An official website of the United States government
Abstract The United States and China are key nations in global agricultural and food trade. They share a complex bilateral agri-food trade network in which disruptions could have a global ripple effect. Yet, we do not understand the spatially resolved connections in the bilateral US–China agri-food trade. In this study, we estimate the bilateral agri-food trade between Chinese provinces and U.S. states and counties. First, we estimate bilateral imports and exports of agri-food commodities for provinces and states. Second, we model link-level connections between provinces and states/counties. To do this, we develop a novel algorithm that integrates a variety of national and international databases for the year 2017, including trade data from the US Census Bureau, the US Freight Analysis Framework database, and Multi-Regional Input-Output tables for China. We then adapt the food flow model for inter-county agri-food movements within the US to estimate bilateral trade through port counties. We estimate 2,954 and 162,922 link-level connections at the state-province and county-province resolution, respectively, and identify core nodes in the bilateral agri-food trade network. Our results provide a spatially detailed mapping of the US–China bilateral agri-food trade, which may enable future research and inform decision-makers.
more »
« less
Setting data free: The politics of open data for food and agriculture
Open data is increasingly being promoted as a route to achieve food security and agricultural development. This article critically examines the promotion of open agri-food data for development through a document-based case study of the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative as well as through interviews with open data practitioners and participant observation at open data events. While the concept of openness is striking for its ideological flexibility, we argue that GODAN propagates an anti-political, neoliberal vision for how open data can enhance agricultural development. This approach centers values such as private innovation, increased production, efficiency, and individual empowerment, in contrast to more political and collectivist approaches to openness practiced by some agri-food social movements. We further argue that open agri-food data projects, in general, have a tendency to reproduce elements of “data colonialism,” extracting data with minimal consideration for the collective harms that may result, and embedding their own values within universalizing information infrastructures.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1749184
- PAR ID:
- 10470502
- Publisher / Repository:
- Sage
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- New Media & Society
- Volume:
- 25
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 1461-4448
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1935 to 1959
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Food and agriculture have recently become focal points of tech sector innovation and financing. Rapidly multiplying agri-food tech startups are promising to import the tech sector’s trademark disruptive innovation into an industry they deem sclerotic, inefficient, and unsustainable. This paper interrogates the cultural and market frictions attending Silicon Valley’s foray into food and agriculture through the lens of what is perhaps the tech sector’s most prominent narrative genre: the public investment pitch. Building on scholarship that views pitching as a performative practice, we show how pitches serve to mediate the tech sector’s entrée into this established industry. Our analysis of four key moments of the agri-food tech pitch reveal how carefully curated framings of agri-food problems and solutions work to reconcile the world-changing ambition and profit-making potential demanded by Silicon Valley investors with the deeply entrenched political economic realities of food and agriculture. Our analysis also suggests a tendency towards ‘non-disruptive disruption’ (Goldstein, J., 2018. Planetary improvement: Cleantech entrepreneurship and the contradictions of green capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Despite nods to disrupting the established industry, the tech sector primarily offers incremental improvements on existing technologies, often developed or marketed in partnership with industry incumbents, underscoring the distinction between technological disruption on the one hand and genuine systemic transformation on the other.more » « less
-
Designed to be “wilderness” spaces with minimal human impact, the establishment of national parks contributed to dispossessing Indigenous peoples from traditional territories across North America, preventing access to dwindling populations of wildlife essential to cultural and material well-being. With the systematic near extermination of buffalo during the nineteenth century and forcible relocation of Tribes onto reservations, Tribal food systems collapsed. Tribal Nations across the Great Plains are now restoring buffalo to support food sovereignty and political resurgence, while re-asserting a presence in national parks where Indigenous hunting remains prohibited. This article focuses on the Blackfoot-led Iinnii Initiative working to restore free-roaming buffalo (Bison bison) along the Rocky Mountain Front, supported by Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks. Recognizing Tribal rights to hunt buffalo in these parks would enable Tribal hunters to exercise practices that challenge the idea of national parks as wilderness. We coproduce this article as Blackfoot and non-Indigenous scholars and activists, drawing on interviews with restoration practitioners, Blackfoot knowledge holders, and park and other government officials to explore distinct narratives of what it would mean to enable Tribal hunting in national parks, with implications for food sovereignty, political resurgence, and wildlife management. We argue that openness within parks agencies to Indigenous hunting suggests a potential watershed moment for reimagining the role of people in parks. Through this, we examine important links between food sovereignty, political sovereignty, biodiversity conservation, and decolonization.more » « less
-
Abstract Achieving large-scale, transformative climate change adaptations in agriculture while mitigating further climate impacts and supporting sustainable and equitable rural livelihoods is a grand challenge for society. Transformation of the agri-food system is necessary and inevitable, but the extent to which transformation can be intentionally guided toward desirable states remains unclear. We argue that instead of targeting leverage points in isolation, coordinated interventions multiple leverage points and their interactions are necessary to create broader system transformation towards more adaptive futures. Using the Southeastern U.S. as a case study, we conceptualize a way of doing transformation research in agri-food systems that integrates multiple theoretical and practical perspectives of how transformative pathways can be constructed from ‘chains’ of interacting leverage points. We outline several principles for transformative research; the core of which are participatory, transdisciplinary, and convergence research methods needed for articulating a shared vision. These principles embrace an action-oriented approach to research in which the act of assembling diverse networks of researchers, stakeholders, and community partners itself can activate community- and regional-level leverage points to scale-up changes. Finally, we present tangible examples of specific leverage points and their interactions targeted by agri-food systems interventions currently underway or planned. This work offers an ‘anticipatory’ vision for agri-food systems transformation research that recognizes the need to normatively create an enabling environment to build momentum toward shared visions of secure, equitable, and sustainable regional agri-food systems.more » « less
-
Rather than treating symptoms of a destructive agri-food system, agricultural policy, research, and advocacy need both to address the root causes of dysfunction and to learn from longstanding interventions to counter it. Specifically, this paper focuses on agricultural parity policies – farmer-led, government-enacted programs to secure a price floor and manage supply to prevent the economic and ecological devastation of unfettered corporate agro-capitalism. Though these programs remain off the radar in dominant policy, scholarship, and civil society activism, but in the past few years, vast swaths of humanity have mobilized in India to call for agri-food systems transformation through farmgate pricing and market protections. This paper asks what constitutes true farm justice and how it could be updated and expanded as an avenue for radically reimagining agriculture and thus food systems at large. Parity refers to both a pricing ratio to ensure livelihood, but also a broader farm justice movement built on principles of fair farmgate prices and cooperatively coordinated supply management. The programs and principles are now mostly considered “radical,” deemed inefficient, irrelevant, obsolete, and grievous government overeach—but from the vantage, we argue, of a system that profits from commodity crop overproduction and agroindustry consolidation. However, by examining parity through a producer-centric lens cognizant of farmers‘ ability, desire, and need to care for the land, ideas of price protection and supply coordination become foundational, so that farmers can make a dignified livelihood stewarding land and water while producing nourishing food. This paradox—that an agricultural governance principle can seem both radical and common sense, far-fetched and pragmatic—deserves attention and analysis. As overall numbers of farmers decline in Global North contexts, their voices dwindle from these conversations, leaving space for worldviews favoring de-agrarianization altogether. In Global South contexts maintaining robust farming populations, such policies for deliberate de-agrarianization bely an aggression toward rural and peasant ways of life and land tenure. Alongside the history of parity programs, principles, and movements in U.S., the paper will examine a vast version of a parity program in India – the Minimum Support Price (MSP) system, which Indian farmers defended and now struggle to expand into a legal right. From East India to the plains of the United States and beyond, parity principles and programs have the potential to offer a pragmatic direction for countering global agro-industrial corporate capture, along with its de-agrarianization, and environmental destruction. The paper explores what and why of parity programs and movements, even as it addresses the complexity of how international parity agreements would unfold. It ends with the need for global supply coordination grounded in food sovereignty and solidarity, and thus the methodological urgency of centering farm justice and agrarian expertise.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231174520
