Culture & community | TableDebates

Biocultural Rights, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities

Biocultural Rights, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities

This book gives an overview of the concept of “biocultural rights” and the tools that indigenous and local communities can use to protect their ways of life and their rights to land, territories and resources.

Traditional Mexican Agriculture

Traditional Mexican Agriculture

This book offers a holistic study of traditional Mexican agriculture, examining how it has changed according to environmental, climatic, geographical, social and cultural conditions. It sets out practices and knowledge that can inform sustainable agroecological systems.

Rethink vegetable supply chains as networks not markets

Rethink vegetable supply chains as networks not markets

This policy brief from the UK’s Food Research Collaboration argues that thinking of vegetable supply chains in the UK as interactive and entangled networks of state, community and commercial actors, rather than primarily as markets, can give communities greater influence over supply chain governance and provide growers with alternatives to supermarket supply chains.

The United Nations' Declaration on Peasants' Rights

The United Nations' Declaration on Peasants' Rights

This book explores the 2018 United Nations' Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). It features sections on specific groups of rights holders (including peasants, indigenous peoples, women and small-scale fishers), access to and control of natural resources (such as land, water, seeds and food), governance of food and agriculture, and examples of the potential impact of the UNDROP in Kenya, Greece, the European Union more broadly, Brazil and India.

Agroecological transitions: determinist and open-ended visions

Agroecological transitions: determinist and open-ended visions

This open-access book looks at the approaches that people take towards agroecological transitions. It defines two clusters: a “determinist” perspective which focuses on achieving a predefined end goal for the transition to agroecology, and an “open-ended” perspective which leaves more room for changing goals.

The politics of knowledge

Understanding the evidence for agroecology

This report from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food examines the evidence supporting agroecology, regenerative, and Indigenous approaches to food systems. It also looks at broader questions of how data is gathered, whose knowledge carries weight and what counts as evidence. It calls for “decolonising and democratising knowledge systems within education, research, and innovation” to help accelerate food systems transformations.

Image: photoAC, Gardening agriculture grass, Pixabay, Pixabay Licence

Journal articles

The mindscapes of regenerative agriculture

This paper analyses six themes that emerge from discourse on regenerative agriculture and identifies three opportunities for how to use discourse to transform “industrial-productivist” agriculture.

Image: Copernicus Sentinel-2, ESA, Flevopolder by Sentinel-2, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/igo/deed.en). Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2018.

Support Your Locals: on international solidarity in a resilient and sustainable urban food system

Anke Brons is a PhD candidate at Aeres University of Applied Sciences Almere and the Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University & Research. Her research focuses on questions of inclusiveness in relation to healthy and sustainable food practices. Dr Sigrid Wertheim-Heck is associate professor global food system transformation in the Environmental Policy Group at WUR, and is professor Food and Healthy Living at Aeres University of Applied Sciences, both in The Netherlands. Her interest in urban food systems informs her agenda on the relationship between urbanisation, food provisioning and food consumption. She is part of TABLE’s board of directors. This blog post is based on a Dutch essay, originally published in the Flevo Campus essay bundle ‘Veerkracht als opdracht’ (Resilience as a mission).

Apples and People

News and resources

Apples and People: The global story of the apple

Apples and People is a digital exhibition telling the stories of apples from around the world and their importance to people and culture. The website includes stories about apples, an apple map, apple art, and written pieces. New apple stories will be released throughout 2021 and 2022; to receive these, readers can subscribe to the mailing list.