WORKSHOP: Local and Alternative Food Systems in Stressed Environments: France, May 2019 & North Carolina, October 2019

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This award supports the participation of U.S. scientists, students, and farmers in two research-planning workshops. The goal of the future research will be to better understand human environmental decision-making in crises contexts. The workshops will focus on local food systems. Some researchers have argued that small, localized systems are inefficient and environmentally harmful. Others have found that local food systems are noteworthy for their support of social equity, citizenship, and long-term sustainability. This workshop series is designed to bring farmers and social scientists together to model how these issues have played out as farmers responded to previous crises in order to plan research to predict and improve responsiveness of local food systems to future crises. The research will take a comparative approach by focusing on southern Appalachia, in the U.S., and the southwestern region of France. Rural landscapes in each region have important cultural value, residents exhibit strong place-attachment, and in both areas, local food systems have seen a recent resurgence. The first workshop will take place (May 20-24, 2019) in Aussurucq, France; the second will take place (October 12-16,2019) in Boone, North Carolina. The workshop agendas will include site visits with farmers in these regions as well as meetings between farmers and scientists to model previous behaviors and identify knowledge gaps. The future research will address these gaps through life cycle analyses of approaches, economic and policy analyses, and socio-cultural analyses. Findings from the workshop will be presented in conferences and used as the basis for a grant proposal to fund the larger-scale study.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.