Food, Agriculture and Social Change ─ The Everyday Vitality of Latin America

In recent years food studies scholarship has tended to focus on a number of increasingly abstract, largely unquestioned concepts, in particular with regard to how capital, markets and states organize and operate. This has led to a gulf between public policy and the realities of food as experienced by people in homes and on the streets. Through grounded case studies in seven Latin American countries, each of which seeks to explain development as it uniquely unfolds, this book explores how social change in food and agriculture is fundamentally experiential, contingent and unpredictable.

In viewing development in food as a socio-political-material experience, the authors find new objects, (inter)subjectivities and associations. These reveal a multiplicity of processes, relationships, effects and affects largely absent in current academic literature. In their attention to the contingency and creativity found in households, neighbourhoods and social networks as well as at the borders of human/non-human experience, the book explores how people diversely meet their food demands while confronting today's most pressing agriculture and food concerns in the region.

Stephen Sherwood is a Docent and Researcher in the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation Group, at Wageningen University, the Netherlands.?Previoulsy he?was the Andes Regional Director for World Neighbors, and has?held positions at Cornell University, the International Potato Center (Peru) and the FAO’s Global IPM Facility. He co-founded a number of grassroots organizations in Honduras and Ecuador.

Alberto Arce is Senior Lecturer in Development Sociology at Wageningen University, the Netherlands and Visiting Professor?in the Agrarian Economy Department at the University of Chile.

Myriam Paredes?is a Professor in the Desarrollo Rural Territorial, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Quito, Ecuador.