Agricultural Geography

Abstract

This entry charts the contribution of agricultural geography to the development of the broader discipline of human geography. From being an integral part of “traditional” human geography in the first half of the twentieth century, it embraced quantitative methods in the 1960s and 1970s, with several seminal contributions helping to shape the discipline at this time. Subsequently, new ideas and philosophies have been adopted, paralleling the emergence of significant changes within human geography. Contributions based on behavioral and political economy approaches in the 1980s and 1990s helped change the focus of agricultural geography away from relatively narrow concerns with production to a more holistic consideration of the broad agri‐food system. This has enabled new concepts to be developed and different questions to emerge relating to cultural, political, and environmental concerns, enabling agricultural geography to address major world problems. Among the concepts developed within agricultural geography, the principal ones highlighted here are food regimes, the transition from productivism to postproductivism to multifunctionality, and the so‐called agrarian question relating to the survival of family farming. The engagement with major problems at a global scale has produced distinctive contributions associated with notions of sustainable agriculture, long‐term legacies from colonialism such as the dual economy, and new relationships between the developed and developing worlds in the form of growing concerns about food security, “land grabs,” the financialization of agriculture, and climate change. The impacts of globalization are discussed, including the impacts of contested new technologies, such as genetically modified foods. Important contributions to the analysis of the impacts of various policies on the agri‐food system are recognized and highlighted. A long‐standing component of agricultural geography, namely the examination of evolving competition between different land uses, is also featured.

New frontiers in agricultural geography: transformations, food security, land grabs and climate change

“…New networks have been created that address concerns for rural social justice, promoting the rights of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through sustainable methods and the right to define their own food and agriculture systems (Robinson, 2018b). These emphasize a need for more returns to accrue to the producers of crops and livestock, and so are allied to the fair-trade social movement (Jaffee, 2014).…”