DIE ERDE – Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin
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Agri-Food Systems and Constitutional Disputes in Latin America: Hegemony and Production of Rationality in Chile’s Constitutional Processes
Full text linkSince the late 1990s, various Latin American countries have held constitutional processes as mechanisms for channeling social conflicts, in which food systems and rural territories stood out as relevant topics. In Chile, the neoliberal agrarian policy of largely uncontrolled agricultural intensification that used to receive broad-based international praise is facing increasing criticism due to its negative impact on the stability of ecosystems and society. This growing dissatisfaction led food systems and agrarian policy to become a focal point of debate in the Chilean constitutional process starting in 2020. In this context, our research seeks to analyze the actors and positions taken on food systems and rural territories in this process, as well as their underlying power structures, which resulted in the constitutional proposal’s rejection in a plebiscite held in 2022. To this end, we review the Constitutional Convention debates and four political campaigns for the plebiscite. We assume that the reasons for the constitutional proposal’s rejection are not to be primarily found in the constitutional commission debate on agri-food systems. Rather, they are a consequence of communication strategies mobilizing values and meaning among many inhabitants of rural territories by targeting their identity. By connecting the theory of agri-food geographies and critical rural studies, we consider that these strategies relate to the emergence of new right-wing populisms opposed to political proposals seeking solutions to the current socio-ecological crisis
Book Review: Handbuch Kritische Stadtgeographie. Verstehen - Verhandeln - Verändern: Belina, Bernd, Matthias Naumann, Anke Strüver (Hrsg.). Handbuch Kritische Stadtgeographie. Münster 2024
No full textDisrupting Colonial Trauma Through the Hyperconsumption of Outside Foods in India? A Digital Food Consumer Citizenship
Full text linkThis article addresses the understudied intersection of digital food cultures, consumer citizenship, and colonial trauma within the context of India. While existing scholarship has examined food cultures in India and their colonial legacies, the role of internet-mediated practices in reconfiguring these dynamics remains understudied. This article bridges this gap by conceptualizing digital food consumer citizenship and analyzing how digital spaces mediate aspirational eating of outside foods as both a continuation of socio economic inequalities and a potential disruption of colonial trauma. To begin, the article examines the global history of Indian cuisine, exposing how colonial culinary politics shaped enduring inequalities and cultural hierarchies. Secondly, consumer citizenship debates open perspectives on participation in the era of economic liberalization and food cultures crossing class and urban-rural boundaries. Third, the analysis of digital food economies introduces the concept of smart food spaces to describe digital and sensor-driven transformations in food consumption settings, critiquing their role in hyperconsumption alongside their disruptive possibilities. The article moves on to explore aspirational eating in internet-mediated food cultures among India’s heterogenous urban middle classes, particularly younger generations, as an expression of participatory global food citizenship that challenges post-colonial classifications. By foregrounding subaltern agency and diverse innovative practices, such as adaptive digital platforms of local community kitchens, the article explores the potential of digital food cultures to de-center global power structures, disrupt colonial legacies, and create counter spaces that thrive otherwise. Finally, it proposes empirical research directions to further understand digital food consumer citizenship and its implications for food justice
Sovereignty Beyond the Human: ASF in the German-Polish Borderland
Full text linkIn this paper, we explore sovereignty over territory and animal population health (intersecting borderlines) via spatial logics of disease control measures addressing African swine fever (ASF), a hemorrhagic fever caused by a virus (African swine fever virus; ASFV) that is deadly for wild boars and pigs. Biosecurity understandings rooted in epidemiology and situated at the farm and lab are challenged by the expansive geography of ASF. Wild boars’ cross-border mobility, along with human factors, further contribute to the spread of ASF across the landscape. Under orders from veterinary authorities, enrolled actors on both sides of the territorial border between Germany and Poland seek to limit ASF’s spread. Ethnographic research methods combined with an analysis of narratives in official statements/ media sources reveal the countries’ incongruences in applying spatial confinement measures and enrolled actors’ relational understandings of ASF risk that differ in placing blame over these borderlines. As a result of a perceived knowledge gap, fences are not erected on the Polish side, along with other measures deemed necessary by the German authorities to control the disease spread among wild boars. In attempting to resolve this gap in the biosecurity apparatus over controlling the intraspecies boundary, territorial borders are reinstated, and a spatial gap is enlarged between it and that of pigs and wild boars. However, the insurance of sovereignty aimed at controlling one’s territory and over animal health populations in doing so remains influenced by economic and social differences in relation to domestic pig economies and wild boar populations that create rifts in possible cross-border and cross-group cooperation
Brewing Resistance: Indigenous Knowledge and the Contestation of Colonial Powers Through Value Chains for Coffee—A Literature Review
Full text linkThrough a literature review, we examine how Indigenous Knowledge (IK) is addressed in studies of value chains (VCs) for coffee and the types of knowledge recognized. We undertake a decolonial critique of capitalocentric paradigms, prioritizing place-based ontologies and relational socioecological practices to rethink coffee quality and value creation. Indeed, “quality” and “value” are grounded in the lived experiences of those who sustain the land—Indigenous and peasant communities. Actors’ epistemologies sustain coffee VCs through context-specific responses to systemic, epistemic, and ideological crises while asserting governance models for their well-being alongside dominant frameworks. Although research on coffee VCs has been extensive, it rarely engages these knowledge systems through a decolonial lens. Consequently, the political and epistemic significance of place-based and relational knowledge in shaping coordination mechanisms—such as quality and value—remains insufficiently theorized and empirically overlooked. Emerging interdisciplinary research on actors’ positionalities frames VCs not as neutral commodity exchanges but as contested political arenas where situated knowledge systems actively reshape and re-signify the value of coffee. This paper moves beyond listing Indigenous practices or diagnosing the still-colonial industry structures. It demonstrates how IK-based practices constitute situated responses to coloniality’s multiple dimensions. Therefore, we foreground not only critique but agency, as observed in agroecological practices, narratives of cultural identity, community-based governance, or cooperative management
Food and Power in the Making: The Double Movement and New Geographies of Food
Full text linkThis paper shows how different actors and issues in the food system redefine not just who makes our food but also what food means to us at a societal level, extending earlier frameworks that define food as a commodity, a right, and a common good. The analysis starts by tracing foundational concepts to understand food and power in the making, including patterns of concentration, global food regimes, empire, and corporate power. It then reviews acts of resistance. Polanyi’s double movement is introduced, alongside conventional and alternative food system models and social movements, to interpret resistance. The paper reveals significant power asymmetries and lock-ins and shows how neoliberalism can resist or respond to calls for change and find ways for food as commodity to reassert itself. The final part of the paper considers the land-food-climate nexus, including metabolic food politics, and calls for an additional more-than-human perspective to be developed to interpret these latest geographies of food and power. This new framing is essential because it is not only about who makes and remakes our food, or even our society, but more fundamentally the sustainable future of our planet
Rural Producers’ Discourses on the Brazilian Agricultural Frontier: Between Local and External Narratives on Land and Forest
Full text linkThe Brazilian Amazon is a region deeply influenced by historical development dynamics and resource extraction. In it, rural producers (RPs) are often held responsible for the increasing deforestation of the biome. This article explores the intricate relationship between national and global discourses and narratives of RPs in Novo Progresso (NP), an emblematic municipality located along the BR-163 highway on the agricultural frontier in the Brazilian Amazon. The study seeks to answer the question: How do RPs’ historical and present positioning and narratives shape land use and management on the agricultural frontier in NP? To comprehensively understand these dynamics, the research incorporates the RPs’ narratives within the historical context of local, national, and international discourses that contribute to land-related decision-making, migration, displacement, and socio-environmental issues, including widespread deforestation. The article situates the RPs in three historical trends: the construction of BR-163, the onset of external pressure, and the current advance of the agricultural frontier. Through biographical interviews, the study connects the RPs’ narratives with national and international developmental discourses in and for the region, providing insights into how RPs perceive the socio-environmental dynamics in NP. The results present various discourses that have impacted biographies and local land dynamics, further developing socio-environmental issues. In addition, the position of the RPs in the region and their biographies contribute to the discussion on determining how to deal with the region’s socio-environmental issues
Shifting Borders, Disturbance, and Temporary Nature: Contested Wildlife in Opencast Lignite Mines in Germany
Full text linkThis paper explores the legal and socio-ecological dynamics of lignite mining landscapes, focusing on the borders and extraction frontiers that shape these environments. It conceptualizes disturbance as a socio-ecological process that generates ecotonal dynamics, where nutrient-poor, sparsely vegetated surfaces of opencast mines mirror the ecological features of other habitats, fostering specialized ecosystems. Drawing from border studies, more-than-human geographies, and ethnographic methods, the article examines the paradoxes of lignite mining by analyzing the co-constitutive relationships between human and nonhuman actors. It delves into how environmental disturbance reshapes the mining landscape, emphasizing the fluidity and complexity of borders and frontiers. The analysis transcends the traditional binary of destruction and preservation, revealing how disturbance affects the legal, temporal, spatial, and social dynamics of boundary formation. By engaging with these dynamics, the paper sheds light on the interconnected processes that shape post-mining landscapes and contributes to a deeper understanding of legal and socio-ecological interactions
More-Than-Human Borderlands of Wilderness— Transactional Relationships and Intra-Active Entanglements Between Wolves and Humans in the Swiss Calanda Region
Full text linkHuman attempts to draw clear boundaries between the wild and the civilized are typically subject to negotiations, discourses, and conflicts between environmental authorities, environmentalists, and the local population. However, this perspective often overlooks the agency of nonhumans in b/ordering space. Against this background, this paper offers a new conceptualization of more-than-human borderlands of wilderness. They are understood as spaces of continuous negotiation processes co-constituted by complex, relational, and hybrid entanglements of humans, animals, materialities, regulations, politics, discursive-material practices and transactions, in which the boundaries between the civilized and the wild are constituted, enacted, and challenged. Using the empirical study of returning wolves to Switzerland, this paper exemplifies the transactional constitution of more-than-human borderlands of wilderness. It demonstrates that the returning animals challenge human b/orderings of wilderness by following their prey, hunting (domestic) animals or entering settlement areas, whereas humans attempt to restabilize the boundary between the wilderness and the civilized by putting the wilderness back in place through new regulations and b/ordering practices that allow, for instance, the hunting of “problem wolves.” Thus, the boundaries between the wilderness and the cultivated are always being challenged by the transactions and intra-actions of humans, wolves, and other morethan-human entities, thereby constituting the borderlands of wilderness that cut across human territorial and b/ordering claims. Therefore, investigating wolves’ actions and the intra-active human attempts to restabilize their ideas of the “right place” for the wild allows a deeper understanding of wilderness in a co-created, fluid, and dynamic way
Bringing Culinary Justice to the Table: A Conceptual Approach to Enrich the Debate on Food Justice
Full text linkThe concept of food justice is widely used in urban geography and agri-food studies in the Anglophone context. Much of the literature revolves around questions of how access to the land and resources to produce food can increase the ability to fulfil the food needs of low-income communities and communities of color, as well as the issue of food access in urban contexts. Less attention has been paid thus far to food preparation practices and culinary aspects. Against this background, we propose the concept of culinary justice, which links culinary practices and power, pointing to injustices in food provisioning and eating while also focusing on the symbolic and cultural components of food. Our central argument is that culinary elements and practices are important dimensions in questions about justice, as they enable a more nuanced understanding of socio-cultural, ecological, political, and historical food (in)equalities.Building on a review of existing approaches that touch upon the issues of culinarity and food justice in the areas of critical food studies, Black food studies, and postcolonial studies, we apply the concept of culinary justice to four contexts: private households, commercial restaurants, public catering, and community kitchens. In each area, we illustrate the role of food knowledge, care work, commensality, and spatial settings in issues of justice. As part of our contribution, we point toward future directions in food justice research, as well as future research needs in the practical field of food inequalities in culinary contexts