Working Group 4.7

Inventing Sustainable Agriculture? Alternative Agricultures, Agricultural Sciences and Social Movements

Convenors:
Christian Deverre, INRA, deverre@avignon.inra.fr
Pierre Stassart, Liege University, Belgium, p.stassart@ulg.ac.be

The search for sustainability seems to be driving main changes in agricultural production systems, under the influence of the ecologisation of agricultural policy, of new environmental and social market standards, and of pressure from environmental and consumers associations. Organic agriculture has been institutionalised in some countries as the model to reach such sustainability, but other types of agriculture are also claiming to be sound alternatives to the dominant industrialised production system. These alternative agricultures are promoted by agricultural scientists and extentionists, farmers’ movements, commercial firms and/or environmental associations. We can mention here, as examples, the different schools of agroecology or ecoagriculture, Integrated production, Conservation tillage, Low input agriculture, Precision farming… Some of these initiatives pay particular attention to changes at the farm level, while others put the emphasis on the need for deep transformations at the scale of the entire food system, calling for re-localisation of marketing or changes in consumption patterns.
The workshop will address studies of these alternative agricultures, focusing in particular on:

1. the origins of such initiatives and their dynamics;
2. their relations to agricultural sciences and social movements inside and outside rural society;
3. the social basis on which they intend to grow;
4. the assessment of their capacity to meet sustainability goals, both ecological and social, and to lead to the development of alternative agri-food systems;
5. the institutionalisation processes in which they get involved at the regional, national or international level (political recognition, commercial labelling, citizen’s certification…).

Organic agriculture studies will be outside the scope of this workshop, except for comparisons with these alternative agricultures.