by Ian Scoones There’s a vegan craze in full swing in Brighton in the UK – and it seems more broadly. There was a vegan festival near my house the…
The vegan craze: what does it mean for pastoralists?
Narratives of scarcity and the global land rush
by Ian Scoones Narratives of scarcity dominate policy discourses about resources, including land. This was certainly the case during the peak of the global land rush, as we show in a…
BioLeft: experimenting with open source seed innovation in Argentina
by Patrick van Zwanenberg and Anabel Marin (Conicet / Cenit / UNSAM) It is sometimes said that plant breeders breed their aspirations about how agricultural production systems ought to function…
Contextualising life histories in Tamil Nadu
by Divya Sharma and V. Gajendra, Relational Pathways project In the Relational Pathways project we are trying to understand the pathways in and out of poverty for farmers in India…
What role does rural people’s agency play in finding pathways out of poverty?
by Saurabh Arora, Divya Sharma, M. Vijaybaskar, Ajit Menon and Joanes Atela This is the inaugural blog post for the project Relational Pathways: Mapping Agency and Poverty Dynamics through Green…
Where is the agency of farmers in Africa’s ‘new Green Revolution’?
by Joanes Atela, Charles Tonui, Dominic Glover and Saurabh Arora Hunger and food insecurity have continued to persist in sub-Saharan Africa. To address these problems, during the last decade there…
Seeding ideas: knowledge brokering and recombination for agricultural transformations
by Adrian Ely, Paddy Van Zwanenberg, Elise Wach, Martin Obaya and Almendra Cremaschi Straight after the ‘Transformations 2017’ conference, the ‘Pathways’ network gathered at the mid-point in our three year…
Why agrarian studies should confront the rise of authoritarian, populist movements
Last week I was in Russia at the fascinating fifth BRICS Initiative in Critical Agrarian Studies conference. Throughout the event we heard about the emergence of particular styles of authoritarian populist regimes,…
Coming to terms with messiness: What is a ‘Transformation Lab’?
In this blog post, Laura Pereira explains the idea of a ‘Transformation Lab’ (T-lab). T-labs are being used in our Pathways Network project in 6 countries to try to enable…
The global food system still benefits the rich at the expense of the poor
Ramen noodles in Sweden, wheat bread in Tanzania and Chilean wines in China. The cross-Atlantic transit of the potato and the tomato from the Andes to Europe, and back again…