Introduction - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 3

Agriculture, Politics and Society, co-advised students, and prepared several confer-
ence presentations that explored trans-disciplinary approaches to organic issues.
Bernhard Freyer's appointment as Senior Fellow at the Minnesota Institute for
Sustainable Agriculture, University of Minnesota from late 2010 to June 2011
offered us a special opportunity to continue our Vienna conversations largely
by Skype. We proposed a panel discussion on the principles and fundamental
assumptions of organic practices for the 2011 annual meetings of AFHVS, ASFS,
and SAFN Societies. 3 In response, the conference program committee invited us to
organize five sets of panel discussions to addressed organic issues. 4
In our call for papers for these meetings, we asked for empirically grounded
discussions that focused on core principles and practices of organic food and
farming. We specifically sought papers that drew upon clearly articulated and well-
defined conceptual frameworks that might offer new insights into organic practices.
Given the quality of the submitted papers, we decided to select some of them to
be used for our proposal to Springer for this collection of original papers that offer
several different perspectives on, and issues in the worldwide organic movement.

1.2 The Broader Idea of This topic

The explosive growth of organic food and farming in recent decades has raised
numerous challenges throughout the organic sector (Willer and Kilcher 2011 ). Some
of these include: a new generation of young organic farmers and others converting
to organic; government subsidies for organic; the development of numerous new
processed organic products; the emergence of diversified market opportunities that
range from grass root food coops, to several types of farmer-consumer collaborative
arrangements, farmers markets as well as other local markets, and organic super-
markets. Several revisions in the organic regulatory framework e.g., in Europe and
in North America have accompanied this expansion and diversification of markets.
Finally, several private and public sector groups and agencies have been established
to deal with organic certification and control, to provide advisory services to farmers
and processors, to carry-out organic research, and to publicize activities in the
organic sector. 5
All of these changes have been occurring within the context of a wide and
diverse number of macro-level changes in food and farming in Europe and North

3 Joint annual meetings of the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society, the Association for
the Study of Food and Society, and the Society for the Study of Food and Nutrition, “Food and Ag
Under the Big Sky” held in Missoula, Montana.
4 Challenges of Standardization; Between Diversification and Holism; Social and Gender Dimen-
sions; Differentiations in Products, Markets and Consumers; and, Values and Ethics.
5 http://www.isofar.org/