Agricultural Sciences

This course introduces food systems and their actors as a framework for understanding and analyzing the development in the food sector. It provides a basis for handling future changes of food systems in a societal context. The course explores food systems and food networks as conceptualizations of the complex system behind food products and as useful tool in analysis of food related developments. It examines the historical development and structure of food systems (mainstream and alternative food systems), including an overview of changing technologies; structure, location, and actors as well as salient political issues characterizing food systems in different periods. The course then discusses the governance of food systems, including an introduction to dynamics of policy processes, and questions of the power and interests of core actors as well the role of social movements. Finally, it presents key concepts and theories useful for understanding an analyzing the development and transition of food systems, such as socio-material approaches to food systems change, sustainability, and actor understandings.

The course is part of the LM degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course reviews the political landscape of food and farming development in developed and developing countries. Policy initiatives by national governments can operate in coordination or conflict with private companies and corporations, international organizations, NGOs. At the end of the integrated course the student is able to: identify the different stakeholders operating the food and farming sectors; understand and evaluate objectives, policy instruments, and strategies that characterize an agricultural policy; identify public policies that address food waste prevention and reduction in developing and developed countries; to outline sustainable food and farming policy options, the implications of these policies for institutions, and their potential impacts on the food system; to analyze the policy formation and implementation processes in different countries, and evaluate costs and benefits of sustainable food and agricultural policies.

Geographies of food are considered principally through long-run and contemporary shifts in the framing of food practices; through shifting power-relations in food networks; and through debates about conceptualizing food-network powers and interests. Animal geographies are considered as a key component in post-humanist, post-environmentalist enquiry in geography, drawing on the co-construction of human/animal spaces and places, practices of human/animal association, and moral and ethical debates from animal welfare to biosecurity. Examination of traditional and contemporary forms of animal representation are examined, leading to an assessment of ideas of hybridity, dwelling, and co-constitutionism.

This course examines Australian bush foods; food safety and processing; unique flavors; nutrition; medical and preservative value; commercialization; and equitable benefit sharing.