Building Diverse, Distributive, and Territorialized Agrifood Economies to Deliver Sustainability and Food Security

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand how agri-food economies can address current sustainability and food security challenges in the context of increasing economic and health inequalities. For that purpose, we cross-fertilize economic geography and food studies literature to develop an innovative conceptual framework that builds upon three currently fragmented bodies of work: the diverse economies literature, the distributed economies framework, and territorial and place-based approaches to food security. The proposed diverse, distributive and territorial framework further develops existing relational, performative and spatial approaches to explore changing economic geographies of agri-food systems. The application of this framework to investigate fruit and vegetable provision in the city of Cardiff (UK) reveals the key role of connective, fluid and multi-functional infrastructures to reconfigure foodscapes. Specifically, our analysis shows how food infrastructures have the potential to act as bridging conceptual, material and socio-political devices. The proposed framework ultimately serves as a capacity building tool to re-assess and rebuild territorialized agri-food economies which champion diversity and redistribution of value with the aim of delivering wide societal and material benefits, enhance democracy and increase the socio-ecological resilience of food systems.