Ressources hors Chaire

Articles

• CAP vs Farm to Fork : Will we pay billions to destroy, or to support biodiversity, climate, and farmers ?
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The EU’s current model of agriculture directs billions in EU taxpayers’ money to fuel climate change, destroy biodiversity, and even undermine farmers’ livelihoods. While the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is approaching a key vote, freedom of information requests show that farmers and agribusiness lobby group Copa-Cogeca, along with pesticides and food industry giants, are doing their best to stop the CAP reform from aligning with the new Farm to Fork strategy of the Green Deal.

• Food swamps predict obesity rates better than food deserts in the United States
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  This paper investigates the effect of food environments, characterized as food swamps, on adult obesity rates. Food swamps have been described as areas with a high-density of establishments selling high-calorie fast food and junk food, relative to healthier food options. This study examines multiple ways of categorizing food environments as food swamps and food deserts, including alternate versions of the Retail Food Environment Index. We merged food outlet, sociodemographic and obesity data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Environment Atlas, the American Community Survey, and a commercial street reference dataset. We employed an instrumental variables (IV) strategy to correct for the endogeneity of food environments (i.e., that individuals self-select into neighborhoods and may consider food availability in their decision). Our results suggest that the presence of a food swamp is a stronger predictor of obesity rates than the absence of full-service grocery stores. We found, even after controlling for food desert effects, food swamps have a positive, statistically significant effect on adult obesity rates. All three food swamp measures indicated the same positive association, but reflected different magnitudes of the food swamp effect on rates of adult obesity (p values ranged from 0.00 to 0.16). Our adjustment for reverse causality, using an IV approach, revealed a stronger effect of food swamps than would have been obtained by naïve ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates. The food swamp effect was stronger in counties with greater income inequality (p < 0.05) and where residents are less mobile (p < 0.01). Based on these findings, local government policies such as zoning laws simultaneously restricting access to unhealthy food outlets and incentivizing healthy food retailers to locate in underserved neighborhoods warrant consideration as strategies to increase health equity.

• Frontières alimentaires et mets transfrontaliers. La pizza, questionnement d’un paradoxe
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Attestée depuis au moins le XVIe siècle à Naples, la pizza a connu au XXe siècle et plus particulièrement après la Seconde Guerre mondiale une diffusion quasi universelle. Met aux racines archaïques devenu étendard de la modernité, la pizza a traversé l’histoire comme les aires géographiques et culturelles. Pourtant, cet atypique comestible transfrontalier ne signe pas l’effacement des frontières : son adoption s’accompagne toujours d’un processus de réappropriation au cours duquel elle est pétrie de traits de culture locale et s’intègre harmonieusement dans un système de règles lui préexistant. Au terme de ce processus de réappropriation auquel la malléabilité inédite de la pizza laisse prise, le mets fait à nouveau frontière pour tout autre groupe que celui qui l’a travaillé et remis en forme. La pizza est un objet culturel qui offre un exemple particulièrement intéressant de la manière dont la diversité se maintient et se renouvelle dans le flux des emprunts, et permet dans le même temps de revisiter les scénarios d’homogénéisation culturelle et culinaire, ou l’effacement des frontières qu’induirait le processus de mondialisation. Le fait est piquant, relevons le, c’est tout justement la pizza qui, plus souvent qu’à son tour, est utilisée pour témoigner de l’érosion des spécificités culturelles.

• Limited food availability
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  While food security is a major worldwide issue, it is a much more serious problem in Low-Income
  (LI) and Lower Middle-Income (LMI) countries. Currently, sub-Saharan Africa is the sub-continent with the highest proportion of undernourished people, the largest gap between current and potential yields, and between cereal consumption and production. Looking to the future, population growth and climate change may worsen the situation, particularly in Africa. African countries are still facing rapid population growth with uncertain prospects about the ability of their agriculture to meet growing food demand. In addition, without sufficient adaptation measures, climate change will negatively impact food production in most African regions.

• Food systems at risk
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The way food systems have evolved over past decades means that they now face major risks, which in turn threaten the future of food systems themselves. Food systems have seriously contributed to climate change, environmental destruction, overexploitation of natural resources and pollution of air, water and soils. Despite the global average improvement in calorie production and major development of the food and agricultural product markets, huge inequalities in food access and repartition of the added value have emerged, leading to new serious nutritional and social problems. Based on a review of the most recent scientific knowledge, this report emphasizes Low-Income and Lower Middle-Income countries where the population faces greater challenges than elsewhere. Different threats are adding up and there are few options to adapt or mitigate these combinations of risks. This is a call for all those - businesses, policy makers, consumers, funding agencies - who are engaged in food systems transformations to bear in mind their systemic aspects and their multiple outcomes and risks in order to be able to fashion more sustainable and equitable food systems.

  This report was prepared and coordinated by the Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD), and is a joint production with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development (DG DEVCO). The scientific report hereunder takes stock of the current and future risks and challenges as regards to food systems.

• Etre agriculteur. L’individualisation du travail des agriculteurs
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Travailler ou ne pas travailler ensemble ? Le travail transforme l’environnement de l’homme, il construit l’identité du travailleur.

  En tant qu’activité de production, ce n’est pas une œuvre isolée, mais de société. Mais, alors, comment et pourquoi se font et se défont ces relations entre les hommes et les femmes lors de ces activités ? C’est sur cette sempiternelle question que Christian Nicourt « travaille » dans cet ouvrage. Ses objets d’étude : le quotidien, la pratique du travail agricole, les manières de travailler. Pour lui, c’est à ce niveau que les exclusions ou les sélections s’opèrent. Comment, en un siècle, les relations de travail des agriculteurs français se sont-elles transformées, déliées, individualisées au point de les vulnérabiliser ?

  Dès le début, l’auteur marque son originalité. C’est le travail de la cultivatrice du début du XXe siècle qu’il examine. Comment se retrouve-telle de plus en plus isolée et cantonnée dans le travail domestique, tout en accroissant sa dépendance lorsqu’elle effectue des travaux agricoles ? Il traite ensuite de l’émergence d’une « profession organisée » et de celle, quelques années plus tard, d’une « agriculture de groupe », nouveau modèle des bonnes manières dans les années soixante. C’est aussi autour de l’étude de populations agricoles plus spécifiques que l’auteur structure son ouvrage. Les éleveurs de porcs qui lui paraissent emblématiques de la transformation de l’agriculteur en entrepreneur. Les agricultrices, ces « travailleuses de l’ombre », pour lesquelles l’auteur cherche à montrer pourquoi et comment le travail de ces femmes a pu sembler inexistant. Il resitue enfin le travail d’une catégorie souvent occultée d’agriculteurs au sein du monde agricole : celui des bio. Enfin, Christian Nicourt analyse les transformations les plus récentes du métier d’agriculteur dans le contexte d’un territoire du travail agricole aujourd’hui recomposé. La rurbanisation, mouvement de redistribution des populations urbaines dans les espaces ruraux, influence-t-elle les manières d’y travailler ? Cet ouvrage s’adresse aux chercheurs, historiens et sociologues, travaillant sur le secteur agricole et rural, aux étudiants de ces disciplines. Toute personne intéressée par l’histoire du travail y trouvera de quoi nourrir sa réflexion.

• Malaysian Food Barometer (MFB) : a study of the impact of compressed modernisation on food habits
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The Malaysian society is undergoing rapid modernisation. The
  emerging middle class in Malaysia is influencing the lifestyles and traditional food habits of the main three ethnics (i.e. Malays, Chinese, and Indians). This article studied the impact of compressed modernisation on food in a multicultural context. The Malaysian Food Barometer (MFB), published in the year 2014, focuses on the socio-cultural determinants of food habits in Malaysia.

• How the microbiome challenges our concept of self
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Today, the three classical biological explanations of the individual self––the immune system, the brain, the genome––are being challenged by the new field of microbiome research. Evidence shows that our resident microbes orchestrate the adaptive immune system, influence the brain, and contribute more gene functions than our own genome. The realization that humans are not individual, discrete entities but rather the outcome of ever-changing interactions with microorganisms has consequences beyond the biological disciplines. In particular, it calls into question the assumption that distinctive human traits set us apart from all other animals––and therefore also the traditional disciplinary divisions between the arts and the sciences.

• Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes : a multi-level perspective and a case-study
  23 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  This paper addresses the question of how technological transitions (TT) come about ? Are there particular patterns and mechanisms in transition processes ? TT are defined as major, long-term technological changes in the way societal functions are fulfilled. TT do not only involve changes in technology, but also changes in user practices, regulation, industrial networks, infrastructure, and symbolic meaning or culture. This paper practices ‘appreciative theory’ [R.R. Nelson, S.G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, Bellknap Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982] and brings together insights from evolutionary economics and technology studies. This results in a multi-level perspective on TT where two views of the evolution are combined : (i) evolution as a process of variation, selection and retention, (ii) evolution as a process of unfolding and reconfiguration. The perspective is empirically illustrated with a qualitative longitudinal case-study, the transition from sailing ships to steamships, 1780–1900. Three particular mechanisms in TT are described : niche-cumulation, technological add-on and hybridisation, riding along with market growth.

• A conceptual model of the food and nutrition system
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The integrated model developed here included three subsystems (producer, consumer, nutrition) and nine stages (production, processing, distribution, acquisition, preparation, consumption, digestion, transport, metabolism). The integrated model considers the processes and transformations that occur within the system and relationships between the system and other systems in the biophysical and social environments. The integrated conceptual model of the food and nutrition system presents food and nutrition activities as part of a larger context and identifies linkages among the many disciplines that deal with the food and nutrition system.