Building Diverse, Distributive, and Territorialized Agrifood Economies to Deliver Sustainability and Food Security

abstract

This article seeks to understand how agrifood economies can address current sustainability and food security challenges in the context of increasing economic and health inequalities. For that purpose, we cross-fertilize economic geography and food studies literature to develop an innovative conceptual framework that builds upon three currently fragmented bodies of work: the diverse economies literature, the distributed economies framework, and territorial and place-based approaches to food security. The proposed diverse, distributive, and territorial framework further develops existing relational, performative, and spatial approaches to explore changing economic geographies of agrifood systems. The application of this framework to investigate fruit and vegetable provision in the city of Cardiff (UK) reveals the key role of connective, fluid, and multifunctional infrastructures to reconfigure foodscapes. Specifically, our analysis shows how food infrastructures have the potential to act as bridging conceptual, material, and sociopolitical devices. The proposed framework ultimately serves as a capacity-building tool to reassess and rebuild territorialized agrifood economies that champion diversity and redistribution of value with the aim of delivering wide societal and material benefits, enhance democracy, and increase the socioecological resilience of food systems.

Key words:

• agrifood economies
• diverse economies
• distributed economies
• place-based approaches
• territorial food security

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the reviewers and the editor, Jane Pollard, for their insightful comments that have contributed to the improvement of the article. We are also thankful to research participants in Cardiff. Part of the research leading to these results has received funding from the EUs 7th Framework Programme, theme KBBE.2013.2.5-01 Grant agreement no. 613532. The main author also acknowledges the funding of the European Commission and the Welsh government, which supported her Ser Cymru fellowship, and the funding of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities that currently supports her Ramón y Cajal fellowship. These results reflect only the authors view; the funders are not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

Notes

¹ Vegetable box schemes deliver fresh fruit and vegetables, often locally grown and organic, directly to customers or collection points.

² These meetings took place between January 2013 and May 2016, and include two dedicated sessions on fruit and vegetable provision in Cardiff.

³ See other examples of diverse economies studies on cooperatives in Gibson-Graham (2006).