The Fight Over Food: Producers, Consumers, and Activists Challenge the Global Food System

9. Possibilities for Revitalizing Local Agriculture: Evidence from Four Counties in Washington State

Research in the sociology of agriculture has come a long way since the late s, when recurrent “farm crises” in the United States brought populist and Marxist scholars together to develop a “new political economy of agriculture ” (Friedland ). At that time, many U.S. farm families were being squeezed out of agriculture in spite of their best efforts to sustain their farms, which contributed to economic and social decline in many rural communities . These events inspired researchers to learn more about the structural conditions that were thought to be contributing to these crises.One of their principal findings was that the economic difficulties facing agricultural producers were attributable, in large measure, to the increasing integration of agriculture into technologically sophisticated systems that were being reorganized on a global level. (For some examples of this literature, see Bonanno ; Kim and Curry ; McMichael ; LeHeron .) Other scholars have criticized research in the political economy of agriculture for being deterministic and for failing to pay significant attention to how people,as part of the networks they create,exert control over their own lives. For example, actor-network theory (ant) suggests that various actors, including nonhuman actors, develop strategies in response to social conditions that promote their own interests (Busch and Juska ).Research that focuses on human agency, like ant, does not necessarily reject the findings of political-economic studies but rather emphasizes the importance of conducting research in a manner that recognizes the importance of microlevel human behaviors in processes of social change (Symes ). This emphasis on human action, both individually and in groups, is also thought to be important in broadening our awareness of what constitutes an actor as well as significant social change.Thus,in examining processes of change in agrifood 9 possibilities for revitalizing local agriculture: evidence from four counties in washington state Raymond A. Jussaume Jr. and Kazumi Kondoh systems,some scholars now analyze the ways in which consumers engage with and influence other participants in agrifood systems (Goodman and DuPuis ; Lockie ). From our perspective,political-economic and agency-oriented approaches to the study of agrifood systems are not antithetical. Taken together, these literatures remind us of the problems inherent in much of contemporary social science research, particularly the long-standing emphasis on causality, as well as debates over whether social change is primarily a product of “topdown ”or“bottom-up”mechanisms.Clearly,human actors are important,as they do attempt to influence other actors and contribute to the creation of social structures and social change. Existing social structures, in turn, establish parameters for the thoughts and behaviors of actors. Social organizations , structural arrangements, history, ecological conditions, and human actors are equally real and equally important subjects of inquiry. For us, the question is not which of these is most significant or has greater causal influence . Rather, our interest lies in identifying the factors that shape human behavior within specific contexts of place and time, and in investigating the evolution of actors’ attitudes and behaviors within these situations. In other words, we argue that research in the sociology of agriculture should move beyond a structure-versus-agency debate and devote more effort to developing analytical approaches that examine various empirical examples of how structure and agency interact. This is the approach we use in this chapter, which seeks to contribute to a discussion of how contemporary agrifood systems are evolving by examining the contexts and processes of change in agrifood systems that vary by place within Washington. A central goal is to investigate the possibilities for the sustainable development of local food systems, which is tied to current interest in how food systems might be democratized, perhaps by reembedding them in localities (Dahlberg ;Lyson and Green ).In other words,we address the question of whether the increased use of local food-marketing strategies in different counties in Washington is a reflection of a specific intent on the part of producers and consumers to create an alternative agrifood system that challenges the mainstream industrialized agrifood system. As noted in several other chapters in this volume, particularly Amy Guptill’s, our analysis demonstrates that while human agency helps shape the structure of agrifood system change at the local level, existing local structural conditions provide varied contexts within which human agency is expressed. Four counties in Washington—Chelan, Grant, King and Skagit—constitute the empirical setting for our analysis.Each of these localities has unique 226 the fight over food ecological...