How Technologies, Identities and Idylls Can Steer Research Through Changing Agrifood Regimes

• In Event: Diversifying Agri-food STS Scholarship Across Transnational Borders I

Abstract

Techno-scientific agricultural research has tended to be supported by governments and endorsed by powerful business interests, primarily to make production greater, more efficient and less risky. Yet family farms still dominate agricultural production, and with increasing consumer affluence and concern about food, there is concurrent diversification in agrifood production. Niche and boutique production, collaborations between processors and producers, and development of vertically integrate businesses operating across value chains are widespread. Here, actors work to embed services (e.g. social identities or environmental outcomes) in their (food) products. Such forms of production rely on very different knowledge/power relations within agrifood systems to those oriented to increasing output, albeit within niches, and at the periphery.
This paper advances STS scholarship related to socio-technical regimes through an analysis of approximately 100 in-depth interviews with food producers and processors across the diverse agrifood sector of Tasmania, Australia. Different forms of institutionalised knowledge production were identifiable, and linked to very differently constituted trajectories of agrifood regimes, and vice versa. The analysis (which is preliminary at the time of submission) suggests that regimes oriented by techno-scientific knowledge tend to be large-scale, hierarchical and commodity focussed. Yet, in Tasmania, with agrifood actors are considering opportunities well beyond increasing factor productivity, knowledge production is widely considered as pluralistic, distributed with minimal roles for science or the state in the co-production of products, values and identities. I close by considering how research might support such plural, socio-technical regimes and thus its own ongoing legitimacy.

Author

• Peat Leith, University of Tasmania