Community Sustainability

The commercial seed industry has undergone tremendous consolidation in the last 40 years as transnational corporations entered this agricultural sector, and acquired or merged with competing firms. This trend is associated with impacts that constrain the opportunities for renewable agriculture, such as reductions in seed lines and a declining prevalence of seed saving. To better characterize the current structure of the industry, ownership changes from 1996 to 2008 are represented visually with information graphics. Since the commercialization of transgenic crops in the mid-1990s, the sale of seeds has become dominated globally by Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta. In addition, the largest firms are increasingly networked through agreements to cross-license transgenic seed traits.

Visualization of the changing structure of the food system has played an important role in the Missouri School of Agrifood Studies’ research and outreach. The analogies and diagrams Missouri researchers have used to describe concentration and consolidation have aided our understanding of the extent of these phenomena, as well as their social impacts. This article discusses why visualization is effective for analyzing and presenting data. Recent advances in visualizing concentration and consolidation are described—these methods include 1) treemaps, 2) cartographic maps, 3) cluster diagrams, 4) taxonomic tree/timelines, and 5) animations. Examples utilizing data from the North American organic food industry illustrate the potential of visualization to improve analysis of recent structural changes, and to increase public awareness of the unequal distribution of power in the food system.

Significant structural changes have accompanied the phase-in of a national organic standard in the United States over the last decade. The organic processing sector was particularly amenable to change due to its location downstream from production, where concentrations of capital encounter fewer biological barriers, and currently benefit from greater economies of scale. Consolidation of this emerging industry in the US and neighboring Canada is characterized visually using information graphics. These graphics provide a broad overview of the current industry structure by depicting the processes of horizontal integration and concentric diversification. Horizontal integration has occurred through acquisitions and strategic alliances, although these transactions are often hidden from consumers through ‘stealth’ ownership. Concentric diversification has occurred through the introduction of organic versions of mainstream brands, and the introduction of private label organics. These trends are expected to continue, and strongly support the conventionalization thesis as it applies to off-farm segments of the organic food industry.

Background

The prevalence of obesity and overweight in youth has increased dramatically since the 1980s, and some researchers hypothesize that increased consumption of low-nutrient, energy-dense foods is a key contributor. The potential importance of food retailers near schools has received increasing attention, but public health research and policy has focused primarily on fast food restaurants. Less is known about the relationship between overweight/obesity and other types of retailers. This study aims to investigate the potential associations between nearby 1) fast food restaurants, 2) convenience stores, and 3) supermarkets, and rates of overweight students in California schools.

Methods

We examined the rate of overweight ninth grade students in public schools in 2007 using linear regression. The percentage of overweight students per school was determined by a state required physical fitness test, with three different options for measuring individual body composition. Our key independent variables were the presence of three different types of retailers within 800 m network buffers of the schools. Additional independent variables included school ethnic, gender and socioeconomic composition, as well as urban/non-urban location. We obtained the data from the California Department of Education and ESRI, Inc.

Results

The presence of a convenience store within a 10-minute walking distance of a school was associated with a higher rate of overweight students than schools without nearby convenience stores, after controlling for all school-level variables in the regression (1.2%, 95% confidence interval 0.03, 2.36). Nearby fast food restaurants and supermarkets, however, were not associated with school rates of overweight students.

Conclusions

Public health researchers and policy-makers interested in the food environments outside schools should expand their recent focus on nearby fast food restaurants to include convenience stores, which may also be important sources of low-nutrient, energy-dense foods for students.

Involving many people in community-based research provides any benefits, such as more labor power and increased buy-in.  Traditional meeting formats, however, are not well suited to attracting broad engagement. One way to address this challenge is to instead employ self-organizing meeting processes, which are designed to invite active participation from attendees, and do not predefine the agenda. This article describes three such processes, 1) Open Space Technology, 2) World Café, and 3) Dynamic Facilitation, followed by my observations on their advantages and disadvantages when employed in community-based research efforts. Their use requires giving up a great amount ofcontrol when compared with traditional, top- down meeting approaches, and may result in actions beyond, or even excluding, research. The strong possibility of failing to address organizers’own short-term goals, however, should be balanced with the higher likelihood of achieving the broader community’s long-term goals.

Sustainability marketing trends have typically been led by smaller, more mission-driven firms, but are increasingly attracting larger, more profit-driven firms. Studying the strategies of firms that are moving away from these two poles (i.e., mission-driven but larger firms, and profit-driven firms that are more committed to sustainability) may help us to better understand the potential to resolve tensions between firm size and sustainability goals. We used this approach to analyze a case study of the U.S. fair trade coffee industry, employing the methods of data visualization and media content analysis. We identified three firms that account for the highest proportion of U.S. fair trade coffee purchases (Equal Exchange, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Starbucks) and analyzed their strategies, including reactions to recent changes in U.S. fair trade standards. We found an inverse relationship between firm size and demonstrated commitment to sustainability ideals, and the two larger firms were much less likely to acknowledge conflicts between size and sustainability in their public discourse. We conclude that similar efforts to increase sustainability marketing for other products and services should be more skeptical of approaches that rely on primarily on the participation of large, profit-driven firms.

Producers are interested in developing labelling schemes that go 'beyond organic' to address ethical criteria not included the US Department of Agriculture organic standards. However, consumer interests in labels that are not as widely available as organic in the market are poorly understood. This study reports results of focus-group research and a survey of 1000 households in the Central Coast region of California to determine which standards consumers are most interested in supporting through their purchases. The results indicate that standards for the humane treatment of animals have the highest level of support, followed by a standard for local origin, and for a living wage for workers involved in producing food. Logistic regression analysis suggests that humane is more likely to be chosen by women, European-Americans, younger people and frequent organic purchasers. Locally grown was preferred by older people and households with children. A living wage for workers involved in food production was selected more often by Latinos. Although a characterization of trends is not possible due to a cross-sectional design, the results suggest some potential directions for producers in this region who are willing to supply unmet consumer demands for ethical criteria. There are three basic directions that new and emerging labels may take with respect to US national organic standards: (1) separate from organic; (2) institutionally separate, but tightly integrated with organic; and (3)

This article considers how geospatial analyses can influence cartographic outputs in studies of the spatial structure of food environments. We make two contributions. First, we present a new approach to conceiving and visualizing urban food environments as 'nutritional terrains', in which the opportunities and costs of locating (healthful) food vary continuously across space. While other researchers have conceptualized and represented food environments as continuous phenomena, we use detailed data to produce maps of food accessibility that have high resolution both spatially and in terms of food availability. Second, we show that decisions made about measuring and modelling food accessibility can create artifactual patterns independently of actual variation in food-environment characteristics. Although the type of method-driven patterning we identify will not surprise cartographers, we argue that non-geographers using geographic information technologies to visualize food environments must give greater attention to the unintended consequences of choices made in geospatial analyses.

Discusses the restructuring of the food production, processing and retailing sectors in the USA. Describes different methods of vertical and horizontal integration that have occurred. Goes on to discuss the consolidation of business in retailing in particular. Refers to the relationships that are being formed between the supermarket chains, for example Wal-Mart and Kroger, and dominant food-chain clusters. Considers whether or not smaller retail chains and wholesalers should feel threatened by this consolidation. Takes the dairy sector in the USA as a case study in the restructuring of the retailing and processing sectors.

The global beer industry has transformed dramatically in recent decades. Two key trends include 1) consolidation resulting from mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures, and 2) the largest firms expanding into new regions. While beer was previously a very local product, these trends have combined to result in approximately half of global sales being controlled by just four firms: AB InBev, SABMiller, Heineken, and Carlsberg. Notably, these top four com-panies are all headquartered in Western Europe. The primary products of the largest firms are pale lagers, with ales and numerous other potential beer varieties produced only in much smaller quantities, if at all. Why are these chang-es occurring now? Many other industries, including soft drinks, have seen a small number of companies achieve global dominance earlier than the beer industry. Recent policy and technological changes, however, have eroded many barriers to consolidation and geographic expansion for beer firms. They have enabled the largest firms to exert more political and economic power, and to move closer to the endgame of a global monopoly. These trends are not inevitable, however, and are countered by 1) the rise of specialty brewers and their much more diverse selection of beer varieties, and 2) cultural barriers to the global branding and marketing of beer.

Intellectual property protections on seeds have increased dramatically in recent decades, from the granting of patent-like protections on certain types of seeds in 1970 to the enforcement of contract provisions for seeds beyond the first sale in 2013. During this same period, the seed industry has experienced rapid consolidation. Although as recently as the 1970s, it was characterized by thousands of small, mostly family-owned business, by 2011, just three agrochemical firms controlled more than half of the global proprietary seed market. These trends have resulted in rapidly increasing prices for commodity seeds and reduced farmers’ ability to save seeds. Given these important negative impacts, why do these trends continue? Expanding intellectual property protections and reducing the number of competitors are strategies that the largest firms understandably employ to increase their power but government support has also been essential to their success. Policy changes have reduced the enforcement of antitrust laws and increased the enforcement of alleged intellectual property infringements. In addition, synergies between stronger intellectual property protections and consolidation have further reinforced the dominance of top firms at the expense of a freely competitive industry. A better understanding of these trends is unlikely to reverse them in the near term but may increase the effectiveness of creating alternatives to a seed oligopoly.