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- Convenors:
-
Andrew Bowman
(University of Edinburgh)
Mehroosh Tak (Royal Veterinary College, London)
Andrew Bennie (Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) Research Associate, Sociology Department, Wits University)
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- Format:
- Paper panel
Short Abstract:
Panel explores crises in industrial animal agriculture/aquaculture in relation to development challenges such as nutrition, sustainability, and inequality. Welcomes papers on livestock production and its consequences, livestock and rural development, and alternatives to industrial livestock systems.
Long Abstract:
There is an emerging polycrisis in industrial animal agriculture, involving multiple simultaneous and amplificatory crises relating to emissions, biodiversity loss, zoonotic diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and socio-economic inequality across both production and consumption (Hinchliffe et al., 2024; IPCC, 2022; Willett et al., 2019). Industrial livestock systems are anticipated to expand in low and middle income countries (LMICs) with increased ‘meatification’ (Weis, 2021) of diets. This poses complex challenges and difficult trade-offs between imperatives for agro-industrial development, nutrition, public health, and sustainability. This is additionally so in many LMIC contexts given widespread nutrient deficiencies and the varying, critical roles of livestock in vulnerable agrarian and pastoral livelihoods (Bennie et al., 2024; Scoones, 2022). These crises are accompanied by opportunities for rethinking dominant productivist approaches to industrial animal agriculture, and situating it within broader discussions of just food system transitions to sustainability. Such discussions are limited by the relative neglect of industrial livestock research within critical development studies and agrarian political economy. The panel, run in conjunction with the Critical Research on Industrial Livestock Systems network,* seeks to bring together researchers on livestock and development working on the following questions or similar:
· Patterns of growth and change in industrial livestock systems, and their impacts on development challenges including public health, sustainability, and inequality.
· The treatment of industrial livestock in debates about agrarian change / rural development.
· Critiques of / alternatives to dominant systems of industrial livestock production and the ‘protein transition’.