Feminist Perspectives on the Bioeconomy
Sarah Hackfort and Anna Saave, together with Carlotta Brinkmann from Universität Erfurt, have published a blog entry on Feminist Perspectives on the Bioeconomy on econ4future.org.
Sarah Hackfort published an article in Frontiers in Political Science.
Abstract
This piece addresses the political dimension of sustainability in the agricultural bioeconomy by focusing on power, participation, and property rights around key technologies. Bioeconomy policies aim to establish economic systems based on renewable resources such as plants and microorganisms to reduce dependence on fossil resources. To achieve this, they rely on economic growth and increased biomass production through high-tech innovations. This direction has sparked important critique of the environmental and social sustainability of such projects. However, little attention has been paid in the bioeconomy literature to the political dimension surrounding key precision technologies such as data-driven precision agriculture (PA) or precision breeding technologies using new genomic techniques (NGT). The political dimension includes questions of power, participation, and property rights regarding these technologies and the distribution of the benefits and burdens they generate. This lack of attention is particularly pertinent given the recurring and promising claims that precision technologies not only enhance environmental sustainability, but also contribute to the democratization of food and biomass production. This contribution addresses this claim in asking whether we can really speak of a democratization of the agricultural bioeconomy through these precision technologies. Drawing on (own) empirical research and historical evidence, it concludes that current patterns are neither driving nor indicative of a democratization. On the contrary, corporate control, unequal access, distribution, and property rights over data and patents point to few gains for small firms and breeders, but to a reproduction of farmers’ dependencies, and less transparency for consumers.?
Read Article
The paper has been published open access and can be read online.
Cite as
Hackfort, S. (2024). Democratization through precision technologies? Unveiling power, participation, and property rights in the agricultural bioeconomy. Frontiers in Political Science, 6, 1363044. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2024.1363044
Header image generated using openai.com.
Sarah Hackfort co-authored an article with Sarah Marquis and Kelly Bronson in Big Data & Society.
Abstract
The global food system is characterized by market concentration and oligopoly. In our article, we focus on the most powerful input supply and machinery companies and analyze how these firms create value, both economic and otherwise, from big data. In digital capitalism, data is valorized across sectors; personal data is aggregated into large-scale datasets, a practice that feeds economic concentration and monopolization. Big data also has become central to the business model for agricultural companies; it is a claim made by the companies themselves. Yet, little is known about their specific strategies to do so. We aim to fill this gap, asking how is agricultural data transformed into value by the most powerful agribusinesses and ag-tech firms?
Through the lens of assetization, we examine corporate strategies for transforming agricultural data into value. We draw on literature from food studies, specifically political economic analyses of the historical practices of agricultural corporations, as well as literature from critical data studies that investigates data as an asset. For our analysis, we rely on a variety of gray literature and public-facing documents: financial documents, sustainability and shareholder reports, terms of use, license agreements, and news articles. Our results contribute to the critical data studies literature on agricultural big data by identifying three main strategies of assetization: securing relationships and dependence, price-setting and data sharing, and product development and targeted marketing.
The strategies have socio-ecological implications; our results indicate the reproduction of asymmetrical power relations in the agri-food system favoring corporations and the continuation of long-standing dynamics of inequalities.
Read Article
The paper has been published open access and can be read online.
Cite as
Hackfort, S., Marquis, S., & Bronson, K. (2024). Harvesting value: Corporate strategies of data assetization in agriculture and their socio-ecological implications. Big Data & Society, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241234279
Blog Post
A blog post summarising the article’s key findings was published here.
Header image generated using openai.com.
Frisch vernetzte soziologische Waldforschung im Aufbruch
Ausrichtung des ersten Soziologischen Waldsymposium am 01.12.2023 an der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Mit dem Soziologischen Waldsymposium kamen am 01. Dezember 2023 erstmals die diversen Forschenden und Akteur*innen der soziologischen und sozialwissenschaftlichen Waldforschung im deutschsprachigen Raum zusammen. Ein breites Spektrum aus eindrucksvollen Forschungsbeiträgen zeigte neben der Vielfalt der bereits existierenden soziologischen Waldforschung ihre Fähigkeit, Beiträge zur sozial-ökologischen Transformation der Waldnutzung zu leisten und kritisch-reflexiv gesellschaftsrelevante Themen und Konfliktlinien rund um Wald und Forst zu bearbeiten. Dieser an Bedeutung gewinnendend Forschungslandschaft fehlte es bisher an Vernetzung und gemeinsamen Vorhaben, weshalb das erste Waldsymposium von reger Teilnahme und einer spürbaren Aufbruchsstimmung gekennzeichnet war.
Organisation: Jana Holz (flumen, FSU Jena), Ronja Mikoleit (FVA Freiburg), Dr. Anna Saave (BioMaterialities, HU Berlin), Ronja Schröder (Uni Oldenburg). Wir berichten in einem Tagungsbericht bald ausführlich von der Veranstaltung.
Tagungsbericht
Der Tagungsbericht ist momentan noch in Arbeit und wird hier verlinkt, sobald er zur Verfügung steht.
Abstract
The future vision of food production is often portrayed as a tech utopia. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), for example, published a future image of food production that includes self-driving tractors, drones, sensor equipped cows, and field robots alongside high-tech aquaponic urban agriculture (BMBF, 2023). There is still quite a way to go until these technologies become all-encompassing or even widespread, but they have made huge headway in the agricultural sector in the Global North in the past five years.
New digital technologies are often presented by politicians and large agro-food companies as the silver bullet to solve all of agriculture’s problems:The food system contributes between 20% and 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Mbow et al., 2019). Most of these emissions are generated by agricultural production, particularly crop and livestock activities within the farm gate as well as land-use change and deforestation for agriculture. Large-scale industrialised agriculture is also a key driver of the global biodiversity crisis. At the same time, many, especially small-scale, farmers as well as farm workers around the world struggle to make ends meet as they are often the first to suffer from the negative impacts of a changing climate. Digital technologies, so a widespread promise, provide the solution to making agriculture more profitable, more productive, more independent of a seasonal workforce, and of course more environmentally sustainable. As such, the promise continues, they will provide a veritable fourth revolution in agriculture.Yet, many of the digital technological innovations currently being rolled out by large agro-food companies such as Bayer, John Deere, or Syngenta are far from revolutionising the dominant agro-industrial model of food production. More to the point, they minimally optimise the current production model through precision agriculture that can slightly reduce the use of fertilisers and water or through robots that reduce the need for seasonal labour (Prause et al., 2021). They do not, however, offer a radically different way of doing agriculture, one that might, indeed, offer ways forward for a pesticide free, more climate-resilient and socio- and ecologically sustainable way of producing food. Instead, data-based decision support tools such as farm management platforms increase the risk of locking farmers into the current system of using large-scale machinery, chemical inputs, and standardised seeds (Bronson, 2022).
Cite as
Prause, Louisa, and Alwin Egger. “Digitalisation for a Socio-Ecological Transformation in Agriculture.” In Shaping Digital Transformation for a Sustainable Society, 104–10. Berlin, 2023. https://publication2023.bits-und-baeume.org/#book/104.
(Header image created using openai.com)
Abstract
Feminist analyses of the historical dynamics of gender systems are fundamental to the work of challenging growth-driven political economies, and of designing more equitable and balanced ecosocial systems. Feminist theories and methods that acknowledge and support diverse voices, knowledges, and practices are vital resources for building on heterodox degrowth movements. In dialogue with postcolonial, decolonial, indigenous, and anti-racist efforts, intersectional feminisms have been unlearning and disrupting conventional politics of knowing and action in ways that help forge more inclusive understandings and applications necessary for degrowth futures. With the purpose of highlighting advances on these three fronts, this essay was co-written by participants in the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA), an inclusive network of activists and scholars that has supported an array of collaborative initiatives. FaDA’s birthplace was the 5th International Conference on Degrowth in Budapest in 2016, where a surprisingly large turnout for the roundtable Degrowth and feminism(s): Conflicts, intersections, and convergences between two radical political movements motivated the establishment of the FaDA mailing list, our main means of communication. FaDA participation reflects the diversity of degrowth advocates in general: a 2017 survey (Iserlohn, 2018) revealed that members bring varying activist, academic, household, and professional experiences from wide-ranging contexts around the world. This essay is illuminated with examples from our own journeys toward more inclusive and mutual learning across languages, nationalities, cultures, gender identities, and time zones, all challenges engaged in the co-writing process. We celebrate the launching of the journal Degrowth as a convivial space for generating and exploring knowledge and practice from diverse perspectives. And we push the journal to realize its tremendous potential to foster synergies around feminisms and degrowth. The main part of this text explores powerful contributions from feminist thought and practice. We then identify a set of important issues and approaches advanced by feminisms and degrowth scholarship, and point to potential for further work along these lines. Our conclusions draw on histories of movement-building across diverse feminisms worldwide to strategize ways to strengthen degrowth alliances toward shared goals of emancipatory ecosocial transformation.
Cite as
“Why are feminist perspectives, analyses, and actions vital to degrowth?” (2023) Degrowth journal. Available at: https://degrowthjournal.org/publications/2023-05-03-why-are-feminist-perspectives-analyses-and-actions-vital-to-degrowth/.
Header image generated with openai.com
Sarah Hackfort published an article on “Unlocking sustainability? The power of corporate lock-ins and how they shape digital agriculture in Germany” in the Journal of Rural Studies.
The article has been published open access.
Abstract
The digital transformation of agriculture is widely presented as a path to sustainability and a win-win strategy that benefits the environment, farmers, and consumers alike. However, recent studies show how the digital economy is characterized by monopolystructures, market concentration and corporate power that determine patterns of control over digital technology, distribution of benefits and value creation from data. In the field of agriculture, there is a lack of empirical research on lock-ins that examines in detail the logic of these effects, the actors, and the power dynamics behind them. Yet such insights are exactly what is needed to better understand the effects and to break unsustainable lock-ins towards more sustainable agri-food systems. Drawing on the literature on the political economy of food and agriculture, and on studies of innovation and sustainability transitions, this article aims to fill this research gap. Based on an empirical case study in Germany, it identifies systemic, technological, data, legal, soft, and discursive lock-ins that reinforce existing power relations and farmers’ dependence on corporate agro-industrial farming models. It concludes that sustainable transformations in agriculture require a disruption of the identified lock-ins at multiple levels.
Cite as
Hackfort, S. (2023). Unlocking sustainability? The power of corporate lock-ins and how they shape digital agriculture in Germany. Journal of Rural Studies, 101, 103065. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2023.103065
Miriam Boyer writes together with Franziska Kusche, Sarah Hackfort, Louisa Prause and Friederike Engelbrecht-Bock a journal article on the topic “The making of sustainability: ideological strategies, the materiality of nature, and biomass use in the bioeconomy”.
Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-022-01254-4
Citation: Boyer, Miriam, Franziska Kusche, Sarah Hackfort, Louisa Prause and Friederike Engelbrecht-Bock (2022): The making of sustainability: ideological strategies, the materiality of nature, and biomass use in the bioeconomy, in: Sustainability Science.
[source of picture: unsplash.com/Rafael Albornoz]
Miriam Boyer writes together with Sarah Hackfort a book chapter on “Materialität der Natur” in the hand book “Handbuch Politische Ökologie. Theorien, Konflikte, Begriffe, Methoden”.
Link: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5627-5/handbuch-politische-oekologie/
Citation: Boyer, Miriam, Sarah Hackfort (2022): “Materialität der Natur.” In Daniela Gottschlich, Sarah Hackfort, Tobias Schmitt und Uta von Winterfeld, ed., Handbuch Politische Ökologie. Theorien, Konflikte, Begriffe, Methoden. transcript, Bielefeld.
[source of picture: unsplash.com/Adam Kool]
Miriam Boyer writes a book chapter on the topic of biodiversity in the handbook “Handbuch Politische Ökologie. Theorien, Konflikte, Begriffe, Methoden”.
Link: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5627-5/handbuch-politische-oekologie/
Citation: Boyer, Miriam (2022): “Biodiversität.” In Daniela Gottschlich, Sarah Hackfort, Tobias Schmitt und Uta von Winterfeld, ed., Handbuch Politische Ökologie. Theorien, Konflikte, Begriffe, Methoden. transcript, Bielefeld.
[Bildquelle: unsplash.com/Henry Perks]