4th EURHO Conférence Rural historie 2019

Agriculture and Food-Supply. Perspectives for a global history

Feeding the world’s population has always produced challenges for agriculture, and these challenges are increasing. In the short term farm output is always affected by fluctuations in weather conditions. In the long run agriculture has to feed a grow-ing number of consumers, and an increasing proportion of them no longer produce what they eat. In the past these factors led to a search for external resources and encouraged the rise of productivism.This double pressure on producers has had some well-known perverse effects: poor peasants needing to have regard to the demands of colonial powers; some countries engaging in land grabbing and controlling local products and resources; farmers in rich countries increasingly relying on markets and distribution networks; and finally environmental problems such as soil and water pollution associated with the intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides.The purpose of this round table is to explore the way in which these phenomena are interlinked and to attempt to answer some key questions. To what extent has agriculture succeeded, in the long term, in meeting the food requirements of rural and urban populations? How did it ensure these supplies, and what changed and what remained the same over time? To what extent are the uncertainties about the future of human nutrition a product of history? In other words, do these uncertainties emerge from policies and practices (of producers, consumers, and trading networks) that have developed over centuries? To what extent is agriculture at a crossroads in having to cope with the growth in world population, a large part of which is already under-nourished or malnourished? Finally, to what extent can agriculture turn its back on productivism at a time of demographic pressure and colonization of cultivable land by other uses, while simultaneously promoting sustainable development?