Doctoral Dissertation Research: Networks, Decision Models, and Moral Economies in Ecological Agriculture

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Much of the world's commercial food production and consumption today depends on large-scale industrial agriculture and use of toxic chemicals. Increasing knowledge about the negative effects of conventional agriculture on health and the environment as well as deepening food insecurity worldwide have recently pushed global policy institutions to promote an agroecological model of cultivation. This model uses ecological principles to produce food with low inputs and without pesticides or artificial fertilizers. While this alternative model has been entering policy discourse and practice at global and local levels, many people all over the world have already been creating alternative networks around ecological production and consumption. This project, which trains a student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, aims to understand how these networks operate on the ground by focusing on the moral decisions and economic considerations of producers and consumers. In addition to enhancing scientific understanding of ecological agriculture from an anthropological perspective, the findings would be useful to policy organizations that seek to establish ecological cultivation as a response to food insecurity, environmental degradation, and public health concerns. Burge Abiral, under the supervision of Dr. Anand Pandian of Johns Hopkins University, will explore the new sphere of ecological food production and consumption that has been forming. This research asks: How do ecological farmers justify their cultivation choices in using specific agroecological techniques, as they attend to consumer demand and seek adequate profit? Through which decisions and strategies are ecological food products priced and marketed? How do ecological food products get to be valued in the different phases of the supply chain? How are ecological norms established among the diverse actors in this food network? The research takes place in Turkey, where the researcher has identified two distinct groups engaged in production that can be comparatively studied to analyze more longstanding against nascent ecological agricultural networks. The project will involve 12 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, during which a combination of research techniques, such as interviews, household surveys, and archival research will be conducted. This research will inform debates in anthropology and the social sciences broadly about development, agricultural production, and food security, as well as economic anthropological debates about moral economies and value.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.