This article examines the marginalisation of small-scale semi-subsistence farming in the context of the European Union's sustainable development reforms as implemented in the new member countries. In documenting how small-scale farming in post-socialist Lithuania has been redefined from being a solution to the environmental and social degradation of industrialised agriculture under socialism to becoming a major obstacle in building sustainable agriculture, this case study offers a critique of sustainability as a developmental project and the asymmetrical relationships implicit in the rural development politics in Europe. Taking a historical-comparative approach, this study demonstrates that the notion of sustainability has been built on assumptions about the industrialisation and globalisation of agri-food systems that exclude alternative local forms of production, consumption and distribution. As a result, the implementation of such sustainable development policies leads to the reproduction of the industrialised agriculture and the exclusion of small-scale farmers from the vision of sustainable rural societies.T his study focuses on the marginalisation of small-scale farming in post-socialist Lithuania in the context of the implementation of European agri-food policies to consider the following questions: how do semi-subsistence economies fit in the vision of sustainable Europe? What role do the poor, smallholder farmers play in advancing sustainability in the new European Union (EU) member states where they constitute a majority among rural populations? What does the fact that semisubsistence agri-food economies have no place in the framework of sustainable development say about the assumptions and contradictions implicit in contemporary definitions of sustainability?Small-scale semi-subsistence farming in post-socialist Lithuania emerged during the early years of decollectivisation and land privatisation (Meyers and Kazlauskiene
This article examines the role of manual work in bridging the distance between production and consumption in alternative food networks, particularly in urban farming. Scholars and public commentators often draw on Marxian theories of alienation to suggest that manual work constitutes a key strategy for reconnecting production and consumption, and overcoming the ecological rift between natural processes and modern, agro-industrial production. Focusing on urban farming, this article complicates the picture of unalienated, decommodified labor and points to continuous negotiations between experiences of re-embedding in the community and the environment, and the on-going commodification of the farming experience. We argue that urban farms function as sites of “experiential production” where farm managers stage work experiences for the volunteers and where visitors build new socialities, reconnect to nature, and accrue social and cultural capital in the context of a global economy that offers limited work opportunities for a generation of highly educated college graduates. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork and 40 semi-structured interviews with employed urban farmers and regular volunteers in metropolitan areas of the Northeastern United States as well as the examination of online and print materials, our analysis highlights the contradictory ways in which manual work in alternative food networks indeed counters alienation, while also reproducing consumer society institutions and reinforcing the core values defining neoliberalism such as productivity and self-improvement.
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