Ressources hors Chaire

Articles

• Corporate concentration and technological change in the global seed industry
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  In the past three decades, the seed sector has experienced, and is now again experiencing, corporate concentration trends. The fallout of this consolidation is the subject of numerous concerns. However, the seed sector is rather poorly understood. Thus, it is useful to understand it better and to investigate the potential impact on the agri-food chain of the trend toward increased corporate concentration. The first part of this paper presents the main characteristics of the global seed sector, its stakeholders, and its size in the agri-food chain. Next, the corporate consolidation trends of the seed industry over the past two years are examined. The technological evolution of the seed sector is also briefly presented. In the last part of this paper, the fallout of recent mergers and acquisitions in the seed industry are analyzed. Opposing views are expressed on the impact of these mergers and acquisitions in the agri-food chain : while certain stakeholders worry about the risk of food power by the biggest companies, some others expect useful innovations.

• When food systems meet sustainability – Current narratives and implications for actions
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The concept of food system has gained prominence in recent years amongst both scholars and policy-makers. Experts from diverse disciplines and backgrounds have in particular discussed the nature and origin of the “unsustainability” of our modern food systems. These efforts tend, however, to be framed within distinctive disciplinary narratives. In this paper we propose to explore these narratives and to shed light on the explicit -or implicit- epistemological assumptions, mental models, and disciplinary paradigms that underpin those. The analysis indicates that different views and interpretations prevail amongst experts about the nature of the “crisis”, and consequently about the research and priorities needed to “fix” the problem. We then explore how sustainability is included in these different narratives and the link to the question of healthy diets. The analysis reveals that the concept of sustainability, although widely used by all the different communities of practice, remains poorly defined, and applied in different ways and usually based on a relatively narrow interpretation. In so doing we argue that current attempts to equate or subsume healthy diets within sustainability in the context of food system may be misleading and need to be challenged. We stress that trade-offs between different dimensions of food system sustainability are unavoidable and need to be navigated in an explicit manner when developing or implementing sustainable food system initiatives. Building on this overall analysis, a framework structured around several entry points including outcomes, core activities, trade-offs and feedbacks is then proposed, which allows to identify key elements necessary to support the transition toward sustainable food systems.

• Toward a new philosophy of preventive nutrition : from a reductionist to a holistic paradigm to improve nutritional recommendations
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The reductionist approach has been predominant to date in human nutrition research and has unraveled some of the fundamental mechanisms at the basis of food nutrients (e.g., those that involve deficiency diseases). In Western countries, along with progress in medicine and pharmacology, the reductionist approach helped to increase life expectancy. However, despite 40 y of research in nutrition, epidemics of obesity and diabetes are growing each year worldwide, both in developed and developing countries, leading to a decrease in healthy life years. Yet, interactions between nutrition-health relations cannot be modeled on the basis of a linear cause-effect relation between 1 food compound and 1 physiologic effect but rather from multicausal nonlinear relations. In other words, explaining the whole from the specific by a bottom-up reductionist approach has its limits. A top-down approach becomes necessary to investigate complex issues through a holistic view before addressing any specific question to explain the whole. However, it appears that both approaches are necessary and mutually reinforcing. In this review, Eastern and Western research perspectives are first presented, laying out bases for what could be the consequences of applying a reductionist versus holistic approach to research in nutrition vis-à-vis public health, environmental sustainability, breeding, biodiversity, food science and processing, and physiology for improving nutritional recommendations. Therefore, research that replaces reductionism with a more holistic approach will reveal global and efficient solutions to the problems encountered from the field to the plate. Preventive human nutrition can no longer be considered as “pharmacology” or foods as “drugs.”

• La crise sanitaire a rendu visible et aggravé...
  22 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  La crise sanitaire a rendu visible et aggravé l’insécurité alimentaire1 en France et montré les limites de la réponse institutionnelle qui lui est apportée. Les raisons en sont connues : d’une part, le manque de revenus économiques des populations concernées, qui conduit, en conjonction avec des conditions de vie dégradées, à des déséquilibres nutritionnels et des risques pour la santé ; d’autre part, les fondements caritatifs des politiques publiques menées depuis le milieu des années 1980 qui font que la lutte contre l’insécurité alimentaire se limite presque essentiellement à de la distribution d’aide alimentaire.

• « La nourriture de la marmite ». Alimentation et socialisation de l’enfant dans deux villes camerounaises
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Chapitre 11 de l’ouvrage Manger en ville  : Regards socio-anthropologiques d’Afrique, d’Amérique latine et d’Asie (Soula et al., 2020)
  Ce chapitre vise à montrer que l’alimentation de l’enfant de 0 à 1 an dans les villes de Yaoundé et de Douala au Cameroun est un enjeu d’humanisation et de socialisation. De juin 2013 à mars 2014, une recherche qualitative a été réalisée sur la base d’un échantillonnage de type non probabiliste par choix raisonné dans ces deux villes cosmopolites. Les ménages rencontrés ont été choisis à partir de critères socio-économiques, niveau de vie haut, moyen et modeste, ainsi que sur la base de leur diversité ethnique. Les pratiques d’alimentation visent à intégrer l’enfant à son groupe social. Un artefact symbolise cette socialisation de l’enfant : « la nourriture de la marmite ».

• Sociologies de l’alimentation
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  « La façon dont les hommes conçoivent la satisfaction de leurs besoins alimentaires ne saurait se réduire à de strictes logiques utilitaires ou technologiques. L’alimentation a une fonction structurante de l’organisation sociale d’un groupe humain. Qu’il s’agisse des activités de production, de distribution, de préparation, de consommation, elle est un objet crucial du savoir socio-anthropologique. »

• La situation mondiale de l’alimentation et de l’agriculture 2019. Aller plus loin dans la réduction des pertes et gaspillages de denrées alimentaires
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Le présent rapport fournit de nouvelles estimations sur le pourcentage des denrées alimentaires qui sont perdues au niveau mondial, depuis le stade de la production jusqu’à la vente au détail. Il constate par ailleurs une grande hétérogénéité dans les estimations relatives aux pertes alimentaires, souvent pour un même produit ou un même stade de la chaîne d’approvisionnement. Le fait de pouvoir déterminer et comprendre clairement les points critiques où se produisent les pertes dans les différentes chaînes d’approvisionnement – là où le potentiel de réduction des pertes alimentaires est élevé – est une condition essentielle si l’on veut prendre des mesures adéquates. Le rapport fournit des principes directeurs susceptibles de guider les interventions de réduction des pertes et gaspillages alimentaires en fonction des résultats escomptés, que ce soit sur le plan de l’efficacité économique, de la sécurité alimentaire, de la nutrition ou de la durabilité environnementale.

• Should we go “home” to eat ? : toward a reflexive politics of localism
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  “Coming home to eat” [Nabhan, 2002. Coming Home to Eat : The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. Norton, New York] has become a clarion call among alternative food movement activists. Most food activist discourse makes a strong connection between the localization of food systems and the promotion of environmental sustainability and social justice. Much of the US academic literature on food systems echoes food activist rhetoric about alternative food systems as built on alternative social norms. New ways of thinking, the ethic of care, desire, realization, and vision become the explanatory factors in the creation of alternative food systems. In these norm-based explanations, the “Local” becomes the context in which this type of action works. In the European food system literature about local “value chains” and alternative food networks, localism becomes a way to maintain rural livelihoods. In both the US and European literatures on localism, the global becomes the universal logic of capitalism and the local the point of resistance to this global logic, a place where “embeddedness” can and does happen. Nevertheless, as other literatures outside of food studies show, the local is often a site of inequality and hegemonic domination. However, rather than declaim the “radical particularism” of localism, it is more productive to question an “unreflexive localism” and to forge localist alliances that pay attention to equality and social justice. The paper explores what that kind of localist politics might look like.

• Insécurité alimentaire et/ou précarité alimentaire, démocratie alimentaire… de quoi parle-t-on ?
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  L’alimentation est un marqueur de la pauvreté qui met au jour des inégalités sociales invisibles. Deux concepts s’y côtoient, celui d’insécurité alimentaire (qui mobilise les professionnels de la santé et les experts des pays du Sud) et celui de précarité alimentaire (qui mobilise les acteurs de l’action sociale et les institutions publiques). Alors que les revendications citoyennes sont de plus en plus importantes, on peut noter un manque de prise en compte des enjeux démocratiques dans les dispositifs d’aide alimentaire en France. Dans ce contexte, la démocratie alimentaire apparait être un concept clef pour aller vers une alimentation pour et par tous et non plus simplement une aide alimentaire.

• The rise of supermarkets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Supermarkets are traditionally viewed by development economists, policymakers, and practitioners as the rich world’s place to shop. The three regions discussed here have a great majority of the poor on the planet. But supermarkets are no longer just niche players for rich consumers in the capital cities of the countries in these regions. The rapid rise of supermarkets in these regions in the past five to ten years has transformed agrifood markets at different rates and depths across regions and countries. Many of those transformations present great challenges—even exclusion—for small farms, and small processing and distribution firms, but also potentially great opportunities. Development models, policies, and programs need to adapt to this radical change.