Contact: Mary Jane Dunlap, University Relations, (785) 864-8853.
Editors note: Communities mentioned in the articles include Sebree, Slaughters and Onton Ky.; Alta Vista and Elma, Iowa; New Boston, Ill.
LAWRENCE - In agriculture, global agribusiness firms and small local producers are having an effect not only on consumer food choices but on U.S. communities as well, according to the summer 2000 issue of Human Organization, an international journal of applied anthropology edited at the University of Kansas.
Mark A. Grey, guest editor for the issue, reports that two food streams have evolved since World War II: a global stream dominated by corporate efficiency and economies of scale, and a local or alternative stream focused on producing and marketing food locally.
The articles focus on how global agribusiness forces out family farms and how alternative agriculture profits from agribusiness's weaknesses.
Grey notes that despite a major decline in people working on farms in the United States, the number of farmers' markets has increased. He writes that in 1990, less than 2 percent of the U.S. population was working on farms, compared to 42 percent in 1900. In contrast, the number of farmers' markets in the United States expanded from fewer than 100 in 1960 to more than 2,400 in 1996.
Agriculture has changed so radically since 1900 that Grey suggests "It may no longer be appropriate to call many aspects of agriculture 'farming'; they have become 'food manufacturing.'"
The journal's case studies include a look at
- a poultry industry boom in western Kentucky where the Corn Belt meets a dwindling Tobacco Belt;
- the effect of an upscale niche market for "wild catfish" on the declining river fishing commerce in New Boston, Ill.;
- a resistant group of Iowa farmers who formed a hog cooperative to raise and sell "free-range" pork to niche markets;
- a consumer survey by the Wisconsin Foodshed Research project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to determine the public understanding of "food system sustainability";
- the independent nature of farmers and the challenges of the cooperative nature of community-supported agriculture; and
- the contentious attempts to define "organic" agriculture.
Human Organization, the journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology, is edited by Donald D. Stull, KU chair and professor of anthropology. Grey is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls.