About this Research Topic
The current globalized food system lies at the center of the connection of multiple economic, social, and environmental problems, ranging from its impacts on family farming due to the progressive oligopolistic concentration and a growing presence of transnational capital dominated by big retailers, to environmental degradation due to the unsustainable resource extraction and the dependence on fossil fuels for the transportation of kilometric food. Other important impacts are concentrated on agriculture and food systems in urban and peri-urban spaces. In addition to the socio-economic and environmental impacts, local knowledge and endogenous varieties are disappearing due to agricultural intensification. As a critical and alternative approach, Alternative Food Networks strive with cooperative values to seek localized, equitable, and sustainable solutions to the problem of food supply in an increasingly urbanized world that continues to depend on rural areas to obtain basic resources such as food. The perspective of value chains considers this interdependence but underlines the need for the food supply process to be accompanied by a fair distribution of the wealth generated and a concatenation of sustainable solutions.
The goal of this collection is therefore to collate research on Sustainable Food Networks (SFNs) related to the following specific objectives:
a) Identifying the different initiatives of SFNs in different territories, including a focus on urban and peri-urban spaces, characterizing their economic, social, political and environmental features;
b) Evaluating the spatial dimension of the SFNs in global contexts, identifying the foodshed of a particular population within Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, or North America, and incorporating the analysis on the centrality of the nodes and their accessibility;
c) Identifying and evaluating the policies that can increase the social, economic and environmental sustainability of food value chains.
The following list of questions may help potential contributors to outline their papers:
• How are those (and other) alternative values (above mentioned) exactly raised and transferred along SFNs?
• What are the most critical spatial nodes within SFNs for the reproduction of alternative values?
• What are the roles of urban and peri-urban agriculture in SFNs?
• What is the relationship between territorial conditions (e.g. city-region vs rural regions), territorial governance and SFN performance in terms of the reproduction of their distinctive values?
• How are SFNs tackling competition from hegemonic value chains and their corporate social responsibility policies?
• How can the perspective of SFNs help to understand the growing surge of local/organic/healthy food outlets?
• What (if any) should be the role of public policy in the strengthening of SFNs?
Keywords: i-urban Food Policies, Governance, Alternative food networks, Sustainable Food systems, Food Value Chain, Short Food Supply Systems, Food Distribution, Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture, Agroecology
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.