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

当今世界的大部分商业食品生产和消费都依赖于大规模的工业化农业和有毒化学品的使用。人们对传统农业对健康和环境的负面影响的认识日益增加，世界各地的粮食不安全状况日益加深，最近推动全球政策机构推广农业生态耕作模式。这种模式利用生态学原理，以低投入和不使用杀虫剂或人造化肥的方式生产食品。虽然这种替代模式已经进入全球和地方层面的政策话语和实践，但世界各地的许多人已经在围绕生态生产和消费创建替代网络。该项目对学生进行实证、科学数据收集和分析方法的培训，旨在通过关注生产者和消费者的道德决策和经济考虑，了解这些网络是如何在地面上运作的。除了从人类学的角度加强对生态农业的科学理解外，这些发现还将有助于寻求建立生态种植以应对粮食不安全、环境退化和公共卫生问题的政策组织。Burge Abial在约翰·霍普金斯大学阿南德·潘迪安博士的指导下，将探索已经形成的生态食品生产和消费的新领域。这项研究的问题是：生态农民如何证明他们在使用特定农业生态技术时的种植选择是合理的，因为他们关注消费者的需求并寻求足够的利润？生态食品是通过哪些决策和策略来定价和营销的？生态食品如何在供应链的不同阶段获得价值？如何在这个食物网络中的不同参与者之间建立生态规范？这项研究在土耳其进行，研究人员在那里确定了两个从事生产的不同群体，可以进行比较研究，以分析更长期存在的生态农业网络。该项目将包括为期12个月的多地点人种学田野调查，在此期间将进行访谈、家庭调查和档案研究等研究技术的组合。这项研究将为人类学和社会科学中关于发展、农业生产和食品安全的广泛辩论，以及关于道德经济和价值的经济人类学辩论提供信息。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.