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Abstract: Environmental justice approaches to the subject of food production have largely examined the presence of environmental toxins on agricultural land where low income people and people of color live, work and play. This paper contends that the production and consumption of food itself constitutes an important environmental justice issue. Within the United States communities of color are actively denied access to the means of food production through political and institutional practices of exclusion, racism and economic disadvantage. Additionally, elites enjoy disproportionate access to fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and lean protein, contributing to disproportionate rates of diet related health problems in low income people and people of color. An analysis of the relationship between environmental injustice and access to healthy food is foreshadowed by current scholarship in environmental justice, sustainable agriculture and food security. I bring these literatures together to contextualize land loss by African-American farmers, lack of access to grocery stores in low-income African American communities, and disproportionate rates of diet related health problems. My ethnographic highlights the work of a collaborative of organizations working against these obstacles in an urban African-American community. I then explore theoretical benefits that flow from the confluence of environmental justice and food scholarship and conclude by suggesting other avenues for research. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses factors affecting the disappearance of organizational forms, including arguments derived from organizational ecology, institutional theory, and the literature on social movements. I apply these perspectives to explain the disappearance of large-scale Southern agriculture in the decades following the American Civil War, employing macro-level analyses of Census records on agricultural tenure and micro-level analyses of the internal demography of the plantation system. Findings suggest that there is limited support for purely exogenous explanations of plantation demise, emphasizing damage from the Civil War and population pressures. Ecological competition, particularly resource partitioning with smaller farms and size-localized competition with mid-sized farms, plays a greater role in the demise of the organizational form. The dominant influence on plantation demise involves the long-term decisions made by former slaves in the plantation system with respect to incentive structures, normative considerations, and the reconstruction of their social networks. Based on these findings, I propose a perspective on organizational forms that brings lower-level members back in as crucial agents of grass-roots change and contestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper explains how American agriculture was a product and producer of global environmental change. It suggests that capitalist agricultural revolutions were central to this development. Utilizing a world-ecology framework, I challenge and extend political Marxists conceptualization of agricultural revolutions on three fronts. First, social property regimes and class relations must incorporate how the extension of the law of value has been a global process to capitalist development. We must consider how global forces conditioned productivity revolutions, and, in turn, how those productivity revolutions reconditioned global forces. Second, historicizing and theorizing agricultural revolutions must include the question of nature. The unpaid work of human and extrahuman natures were crucial to reproducing capital's cheap food model. And third, capital's golden-ages have been premised on successive agricultural revolutions provisioning cheap food, energy, and raw materials. The succession of agricultural revolutions alludes to how as a productive system agriculture creates and resolves recurring crises and limits. I make these claims based on the forces, patterns, and trends of American agriculture in the world-economy. I argue that the United States engendered three successive agro-industrial revolutions that constituted, and constitutive of, global socio-ecological change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements that aim to combat "invisible" health and environmental problems--from toxic waste in the water supply to global climate change--have a unique relationship with science. The phenomena that are at the core of such movements' grievances are undetectable without scientific experts and their specialized tools of measurement. What does this dependence on scientific experts imply for those who wish to collectively bring about social change? How can social movements mobilize people to protest threats that are invisible? This study of the contemporary Mexican anti-biotechnology movement considers the relationship between scientific knowledge and movement mobilization. Since 2001, a transnational network of activists has protested the importation of GE corn from the United States and demanded the protection of native maize varieties. Among a variety of strategies pursued by this activist network, some peasant farmers and non-governmental organizations have undertaken scientific research to discover the extent of transgenic "contamination" of native maize. In this paper, I intend to show that, rather than creating an unbalanced relationship of dependence on science, Mexican anti-biotechnology activists transformed themselves into specialized knowledge producers. These findings contribute a new dimension to understanding how social movements define their grievances and confront contradictory claims made by their opponents. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Co-written with Fred Buttel, this paper examines the global political economy of agriculture through a focus on the post-WW II political economy of agriculture in the United States in relation to recent developments in the world trading system, and in the WTO in particular. The paper’s analysis of agrarian political economy and the collapse of the WTO Doha round shows the continued relevance of national states and national agricultural policies to the world system. It contends that an appreciation of the unique traits of agriculture, as a type of economic activity, helps elucidate the significance of changes and continuity in the World System. Substantively, the paper explains fluctuations in US agricultural subsidies in relation to developments in the US political economy and that of the World System. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article cites a research study, which analyzes the environmental aspect of science and power in agriculture in the United States. The author of this article started his ethnographic research with a group of University of California agricultural scientists who work as farm advisors. He focused on agricultural scientists' attempts to negotiate the power relations of particular communities of practice, creating a kind of negotiated order around knowledge, practice, and political change. This study revolves mainly around the work of farm advisors in California's Salinas Valley and especially their attempts to mitigate the environmental impacts of farming.

A coalition of grassroots sustainable agriculture movement organizations has mounted a policy challenge to the fundamental principles of six decades of U.S. farm policy. This challenge is explored through a case study of the 2002 farm bill lobbying efforts of one of the most important of these coalition actors, the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture (NCSA). The social dynamics of NCSA policy action are analyzed using the conceptual tools of social movement theory, e.g., political opportunity structure, framing alignment, and organizational networking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among developed nations, the U.S. employs the largest percentage of youth. The agricultural sector has been considered the most hazardous youth employment sector, with disproportionately high rates of grade repetitions, dropout, injuries, and death. Contemporary issues in adolescent employment focus, in part, on whether students' employment has positive or negative effects on students' academic outcomes. This study explores the relationship between employment sectors (agricultural v.s. non-agricultural) and the academic achievement of junior and senior high school students. The achievement of non-working students is also compared. Multiple regression is used to analyze the NELS: 88 data. The results of this study suggest several policy implications. First, this study increases our academic understanding of youth employment and how it affects school success. Second, results from this study contribute to the construction or modification of relevant school policies and programs in an attempt to decrease learning gaps. Third, this study may be advantageous in adjusting child labor federal policy, in particular, the Fair Labor Standard Acts (FLSA), to more contemporary needs. Finally, the study contains an international application since youth agricultural labor has been a worldwide heated issue. Thus, results from this study will be applied to the analysis in other national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates about the environmental impact of genetically engineered (GE) crops burst into the US media in the Spring of 1999, when a group of researchers at Cornell University published a research brief in the journal Nature, reporting on laboratory experiments in which monarch butterfly larvae died after feeding on milkweed leaves coated with GE corn pollen. The article immediately attracted a great deal of media coverage and generated an intense amount of controversy. Critics of the initial report in Nature cautioned the scientific community and the wider public against overreacting to the study and its results, pointing to the ?artificial,? laboratory context for the research. These critics contrasted this research setting with a more ?realistic? place to assess the toxicity of GE corn pollen for monarchs?the farmer?s cornfield. I use the monarch controversy as a point of access for exploring the politics of science and agricultural biotechnologies. In particular, I examine the role that the ?place? of research plays in these debates, as protagonists argue the merits of research in laboratory- and field-based settings. I argue that the local, mundane details of how an applied experiment is designed and implemented are directly linked to larger issues about the political economy of farming in the US and around the world. Drawing on interviews with key participants and content analysis of media related to the issue, I describe and analyze the ways that participants in the monarch controversy use place for strategic effect, to deconstruct and delimit the credibility of research conducted in particular places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As rural America turns down the path of a new century, the independent, self-reliant farmer and small business owner of the last century may be disappearing from the landscape. In many rural communities, it is the large national and multinational corporations that seem to have set the development agenda. Yet, one of the paradoxes of rural America is that some communities retain educated and skilled residents. The civil class, comprised of these small business stakeholders, still thrives in many rural localities, yielding beneficial consequences for the communities. The fundamental attribute of this civic class is its relative autonomy from wage labor and from forces that steer workers towards wage-maximizing behaviors such as out-migration. This civil class is rooted in constellations of local relationships and localized markets. Our hypothesis is that, when this group of local business persons and small farmers succeeds, it serves to benefit the community and buffers it from external, global forces. Specifically we: define the civil class, describe fully individual and household attributes of its members, and contrast it with the wage and salaried middle class. We geographically locate the prevalence of the civil class in detailed spatial terms. We then analyze temporal changes in retention of individuals in this class using multilevel models of community economic, social and cultural contexts hypothesized to promote this class sector. We conduct this analysis primarily with confidential internal Census data files that are sufficiently large and detailed to address adequately these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the U.S., as hegemonic power, is largely responsible for the creation of the World Trade Organization, its own domestic politics periodically threatens the stability of this international regime. In order to accomplish domestic political objectives judged crucial to power consolidation, the U.S. governing elite has compromised its neoliberal regime creation efforts by supporting the 2002 Farm Bill, a legislative rollback of more neoliberal farm program reforms legislated in the mid-1990s. This episode illustrates fundamental limitations of hegemonic power, as internal politics may undermine global power aggrandizement objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a preliminary examination of the relationship between the U.S. and the development of commercial spaceflight. It describes in particular how different state actors, industry leaders, and representatives from research and educational institutions frame the development of commercial spaceflight, and it sheds light on the state's involvement in promoting the industry. I ground my analysis on six U.S. congressional documents regarding commercial spaceflight, and organize my discussion around the four types of state roles that Evans (1995) identifies: midwifery, husbandry, custodian and demiurge. My general conclusion is that the U.S. is undertaking the roles of midwife, husbandry, and custodian in the promotion of commercial spaceflight, and from this, we can speculate that the industry has the potential for economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As concerns over the negative social and environmental impacts of industrial agriculture become more widespread, there has been a proliferation of efforts to define and regulate sustainable agriculture in the US. Whereas the USDA spearheaded previous efforts, today such efforts have largely shifted to Tripartite Standards Regimes (TSRs). Using a case study of the Leonardo Academy's initiative to develop a US sustainable agriculture standard, this paper examines the standards-development process and efforts by agribusiness to influence the process. Specifically, we analyze how politics operate in "depoliticized" TSRs, and how agribusiness and the USDA use framing practices and procedural complaints in attempts to influence the standard-development process. In concluding, we contend that although governance mechanisms are a potentially powerful tool for advocates of alternative agrifood, their efficacy may be constrained by science-based requirements, an agribusiness countermovement, and a captured state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores three historical periods in the governance of cotton quality standards, corresponding roughly to the eras of British and U.S. hegemony and to the current era. In each period, distinct authority relations emerged between private and state actors. In the current era, we see the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) making a bid to oversee global standards for cotton quality, involving claims to represent a global political community of interest and to govern a global jurisdiction. Many scholars claim that the emergence of 'global political communities' and 'deterritorialized' governance forms represent radically new phenomena in the current era. The historical evidence demonstrates that claims to represent a global political community of interest are not altogether new. Rather, they build on USDA's claim to represent transnational political communities in previous eras. However, the shift from a national to a global jurisdiction of authority does represent a break in the link between authority and territory. In this context, we see the declining importance of territory as a source of legitimacy. In its place are claims to rely on scientific validity as a more 'neutral' basis for global legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growers in the United States have adopted genetically modified crops on a large scale, despite political controversy over its use. Researchers now are devoting themselves to understanding the costs and benefits of adopting biotechnology for various stakeholders. These stakeholders include the environment, consumers, and growers. For growers, results show that adoption comes with added costs in inputs and added time following regulations. Yield is not always better. So why are farmers adopting these crops? Quantitative research has proposed some ideas, but it is time to ask the farmers. This research presents findings based on in-depth interviews with farmers in Florida and Georgia. We see how farmers are positioned in agro-food networks and do not always have power. Squeezed as they can be between input and product markets affects how they conceptualize technology and assess its benefits. They do not have to know the science behind biotechnology or necessarily what consumers think. Their job as they define it is the growing. Biotechnology appears to some conventional growers as an easy and less environmentally harmful way to produce (compared to what they are currently using). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the Western world, a cross section of the population has been presented in recent years with the concept of "local food." The cachet of "local food" generally rests on its implied relationship between consumer and producer and its designation as special, good, or virtuous in a way that appeals to an individual's sense of moral and political duty to consume it in response to problems cause by the industrialization and globalization of food markets. Its popularity has been mutually reinforced by the growth of farmers' markets in urban and suburban areas, the promotion of "local food" by restaurants and cookbook authors, and by its linkage to tourism activities. We question how "local food" is represented within different national contexts and cultures where their qualities would not be considered equally virtuous and demonstrate how its characteristics vary across national-cultural context, using the cases of the United States and France. We examine the rhetoric, beliefs, and strategies of producers and advocates in these two countries to discuss how "local foods" are identified, assigned measures of quality and authenticity, and promoted as solutions to perceived social problems stemming from agricultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology and political science offer multiple accounts of the origins and persistence of the U.S. agricultural welfare state, all sharing a common focus on the role of powerful private actors, state agencies, and the insertion of private interest into state agencies. This piece interrogates this dominant narrative. I sketch a brief history of U.S. agricultural policy - with a focus on the leading cash crop, corn - and then utilize limited international comparisons and data on supply, demand, prices, and government subsidies over time to first suggest the inadequacy of existing accounts and later offer theoretical alternatives. I conclude with directions for future research, including a focus on the role of the corn processing market - rather than farmers, as in traditional accounts - and questions about the empirical viability of an unprotected agricultural sector. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the United States, there is a discernible movement towards a more localized food system. Asserting that movement practices can minimize detrimental effects to the environment while providing benefits to human nutrition, community well being and social justice, those promoting food system localization engage in practices which aim to resist the globalizing and industrializing food and agriculture system. Despite these aims, however, the discourses and practices of the movement could be veiling inequalities which limit opportunity for participation in food system localization. Many scholars have pointed theoretically to the ways in which food system localization is not a priori more environmentally, socially or economically better than the global agrofood system. However, there has been considerably less empirical attention paid towards exploring possible impediments in accomplishing these goals. This article begins to fill this gap by examining who currently participates in the movement and the barriers that prevent some from engaging in the movement. Results show that while there is notable and widespread interest in a local foods movement, actual participation is limited to a distinct group and there are several relevant barriers that are germane when considering expanded involvement, and thus achieving democracy, in local food movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]