 2011. Cultivating food justice: race, class, and sustainability. Cambridge: MIT Press.
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Anguelovski, I. 2015. Alternative food provision conflicts in cities: contesting food privilege, injustice, and whiteness in Jamaica Plain, Boston. Geoforum 58: 184–194.
Argüelles, L. 2020. Growing farming heroes? Politics of imaginaries within farmer training programs in California. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, in press. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1823202
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Argüelles, L., I, Anguelovski and F. Sekulova. 2018. Artificial quality food, urban-rural politics, and the new forms of rule for farmers embedded in direct marketing strategies. Journal of Rural Studies 62: 10-20.
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Bradley, K. and H. Herrera. 2016. Decolonizing food justice: naming, resisting, and researching colonizing forces in the movement. Antipode 48(1): 97–114.
Brown, S. and C. Getz. 2008. Privatizing farm worker justice: regulating labor through voluntary certification and labeling. Geoforum 39(3): 1184–1196.
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Busa, J.H. and R. Garder. 2015. Champions of the movement or fair-weather heroes? Individualization and the (a)politics of local food. Antipode 47(2): 323–341.
California Certified Organic Farmers. 2015. Future organic farmer grant fund. https://www.ccof.org/ccof-foundation/future-organic-farmer-grant-fund Retrieved April 12, 2020
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McCarthy, J. 2006. Neoliberalism and the politics of alternatives: community forestry in British Columbia and the United States. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96(1): 84–104.
Meek, D. and R. Tarlau. 2016. Critical food systems education (CFSE): educating for food sovereignty. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 40(3): 237–260.
Minkoff-Zern, L.-A. 2018. Race, immigration and the agrarian question: farmworkers becoming farmers in the United States. The Journal of Peasant Studies 45(2): 389–408.
Mitchell, J. 2015. A young generation sees greener pastures in agriculture. National Public Radio, January 3.
Mostafanezhad, M., K. Suryanata, S. Azizi and N. Milne. 2015. 'Will weed for food': the political economy of organic farm volunteering in Hawai'i. Geoforum 65: 125–133.
Murphy, M. 2012. Seizing the means of reproduction: entanglements of feminism, health, and technoscience. Durham: Duke University Press.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2458/v27i1.23241
