- Convenors:
-
Pragya Timsina
(University of Adelaide)
Sayan Deori (Tezpur University)
Silva Mgunda Namalwa (University of Adelaide)
Anjana Chaudhary (The University of Adelaide, Australia)
- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
This panel will consist of oral presentations followed by a moderated discussion. Each presenter will share a 12–15-minute talk.
Long Abstract
Food systems are increasingly framed as sites of crisis and transformation—ecologically, socially, and politically. Yet, the fundamental questions of who shapes these systems, who benefits from them, and who is excluded remain deeply contested. This panel invites critical political ecology scholarship that interrogates the power relations embedded in food systems, with particular attention to knowledge, stewardship, access, control, and contestation over lands, markets, technologies and resources.
We aim to explore the intersecting roles of hegemony, producer agency, resistance, and capitalist restructuring in shaping opportunities for farmers, growers, and food producers across rural and urban spaces. How do policies, development interventions, technologies, land regimes, and market dynamics reflect and reproduce broader structures of inequality? How do marginalized smallholder (urban and rural) populaces, indigenous communities, feminist perspectives, along with alternative economies transform or reimagine dominant food paradigms?
This is a timely moment to examine how food systems are governed, by whom, and to what ends, as globalization rapidly brings about transformations especially as narratives of sustainability, innovations, climate adaptation and, risk obscuring deeper issues of dispossession, labor exploitation, and ecological degradation. We welcome presentations that draw on empirical and theoretical work from diverse geographies, disciplinary perspectives, including those focused on the Global South, post-colonial contexts, indigenous studies, food sovereignty, epistemic injustices within rural and urban foodscapes.
This multiple oral presentation-based panel advances the scholarship of critical Food system studies, from a political ecology lens, by examining how structural power relations and hegemonic processes shape food production across diverse spaces, while revealing how producers can create alternative futures through collective organizing, resource sharing, social learning and spatial practices that challenge dominant food system logics. This panel invites transdisciplinary dialogue on the political ecology of food systems and offer space for plural narratives and imaginaries of more just, inclusive and sustainable futures.
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
The presentation analyzes how Chinese investments reconfigure food-system governance in Argentina through the case of Chinese-funded mega-swine farms. It highlights the resulting socio-environmental challenges and the debates sparked by the initiative.
Presentation long abstract
Existing literature has shown that, through trade and investments in food-related sectors, China is restructuring global commodity networks and reshaping power relations in the global food system. However, less attention has been devoted to examining how these processes unfold in specific local contexts, particularly in territories of the Global South that have become critical zones for China’s food supply. This paper analyzes the influence of Chinese investments on the governance of food systems in Argentina. It focuses on the social resistance that emerged in response to the proposal to establish mega pig farms in 2020, following the outbreak of African swine fever in China. Drawing on a dialogue between the neo-Gramscian approach of International Political Economy and Latin American Political Ecology, the paper argues that Chinese capital is facilitating processes of reconfiguration of food system governance.nHowever, these transformations tend to reinforce corporate power, thereby exacerbating existing socio-environmental challenges within food systems. Nonetheless, the disputes and resistance show that the initiate also opens space for debating alternative forms of governance.
Presentation short abstract
In coastal Madagascar, shifting fisheries, conservation limits, and climate change are transforming foodways central to cultural heritage. Findings show declining land–sea exchange, reduced access to culturally significant foods, and growing threats to food sovereignty in rural fishing communities.
Presentation long abstract
In coastal Madagascar, small-scale fisheries (SSF) are central not only to livelihoods but to food heritage, shaping cultural identity, ecological relationships, and local resilience. This research examines how commercialization, conservation, and climate change are transforming traditional foodways in the Bay of Ranobe, southwest Madagascar, and what this means for food sovereignty and sustainability in SSF. Using political ecology and food systems lenses informed by food sovereignty principles, we conducted 52 in-depth interviews with fishers, farmers, and elders across coastal and inland communities in 2024-2025. Participants described past systems of exchange linking land and sea that once ensured seasonal food security, social cohesion, and safety nets in times of scarcity. Today, these networks are eroding under pressures of export-oriented trade, restricted forest access, and declining fish stocks. Fish once kept for local consumption are now sold to external markets, while conservation restrictions have limited traditional foraging and coping strategies. These shifts reveal a deep erosion of food sovereignty: the loss of local control, knowledge, and rights to culturally meaningful foods. Recognizing foodways as a form of heritage underscores that conservation and food security cannot be separated. Protecting the foodways that sustain both ecosystems and communities is essential for achieving equitable, just, and lasting outcomes in SSF governance.
Presentation short abstract
This study explores how gendered power dynamics shape women’s access to a community maize sheller in Northern Ghana, showing how decisions around mechanisation are negotiated within local cultural norms, household relations, and social expectations.
Presentation long abstract
Mechanization plays a critical role in advancing sustainable intensification among smallholder farmers. However, access to mechanized implements remains uneven, particularly along gender lines. Recent efforts to enhance soil fertility and increase maize productivity through sustainable intensification led to a 13–30% rise in the harvesting workload for smallholder farmers, including the maize shelling process. This activity was traditionally carried out either by beating the maize with sticks or by using bare hands to shell it. To reduce the physical demands and time constraints involved, the Africa RISING project introduced small-scale mechanized shellers to smallholder farmers in Northern Ghana. Despite their benefit, access and usage remain limited amongst women smallholder farmers. This study adopts Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) to understand why limited access to mechanization amongst smallholder women farmers persists in harvesting maize. It provides insights on how gender norms, power relations, and socio-economic structures shape access to mechanized tools, reinforcing gender inequalities in agriculture. The research employs a qualitative methodology involving Key Informant Interviews (KII) and participatory interviews conducted during focus group discussions with smallholder farmers. The findings reveal critical disparities in actual engagement, shaped by structural and social barriers. Women’s limited access to mechanized shellers is not only a production or distribution challenge but also a reflection of deeper power imbalances in rural agricultural systems, as women often have access to these implements only through men, irrespective of their personal resources or the availability of the machinery.
Presentation long abstract
Food systems scholarship has largely overlooked blue foods, rendering marine political ecologies and coastal fishing community dispossession invisible. This paper examines small pelagic fisheries governance in South Africa, where fish have been channelled through industrial pathways since apartheid—anchovy to fishmeal, sardine to canning—whilst marginalised coastal communities face food insecurity and progressive exclusion.
Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis of fisheries policy documents (1998-2025), we reveal how Administrative and Economic Rationalism and Sustainable Development rhetoric interlock to constitute blue colonialism. This regime naturalises industrial capture whilst legitimising dispossession by framing capital requirements as technical necessities rather than political choices. Post-apartheid "transformation" discourse enables elite accumulation: Black ownership statistics mask continued race and class-based dispossession of poor Black coastal communities. Scientific management monopolises knowledge authority, marginalising traditional ecological knowledge, whilst "sustainable utilisation" rhetoric depoliticises allocation decisions serving capital over food security.
The case exposes intersections of racial capitalism (where Black ownership masks continued race and class-based dispossession), epistemic colonialism (where only science counts as legitimate knowledge), and extractivist metabolism (where fish flow through industrial pathways that extract economic value and control from coastal communities).
This regime forecloses alternative rationalities, yet they persist in fisher knowledge, place-based practices, and community food systems, offering pathways toward transformation centring both human wellbeing and more-than-human ecological relations. This research centres marginalised marine political ecologies, reveals how "progressive" discourse conceals colonial dispossession, and articulates how alternative knowledge systems offer possibilities for food futures honouring justice and ecological integrity.
Presentation short abstract
The ASF outbreak in Northeast India has disrupted Indigenous food systems, particularly the pig based economy, leaving the communities in precarity. It has impacted livelihood, culture, and eating. This paper examines how biopolitics of viral outbreak has (re)shaped human- pig relationships.
Presentation long abstract
The Northeastern region of India is a multicultural, multiethnic geography with many small indigenous and tribal ethnic groups calling it their home. The food systems are local, and deeply tied to their social, and ecological world. It nourishes the communities, and provides them basic livelihood. From mid 2025 the outbreak of African Swine Fever (ASF) in Northeast, has disrupted the Indigenous food systems, and left many farmers helpless, and uncertain about their future. ASF mainly affects pigs, and as of now there is no "cure" or vaccine that can prevent this outbreak, other than biosecurity measures.
People in Northeast not just rear pigs, but co-exist with them, reflecting their wider ritual, social, and ecological world. As pigs hold deep economic, cultural, and nutritional significance for tribal communities in the region, the rapid loss of pigs to ASF has severely disrupted the food system, impacted the value chain, and compromised everyday nourishment leaving the communities, and farmers in precarity.
In the absence of robust care infrastructures or state support, the crisis reveals a complex web of vulnerabilities, and negotiations around disease management, animal life and human life. This paper employs a lens of bio-politics to understand how the outbreak of ASF has (re) shaped/ (re) shaping human - pig relationships, and looks at the entanglements of viral outbreaks.
This research is drawn from my ongoing ethnographic field work, for my doctoral research.
Presentation short abstract
Why policy favoured industrial broiler production and how concepts such as food security, efficiency, and global competitiveness have gradually pushed aside alternative systems, such as free-range farming.
Presentation long abstract
The HPAI (Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza) outbreaks that hit Thailand between 2003 and 2007 affected the organisation of the country’s poultry sector. In the following years, the government encouraged farms to move toward closed production systems and to adopt compartmentalisation practices to lower the risk of future outbreaks. Since Thailand is one of the world's major exporters of chicken, the industry has pushed for more industrialised, vertically integrated production to meet the increasingly strict food safety and animal welfare standards set by foreign importers. This industrial poultry narrative, which focuses on biosecurity, large-scale production, export growth, and national food security, has become dominant in policy discussions. As a result, other alternative forms of poultry farming are marginalised. This paper examines how HPAI outbreaks created an opportunity for these regulatory changes and how certain actors shaped and promoted these narratives. It examines why policy favoured industrial broiler production and how concepts such as food security, efficiency, and global competitiveness have gradually pushed aside alternative systems, such as free-range farming. Ultimately, the paper argues that we need a more inclusive policy framework that recognises the value of diverse production systems and their differing social, environmental, and nutritional contributions.
Presentation short abstract
This study explores how women farmers in India and Nepal learn and share knowledge through farmer-led group activities, highlighting underexplored learning experiences, gendered barriers, and the role of social learning in enhancing women’s agency and promoting inclusive, sustainable agriculture.
Presentation long abstract
This research examines how women farmers in India and Nepal learn, share knowledge, and build agricultural skills, with a particular focus on the gendered dynamics that shape these processes. Women play an essential role in agriculture across the region, yet their contributions often remain undervalued, and their voices overlooked in discussions on innovation, scaling, and sustainability. Understanding how women learn from each other, from farmer collectives, and through wider community networks is therefore crucial for improving their access to resources and fostering more equitable agricultural development.
Existing scholarship recognises that social networks, collective action, and peer learning can significantly enhance women’s agency and decision-making power. However, there is a clear lack of empirical research centred specifically on women farmers in the Eastern Gangetic Plains (India, Nepal, and Bangladesh). There remains a gap in current literature understanding the gendered constraints women farmers face, particularly their limited visibility in agricultural spaces, restricted access to training and extension services, and the lack of inclusive institutional support. While existing studies acknowledge the value of farmer groups for knowledge exchange, few examine how these interactions specifically influence women’s livelihoods, adaptive strategies, and resilience to economic and environmental stressors. This study addresses these gaps by synthesising available evidence through a distinctly gendered lens and by foregrounding women’s unique learning experiences within farmer collectives and community settings. By highlighting the significance of social learning and participation, the research aims to inform more responsive interventions and policies that strengthen women’s roles in agriculture and promote sustainable, inclusive development.
Presentation short abstract
Agricultural change in India remains shaped by Green Revolution interventions. Assam’s contrasting trajectory reveals the limits of standardized policy. This study examines how farmers navigate transformation and why reflexive, context-sensitive approach to policies are crucial.
Presentation long abstract
Understanding agricultural transformation in India requires revisiting the legacy of the Green Revolution, a defining moment that reshaped global food systems. While the Green Revolution supposedly led to higher yields, it also produced unintended social and ecological consequences—deepening inequalities, increasing marginalization and transforming food systems in ways that continue to reverberate through farmer distress, protests, and rising precarity. However, Assam presents a distinctive case within this national story. Unlike early Green Revolution states, Assam remains rich in biodiversity, with a long tradition of cultivating diverse rice landraces, limited mechanization, and agricultural practices embedded in unique cultural and ecological contexts.
Assam’s agrarian landscape has also been shaped by colonial histories, political unrest, identity movements, and plantation economies, creating layers of vulnerability alongside recurring floods, biodiversity loss, and human–animal conflicts. At the same time, new input-intensive technologies are increasingly shaping agricultural choices, raising questions about how global models of modernization intersect with local realities.
This study proposes to examine Assam as a critical site for rethinking agricultural transformation in India. Its trajectory diverges significantly from states that experienced the first wave of Green Revolution interventions, offering an opportunity to explore how and why these differences persist. The study argues that despite decades of evidence of uneven outcomes from standardized agricultural models, policy approaches remain top-down and insufficiently reflexive. The paper will foreground three core concerns: how farmers negotiate change, whose knowledge is valued, and what more context-sensitive and inclusive agricultural planning might look like for the future.
Presentation short abstract
Research on Wales' protracted agri-environmental reform process illustrates how co-design can be mobilised to depoliticise sustainability transitions when market power and structural drivers of ecological harm go unchallenged, narrowing the scope and scale of "just" agri-food transitions.
Presentation long abstract
State policies to meet climate and nature goals in food-system transitions increasingly invoke the rhetoric of participation and just transition as strategies of legitimation. Yet the politics and outcomes of such processes remain under-examined. In Wales, post-Brexit agricultural reform was explicitly framed around co-design and well-being, yet in practice became mired in contestation and protest, with ambitious proposals progressively diluted in pursuit of consensus.
Drawing on interviews, workshops and documentary analysis, this paper examines the protracted co-design of a national farming scheme and its attempt to reconcile conflicting ideas about what farming is for, and who the transition should serve, at a time of growing polarisation and uncertainty in rural Wales. These tensions were not only ideological but reflected the structural demands of a food system built on cheap food, efficiency and competition. In this context, efforts to transform a predominantly livestock-based sector toward environmental objectives were constrained by the same market pressures driving ecological harm and the precarity of workers and smaller-scale farmers. Government attempts at structural reform were thus foreclosed, with co-design reduced to marginal “win-wins” and symbolic inclusion.
By tracing how conflict, compromise and silences shaped the emergence of “acceptable” pathways, the paper argues that just transition rhetoric risks being absorbed into governance arrangements that mobilise participation to depoliticise transitions, and tolerate inequalities as necessary for sustainability. The Welsh case illustrates that a meaningfully just agri-food system transition must be a struggle over political economy, not merely a matter of procedural participation.
Presentation short abstract
The paper addresses the political tensions that arise in participatory transdisciplinary processes for Food System Transformation. We focus on how power operates through the methods mobilized, the relations enacted between actors, and the conceptual representations that shape the framing of FST.
Presentation long abstract
Food systems frameworks are increasingly used as heuristic and analytical tools to guide food system transformation (FST) processes by supporting decision-making and fostering collaboration across diverse knowledge domains. However, limited attention has been paid to their value-laden and epistemological foundations, which condition the diagnosis, trajectories, priorities, and types of solutions these frameworks advance.
This presentation addresses this gap by critically examining the epistemic and political tensions that arise in participatory transdisciplinary processes aimed at developing and implementing food system frameworks for advancing socio-ecological transformations. We draw on ethnographic work conducted within a European process aimed at developing a food systems framework to inform FST at different levels and advancing transdisciplinary knowledge in the field.
Our analysis builds on the authors’ active involvement in 1) co-developing a food system conceptual framework and 2) the transdisciplinary and participative use of a systemic food map and a Multi Level Perspective (MLP)-based theory of change in Catalonia (Spain).
We examine how these tools structure engagement, frame transformation pathways, and stabilize particular narratives of FST, ultimately contributing to the depolitization of transformative processes.
Our analysis centers on how power operates through the methods mobilized, the relations enacted between actors, and the conceptual representations that shape the framing of FST. In doing so, we argue for greater reflexivity in recognizing and addressing the epistemic divides, positional conflicts, and underlying values embedded in these frameworks to avoid reinforcing epistemic injustices and to foster more inclusive and transformative transdisciplinary food systems research and practice.
Presentation short abstract
Urban Agriculture (UA) in slums reflects struggles over land, power, and survival. This study shows how slum residents use UA to secure food and shape urban space despite insecure tenure, pollution, and exclusion, highlighting its role in resilience and justice.
Presentation long abstract
Urban Agriculture (UA) is increasingly recognized as vital to sustainable city development, yet its practice within informal settlements remains marginalized in urban policy and scholarship. This paper explores the political ecology of UA in slum environments, examining how power, governance, and socio-environmental inequalities shape the ability of residents to cultivate food and manage urban space. Using political ecology as a guiding framework, the paper analyzes how access to land, water, and environmental resources is negotiated amid overlapping interests of local authorities, informal landholders, private developers, and community actors. Despite being depicted as environmentally degraded spaces, slums often host dynamic forms of environmental care. Residents repurpose vacant plots, riverbanks, and roadside margins into productive UA sites, using cultivation as a strategy for survival, food security, and income generation. However, these efforts are constrained by insecure land tenure, restrictive municipal regulations, exposure to pollution, and periodic evictions driven by redevelopment and land speculation. The paper highlights how gendered labor roles, informal governance networks, and socio-spatial inequalities influence who participates in UA, under what conditions, and with what risks. These findings underscore that slum-based UA is deeply political, embedded in broader struggles over land, legitimacy, and environmental justice. By situating informal UA within wider urban political economies, the paper contributes to debates on resilience, food systems, and inclusive urban development. It argues that integrating community-led UA into municipal planning is essential for enhancing food security, improving environmental conditions, and supporting equitable climate adaptation in rapidly urbanizing cities.
Presentation short abstract
Informal food systems are vital to urban food security in sub-Saharan Africa as they provide affordable diets to the low-income urban residents. However, they are often marginalized, which disrupts food availability. This study examines the strategies the informal vendors use to endure.
Presentation long abstract
This research examines the irony of informality and regulation in shaping urban food landscapes in Sub-saharan Africa. Informal food retailers operate within a state of regulatory exception that is both visible and crucial to food access and availability, yet are exempt from formal recognition and often face punitive municipal actions. Despite these shocks, they remain essential to the diets of low-income urban residents who rely on accessible and low-cost meals. The study analyzes how existing policies and regulatory frameworks, particularly licensing regimes, street clearing operations, compulsory relocations to formal markets, and periodic evictions, influence the affordability and availability of food within urban informal economies. It also explores how informal vendors adapt, negotiate, and endure within restrictive governance environments. By addressing the limited empirical evidence on the interface between policy and food security in Kenya’s informal vending sector, the research highlights the critical role of everyday governance practices in shaping urban food security outcomes. Through analysis of policy documents and vendor experiences, the study reveals how regulatory exclusion creates spatial and economic barriers that ripple through low-income urban communities, which heavily rely on informal food systems. At the same time, vendors demonstrate notable endurance by reorganizing their operations, adjusting supply chains, leveraging social networks, and navigating authority structures to sustain their livelihoods. Findings aim to inform more inclusive, context-appropriate policy interventions.
Presentation short abstract
This research, through participatory methods, examines how historical agrarian conflicts have influenced agricultural practices and local crop diversity at the scale of a campesino community.
Presentation long abstract
Land and agrarian conflicts have intensified Colombia’s internal war, particularly through land grabbing and dispossession, victimizing rural communities. National policies have favored industrial agriculture while marginalizing traditional smallholder practices. In the Colombian Caribbean region, this has hindered campesino livelihoods and biocultural memory. This research examines how agrarian conflicts have influenced agricultural practices and local crop diversity at the scale of a campesino community. It offers insights into the links between agrarian conflicts, transformations in local food systems, and the erosion of biocultural memory. Drawing on concepts from agrobiodiversity, biocultural memory, and political ecology, this study uses social mapping and historical analysis to assess how people experience spatiotemporal changes in land use and crop diversity. The findings show that people connect the decrease in crop diversity to wider changes in the food system, the effects of the violent agrarian conflict, and the expansion of industrial agriculture supported by the State.
Presentation short abstract
The coffee industry in Puerto Rico, is clouded by complementary, contradicting, and divergent narratives tied up in a history of colonization, globalization, and local movements. This study examines the intersections of coffee trade politics, local agrarian geographies, and social organizations.
Presentation long abstract
The coffee industry in Borikén, or Puerto Rico, is clouded by complementary, contradicting, and divergent narratives tied up in a history of colonization, globalization, and local identitarian movements. In the past three decades, transnational corporations have bought out heritage Puerto Rican coffee brands while local bean production has fallen over 90% due to a legacy of industrialization, climate change and a debt-crippled economy. As a result, large-scale roasters are increasingly more reliant on cheap, imported beans which they blend with local coffee and market as “developed in Puerto Rico.” Smallholders struggle to pay U.S. prices for labor and inputs, and either sell their beans green or produce less competitive, expensive "specialty" batches. Meanwhile, NGOs offering fiscal and technical support have emerged from both the local agroecology movement and foreign corporations. This study examines the intersections of global coffee trade politics, local agrarian geographies, and social organizations involved in coffee production. Through archival research, ethno-photography, and participatory interviews, we worked with small, medium, and large-scale farmers; local and transnational roasters; NGOs; agronomists; and local government employees. The preliminary analysis reveals a complex matrix of influences (1) Oligopolies dominate the industry with intensive agriculture, mass imports, and commercial processing. 2) NGOs supporting smallholders are funded by the same companies driving intensive production. (3) Despite receiving NGO assistance, small producers absorb externalities of transitioning away from an agroindustrial system. 4) Through NGOs, large companies co-opt agroecology as a “business solution to poverty” that serves public-private partnerships but leaves smallholders out.
Presentation short abstract
Follows the fate of Soviet-era rice varieties to show how seed knowledge survives, disappears, or becomes memory after post-Soviet institutional decline.
Presentation long abstract
This paper traces the quiet afterlives of several rice varieties once developed and cultivated in a Soviet model kolkhoz in Kazakhstan. In contemporary district reports, only a single externally sourced variety appears. Yet retired agronomists and long-time residents recall locally bred seeds that circulated through Soviet breeding programs and, in some cases, may still survive in private holdings and personal seed stocks. Their presence today is uncertain — held in memory, reputation, and occasional practice rather than institutional registry.
The purpose of this study is not to establish which seeds remain, but to explore how agricultural truth becomes fragile when the infrastructures that once stabilized it have receded. Through ethnographic fieldwork, archival encounters, informal conversations, and time spent in markets and administrative offices, the research follows seeds as they pass between bureaucratic simplifications, partial archives, and lived recollection.
Rather than framing this as a story of loss alone, the paper attends to how knowledge persists unevenly — through individuals, habits, and quiet acts of custodianship — and how authority over knowing what grows reassembles in the absence of formal institutional oversight. Seeds here offer more than a botanical trace; they reveal how post-Soviet food systems depend on fragile epistemic remains and the people who continue to hold and enact them, long after official systems have forgotten.
Presentation short abstract
Territorial approaches illuminate agroecological practices, governance, and social relations shaping food system transformation. This paper examines households' agroforestry responses to climate, migration, and markets in Eastern Indonesia, considering the possibilities for transformation.
Presentation long abstract
While territorial approaches have become central to agroecology and food system transformations in the Global South, most Southeast Asian literature prioritizes technical and farm-level issues over territorial-political concerns. Territorial frameworks can illuminate the practices embedded in specific places, the governance processes, and the social relations that shape who benefits and loses from agroecological change, as well as the prospects for transformation. This paper analyses community livelihood strategies in Flores, Eastern Indonesia, exploring the opportunities and the structural barriers to developing territorial strategies. Flores faces intersecting crises: climate variability undermines dryland farming, out-migration depletes rural labour, and market integration subjects smallholders to volatile prices, while gender intersects with social differentiation to squeeze the space available for social reproduction. The paper examines how households, relying on agroforestry and migration, craft autonomous responses to these threats. It examines both the possibilities and limitations of these strategies for navigating external pressures and local social relations. Finally, the paper considers the prospects for territorial strategies that address interlinked pressures— including governance challenges, policy fragmentation, and stakeholder exclusion—to reduce nutritional insecurity and climate precarity, identifying lessons relevant for agroecology and food system transformation agendas across Southeast Asia.