Health before medicine: community resilience in food landscapes

Health and disease have more than shaped civilisations past and present. They tell us how a people lived. An era’s way of life confronts possible health threats with a specific array of barriers and opportunities (Dobson and Carper 1996; Engering, Hogerwerf and Slingenbergh 2013; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO] 2013a; Wallace et al. 2015). Some threats are filtered out. Others are offered a fast track forward.

From our species’ origins, infectious diseases, historically the greatest source of human mortality, have repeatedly emerged upon major shifts in socioeconomic and cultural practice. Early domesticated animals were sources for human diphtheria, influenza, measles, mumps, plague, pertussis, rotavirus A, tuberculosis, sleeping sickness, and visceral leishmaniasis (McNeill 1977/2010; Wolfe, Dunavan and Diamond 2007). Ecological changes that humans imposed on landscapes promoted spillovers of cholera from algae, malaria from birds, and HIV/AIDS, dengue fever, malaria, and yellow fever from wild non-human primates and monkeys. In some industrialised systems, non-communicable illnesses have replaced infectious disease as the biggest killers: heart disease, obesity, diabetes, micro-nutritional deficits, and other symptoms of a dysfunctional hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenocortical (HPA) axis, translating diet and sociopsychological stress into metabolic pathology (Cohen et al. 2012; Lemche, Chaban and Lemche 2016; Wallace and Wallace 2013).

New juxtapositions of population health and disease regularly stimulated innovation in medicine and public health, including individual treatment and prevention, but also land and marine quarantines, compulsory burial, isolation wards, water treatment, and subsidies for the sick and unemployed (Colgrove 2002; Watts 1997). Indeed, as classic work by John McKinlay and Sonja McKinlay (1977) and Thomas McKeown (1979) showed, the declines in disease deaths that marked the first half of the 20th century in industrial countries resulted more from public health interventions than from medical advances. Social determinants can improve as well as diminish population health, with historical circumstance repeatedly resetting the clock. Each series of agricultural and industrial inventions accelerates demographic shifts and new settlement, placing susceptible host populations close to novel sources of infection and environmental exposure (Kock et al. 2012; Wallace et al. 2015).

The dynamic continues to this day. At the start of the 21st century, a large part of humanity’s organising ethos orbits neoliberal capitalism (Plehwe, Walpen and Neunhöffer 2006). Neoliberalism is a program of political economy aimed at using the state to globalise laissez-faire economics for multinationals, promoting free trade and shifting state expenditures in favour of protecting private property and deregulating economic markets (Centeno and Cohen 2012; Ganti 2014; Harvey 2005). In the course of increasing the scope and pace of turning natural resources into commodity exports, the neoliberal doctrine is transforming planet Earth into planet Farm (Wallace et al. 2016). Forty per cent of the planet’s ice-free land surface is dedicated to agriculture, with millions more hectares to be brought into production by 2050 (Alexandratos and Bruinsma 2012; FAO 2013a; Foley et al. 2005; Ramankutty et al. 2018). Livestock, representing over 70 per cent of vertebrate biomass, use a third of our available freshwater and a third of our cropland for feed (Herrero et al. 2013; Robinson et al. 2014; Smil 2002; Steinfeld et al. 2006; Van Boeckel 2013). Industrial animal production is a major source of greenhouse gases (Gerber et al. 2013).

Agribusiness’s impact extends to the deadliest diseases. By its global expansion alone, commodity agriculture acts as a gateway through which a wide array of deadly xenospecific pathogens are migrating from the deepest forests and backwater farms to the most cosmopolitan of cities (Engering, Hogerwerf and Slingenbergh 2013; FAO 2013b; Graham et al. 2008; Jones et al. 2013; Liverani et al. 2013; Wallace 2009; Wallace 2016a). Ebola, Zika, and yellow fever recently re-emerged when logging, mining, and intensive agriculture opened up neotropical forests to their escape (Dyer 2017; Wallace 2016b; Wallace and Wallace 2016: Wallace et al. 2018). Other pathogens are evolving more directly off megafarms. Nipah virus, Q fever, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), hepatitis E, salmonella, foot-and-mouth disease, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and a veritable grocery list of novel influenza variants have emerged (Epstein et al. 2006; Graham et al. 2008; Jones et al. 2013; Khan et al. 2013; Leibler et al. 2009; McDermott and Grace 2012; Mena et al. 2016; Myers et al. 2006).

Neoliberal production appears implicated in metabolic disorders as well (Glasgow and Schrecker 2015). Schubert et al. (2011) called for disciplines such as sociology, human geography, cultural anthropology, political science, and health economics to be positioned at the centre of a new nutrition science. In one effort, Rodrick Wallace’s (2016) information theoretic model finds thresholds over which an environmental/social feedback signal, acting as unresolved psychosocial stress upon the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenocortical axis (HPA), interacts with the body’s regulatory systems to produce body mass pathologies. Bjorntorp (2001) and Cohen et al. (2012) show abdominal and visceral obesity (the most dangerous) originates from the chronic emotional stress that drives disorders in the HPA. Under the greatest psychosocial stresses, including an unresolved ‘fight-or-flight’ activation documented under globalisation’s structural violence (DeVon and Saban 2012), HPA reactivity changes from relatively transient attempts to maintain homeostasis or allostasis, with temporary peaks of cortisol secretion, to a state of sensitisation and exaggerated secretion. Upon repeated challenge, homeostasis can atrophy, directing a larger than normal fraction of total body fat to visceral deposits.

The obesity pandemic (Malik, Willett and Hu 2013), extending across both global North and South, appears a metabolic correlate of a spreading (and shifting) neoliberal model of development. China, for instance, has undergone an increase in diabetes from less than 1 per cent of the population in 1980, at the start of its economic liberalisation, to 11.6 per cent in 2013 (Xu et al. 2013). The latter represents 114 million people, a third of the world’s diabetes cases, with half tested showing ‘prediabetic’ blood glucose levels. In Africa, diabetes is spreading at an alarming rate, with prevalence predicted to increase 80 per cent in 20 years (Dalal et al. 2011).

How are we to stop or alleviate the pathogens and pathologies emerging out of such a model of food production and consumption? Biomedical approaches, from vaccines to emergency care, are necessary interventions for infectious outbreaks and metabolic disease. But in reducing health to molecular, clinical, and even ostensibly public health interactions, such approaches, consequentionalist in bias, repeatedly have proved insufficient (Muntaner and Wallace 2018; Wallace et al. 2016).

Even approaches acknowledging broader contexts can fail. The One Health approach, for instance, supplements the germ theory of disease with an ecosystemic theory: that the health of organisms in the field is relational (Zinsstag et al. 2015). Animals and their pathogens are embedded in webs of interaction across populations and species. One Health integrates investigations of wildlife, livestock, and human health in this ecological context. The approach includes medical doctors, veterinarians and wildlife biologists since many species at a locale share infectious, chronic and environmental illnesses. Who in good faith could oppose such efforts?

The One Health approach, however, repeatedly omits key sources of causality that if included can reverse preliminary conclusions (Wallace et al. 2015; Wallace and Wallace 2016). Health and disease are synonymous with no infectious agent, clinical course, or map of the ill, however conscientiously such epidemiologies are placed in the functional ecologies humans, livestock and wildlife share. Causality often extends beyond the areas where health crises are ostensibly located. The capital backing the development and production behind shifts in land use driving health crises in the global South, for instance, routinely originate in centres of capital, including New York, London and Hong Kong. Sovereign wealth funds, state-owned enterprises, government and private equity, the latter including mutual funds, banks, pension funds, hedge funds and university endowments, finance such development (Daniel 2012; Oakland Institute 2011a; Wallace 2016a; Wallace and Kock 2012).

Figure 9.1a Your Schematic of resilient system defined by multiple loose ecological ties (thin lines) among participants (dots) and only a few strong ties (thick lines). Perturbation shock (indicated by the arrow) dissipates along loose ties.

Figure 9.1b Less resilient system defined by a stronger proportion of strong ties. Such systems are often defined by less diversity and are unable to replace lost relationships (dashes) with ecological equivalents. Perturbation (indicated by the arrow) shock broadcasts through entire system, leading to a rapid shift in the very nature of the system.

One Health as a science can blur such contexts, even while describing multiple sources of epidemiological cause and effect (Degeling et al. 2015; Kingsley and Taylor 2017; Queenan et al. 2017; Wallace et al. 2015). If the vantage is limited enough, health research treats state and market neoliberalism as a natural order that study interpretations and proposed interventions must accommodate, even should other studies show the economic system’s mechanisms are central to the health crises under examination. Many studies offer rationales for the land grabs, deforestation and agricultural intensification underpinning many a health problem, including famine, in favour of the very companies and governmental agencies pursuing such efforts (and now also funding One Health studies) (Davis 2006; Martin-Prével, Mousseau and Mittal 2016; Oakland Institute 2011b; Wallace 2016a).

The kinds of community resilience at the heart of keeping infectious and chronic morbidities from emerging in the first place are foundationally interconnected with alternate models of agriculture and social organisation that reacquaint economic practice and ecological regeneration (Bennegouch and Hassane 2010; Jones, Betson and Pfeiffer 2017; Kock 2010; Scherr and McNeely 2008; Wallace and Kock 2012). In this chapter, we define resilience and explore several of the mechanisms underlying its function in food landscapes. We also present three examples from the field, from different parts of the world and in different stages of historical development.

What is community resilience?

Resilience is the capacity of a community to absorb external impacts without changing the system’s fundamental properties (Chapin, Kofinas and Folke 2009; Folke 2016; Patel et al. 2017). In an agricultural context, these properties can include an area’s mix of agricultural sectors, crops harvested, prevalent wildlife, typical economy, and human population densities and distribution. Localities defined by similar demographics can differ in resilience (Gunderson 2000; Holling 1973; Ives 1995; Walker et al. 2004; Wallace and Wallace 2000).

In some areas, the functional interactions among agroecosystemic players are finely structured and characterised by many ‘loose’ relationships of largely contingent or intermittent interaction (Figure 9.1a). Any single impact upon the community may be felt along some of the ‘strong’, obligatory ecological relationships, but much of the impact is dissipated along the loose ties. Strong ties lost in an impact are replaced by functional equivalents and the system retains its general character (Kéfi et al. 2016). Such systems are considered resilient.

In contrast, other areas may be defined by only a limited number of requisite strong ties (Figure 9.1b). An external shock felt by one player is more easily amplified across to other players. Such systems, often defined by lesser diversity, are less able to replace lost ecological players. In short, a system defined by only a few strong relationships more readily undergoes a sharp shift in agroecological character. Multiple impacts can degrade a system’s loose ties in such a way as to transform a resilient system at one quasi-equilibrium into one less resilient at another equilibrium (Figure 9.2). The new system may stabilise but is also functionally degraded as subsequent shocks are more easily felt throughout.

Figure 9.2 Schematic showing transition from an ecosystem defined at one quasi-equilibrium (high stability) by many loose ties and high resilience to another quasi-equilibrium defined by fewer loose ties and less resilience.

The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) (2016) attempts to socialise the resilience concept along two axes:

The IPES definition folds in a particular metaphysical model of the relationship that nature and society share, with fundamental implications for the metrics that might be used to track systemic inputs and outcomes (Bergmann 2016; Moore 2015). As farmers in any drought-prone region can testify, the two types of resilience are mutually dependent.

These relationships are also dynamic. For Folke (2006), pest and disease control efforts along the lines of ‘bio-exclusion’, however conscientiously implemented across agricultural sectors, often fail because of a refusal to account for the possibility that systems involve change, uncertainty and surprise, affecting even scales beyond their immediate scope:

Rotz and Fraser (2015) address such industrial landscapes explicitly. In a preliminary analysis, they show agribusiness concentration, farm-scale intensification, mechanisation, and the cost–price squeezes to which contract farmers are subjected have led to decreases in ecological and economic diversity (within and between crops, in soils, across oligopolistic markets), higher orders of spatial and organisational connectivity, and diminished decision-making power at the level of the individual farmer. Rotz and Fraser propose that, as a result, industrial food systems are becoming less resilient to external shocks, including disease and climate change.

Even in an agrosystem of expansive community resilience, complications can abound. The non-linearity, heterogeneity, dispersed interactions across space and scale, and continual adaptation displayed by resilient systems complicate recovery after impact (Folke 2006; O’Neill 1999). Such systems do not just return to a state of quasi-equilibrium. The disturbance may affect the system’s ties in such a way that, when the system recovers, it appears superficially similar though not exactly the same. The system does not so much ‘recover’ as regenerate and reorganise. System trajectories post-impact may be unique and difficult to predict. The notion that one cannot step in the same ecosystemic river twice has inspired some researchers to abandon resilience theory for models of socioeconomic evolutionary process (Wallace 2015). Communities subject to significant perturbation experience a selection pressure that, if they survive, permanently alters their structure and the culture they pass on. The communities evolve along a path-dependent trajectory and never return to equilibrium.

Evolution and resilience need not necessarily be opposed. Communities that adapt can better buffer their core relationships (even as others may indeed evolve anew or are broken for good) (Barnes 2009; Tonts, Plummer and Argent 2014). Even in the face of an epistemic opacity by which the future cannot be predicted, in some cases orderly transitions (or even persistence) may be possible. Regime shifts – from one constellation of interrelationships to another – appear preceded by a variety of statistical signals, including increasing variance at multiple scales, greater autocorrelation across system variables, slower recovery after perturbation, changes in skewness, transient amplifications, and spatial indicators (Biggs, Carpenter and Brock 2009; Carpenter and Brock 2006; Dakos et al. 2008; Guttal and Jayaprakash 2008; Kleinen, Held and Petschel-Held 2003; Scheffer et al. 2015; Townley et al. 2007; van Nes and Scheffer 2007). There may be room for a field of applied resilience in food systems.

Resilience, emergent or intended, does not always produce favourable conditions. Perverse outcomes are possible. For instance, a semi-resilient community defined by great diversity but with sufficient strong ties to allow infectious disease or environmental exposure to spill over across a population (and across species) may promote disease persistence in ways that a less diverse community, assuming little geographic connectivity, cannot (Hogerwerf et al. 2010). In the latter community, the threshold of susceptibles to support a pathogen beyond an initial outbreak may not be available. When connectivity prevails, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ localities can be linked in counterintuitive large-scale relationships that render both highly sensitive to perturbation (Wallace et al. 2007). Another perversity centres about intervention. A network of weak ties that attenuates bad shocks may also retard intervention efforts (Wallace and Wallace 2000; Wallace 2004). There are, finally, the matters of for whom resilience is established and at what it is directed (Cretney 2014; Rotz and Fraser 2015). The environmental and economic costs of industrial agriculture are routinely externalised to smallholders, farmworkers, consumers, local rivers, wildlife, livestock and governments, protecting agribusiness from the shocks that its own business model promulgates across multiple biocultural domains (Wallace 2016a).

Despite, or perhaps because, of these complications, we propose the difficult, cutting-edge science of the 21st century will include studying and designing the spatiotemporal configurations across agroecological interactions best able to promote healthy outcomes before crises emerge, pre-empting acute biomedical intervention, however necessary the latter remains (Wallace et al. 2016). We next review three food-disease systems, beginning with those in Tanzania and Zambia, wherein such outcomes – producing health resilience across food landscapes – appear either in progress, switching off, in their planning stages, or combinations thereof.

Village chickens and mixed farming households in Tanzania and Zambia

Rural communities in low- to middle-income countries that rely on rain-fed crops (especially in areas with unimodal, irregular or limited rainfall) often experience severe hunger periods just prior to the major harvesting season when their stored grains have been exhausted. These significant peaks and troughs in household food availability, even in peri-urbanised landscapes, are exacerbated by low diversity in family farming activities, especially for more vulnerable households (Arnold 2008; Sibhatu, Krishna and Qaim 2015). Loss in diversity has been identified as a secular trend as far back as 10,000 years ago, from humanity’s transition out of hunting and gathering to sedentary farming, decreasing dietary diversity, with, until recently, limited meat consumption and increased consumption of cereals (Kock et al. 2012; Turk 2013).

In addition to sufficient calories, the right mix of essential macro- and micronutrients is required for each stage of our lives (Alders et al. 2016; Geissler and Powers 2010; Neumann et al. 2003). If the mix is not achieved, the resulting undernutrition will affect the physical and cognitive development of children, with long-term impacts on maternal health, educational attainment, and productivity in adulthood (Black et al. 2013). Different species, and within species different populations, have converged upon various options for nutritional survival and optimal growth across the seasons (Foster and Kreitzman 2009).

Early in human history, humans moved their locations with the changing seasons. Since the advent of sedentary agriculture and large urban centres, humans have designed systems of social reproduction wherein food is moved to human settlements (Metheny and Beaudry 2015). From the late 19th century, rural households have largely switched from producing the majority of food required to survive harvest to harvest, to focusing on the production of a smaller range of food and fibre products they sell into commercial value chains (Ali 2012). Households use the money earned to purchase additional foods to meet household requirements.

The switch is as much structurally bounded as it is a household decision. In what appears a disconnect between human health agencies and their agricultural counterparts, agricultural researchers have tended to focus on developing plant varieties and animal breeds with higher yields and/or faster growth (Turk 2013; Wang et al. 2009). The ‘Green Revolution’ focused on producing such cheap energy-rich, nutrient-poor plant foods in low-income countries (Turk 2013). Despite increases in agricultural production over the past two decades, malnutrition rates in children have not diminished significantly in these countries. Recent reviews of agricultural interventions on childhood nutrition have shown little impact (Girard et al. 2012; Masset et al. 2012). In response to undernutrition, health-related multilateral agencies have been supporting micronutrient fortification and supplementation through national ministries of health (Alders et al. 2014). Agriculture-related multilateral agencies meanwhile had been supporting production with an emphasis on the quantity of food produced for income rather than its nutritional quality.

The long-term sustainability of these interventions is increasingly under reconsideration because many rural poor are unable to access fortified foods and increased agricultural production has tended to emphasise nutrient-poor staples such as hybrid maize (Idikut et al. 2009). Current debate has shifted focus from food security to food and nutrition security which is defined as existing ‘when all people at all times have physical, social and economic access to food, which is consumed in sufficient quantity and quality to meet their dietary needs and food preferences, and is supported by an environment of adequate sanitation, health services and care, allowing for a healthy and active life’ (Committee on World Food Security 2012). Other programs explicitly push for food sovereignty in which local peoples actively oppose structural inequalities and exert self-determination around their own agricultural and food policy, including around food production and consumption (Chappell 2018).

Over the past two decades, in conjunction with the new focus, increased attention has been paid to gender equity in agriculture. Empowered women who make decisions on household income and expenditure spend more money on nutritious food, healthcare and education (Quisumbing et al. 1995). Women’s work can also lead to increased income, which may be spent on food, improving nutrition. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the World Bank, an increase in women’s income of $10 in Sub-Saharan Africa achieves the same improvements to children’s nutrition and health as an increase in a man’s income of $110 (Ashby et al. 2008).

These findings prompted one team to design a multi-sectoral, interdisciplinary and participatory project in Tanzania and Zambia aimed at enhancing traditional village chicken-crop systems (Alders et al. 2014; Pym and Alders 2016). The project, funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), emphasised assets controlled by women as a sustainable solution to the ongoing nutritional challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa. The five-year, mixed methods, cluster-randomised controlled project staggered each study ward into the project. Project activities began in April 2014 in Sanza Ward, the semi-arid central zone of Tanzania with a mean annual rainfall of less than 600 mm.

One strategy for meeting the global international development priority of food and nutrition security is to improve village chicken health and welfare. Prior to this project, only one such intervention had been documented. Poultry meat and eggs increase household access to high quality protein, bio-available micronutrients, and income (de Bruyn et al. 2015; Wong et al. 2017). Village chickens are frequently the only livestock controlled by women in low- and middle-income countries in Africa and South-East Asia (Alders and Pym 2009).

Healthy village poultry ensures households have physical and economic access to adequate, safe and culturally appropriate nutrition (Alders et al. 2014). The project began improving chicken health with a community-led anti-Newcastle-disease vaccination campaign of four-monthly eye-drop administrations conducted on a fee-for-service basis (Alders, Bagnol and Young 2010). Manure from poultry and other livestock also improves soil fertility for producing indigenous vegetables at the household level, further diversifying the range of foods eaten.

The wet season commencing December 2014 was very poor in the project area, with rainfall totalling only 183 mm. When grain supplies are depleted, village poultry are often consumed or sold (Alders and Pym 2009; de Bruyn et al. 2015) (Figure 3). Chickens and other poultry can also scavenge feedstuffs not typically consumed by humans (de Bruyn et al. 2015). Despite the drought, data collected in two project wards demonstrated an increase in poultry from 2014 to 2015. The impact of vaccination against Newcastle disease on chicken numbers and nutrition security is under investigation. de Bruyn et al. (2016) did report that children from participating households that owned chickens had significantly improved height-for-age Z-scores than those from households without chickens (-1.76 vs. -1.90; p=0.03).

Figure 9.3 General patterns of monthly rainfall, availability of household (HH) crops, and village chickens throughout the year, with and without regular vaccination of chickens against Newcastle disease in Sanza Ward, central Tanzania.

This model of cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary research collaboration incorporates producers and traders, as well as government and local and international research institutions (Pym and Alders 2016). When adapting a community-centred approach, such collaborations can target strategies with the best chance of long-term sustainability. The research explores how an interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral team – one covering human and livestock health, food and nutrition security, and related policy-making agencies – can create a cohesive team delivering long-term solutions. The Tanzanian Country Coordinating Committee (CCC), which has oversight over the project, has already contributed to nutrition-sensitive policy interventions at district and national levels.

Linkages between the CCC and households have prompted community members to raise a broad range of nutrition-sensitive issues and interventions (Maulaga et al. 2016). Self-determination, the crux of food sovereignty, enables rural communities to direct their own course in building resilient food systems, often in the face of cheap exports, cycle migration associated with semi-proletarianisation, and other external perturbations.

Resilience shifts among the Nenets on the Yamal Peninsula

Cities and urban sprawl, driving many of the key agricultural dynamics of the ostensibly rural systems just described, are the dominant human-occupied landscape worldwide. Such systems are characterised by a separation of people from the natural land and agriculture into an artificial, serviced environment (McGranahan and Satterthwaite 2014). Retailers and service agents sell goods to consumers, including food and water, clothing, energy, transportation, medicines and other necessities. The food system is mechanised and industrialised, incorporating supply chains from sources of near-global origins (Godfray et al. 2010). Processed food products unrecognisable from their original ingredients are packaged, greatly reduced in nutrition, and carry significant health risks both for individuals and the population (Keding, Schneider and Jordan 2013; Schwingshackl et al. 2017).

These food systems have become so fast and efficient that little consideration is given to storage or preservation, apart from the time along the length of the commodity chain. There is no profit in holding or banking for the seasons, droughts and famines, the last now treated as a thing of the past or limited to villages of the global South. But can the modern family make a meal from raw food? Are the diets in this system leading to healthy bodies and minds? Are these systems resilient? Is three days’ food supply adequate for supplying a modern city subjected to a collapse in transport that produces an acute shortage or even the threat of starvation? (Wallace and Wallace 2016).

Rural systems – losing land to multinational agribusiness, men to the cycle migration associated with urban industrialisation, and lifestyles to peri-urban integration – are also being pulled apart in these socioeconomic transitions (M. Davis 2006; D.K. Davis, 2006). Communities remaining on the land and whose food cultures are embedded in local production systems and livelihoods, with livestock and crop diversity consciously cultivated, can survive external impacts putatively more sophisticated societies might struggle with under the worst conditions. Many such communities that survive still access cyclical resources along ancient terraces or routes of transhumance and nomadism, often based on livestock systems (Catley, Lind and Scoones 2013; Tessema, Ingenbleek and van Trijp 2014). They remain cash-poor but largely healthy societies in the relative absence of external inputs and limited healthcare. The seasons are respected. Physical activity is the norm and the need to replenish the ecosystems from which they draw their wealth is a daily duty. Some of these cultures and their diets, such as the Mediterranean, are recognised as world heritage.

The indigenous communities on the Yamal Peninsula, an autonomous region of the Russian Federation, offer one example. The Nenets people were early migrants from southern Asia between 500–1100 AD, moving there during the upheaval of the emerging Mongols (Fedorova 1998). A frozen remote landscape perhaps offered better prospects than life on the steppe with pillaging armies. The Nenets live on a flat peninsula of land the size of England, devoid of forest, bar a few riverine pines (Figure 9.4a–c). Their socioecological system survived the traumatic histories of the Soviet era better than other regions, as has been described by Forbes and colleagues (2009; 2013). Jutting into the Arctic seas of the far north, temperatures during the long dark winter nights are as low as -60 degrees Celsius and hot summer days are marked by exceptional mosquito populations dependent on the blood they find. The vegetated tundra includes a few herbs, grasses, and lichens clinging to impoverished soils, interspersed with myriad lakes and the snaking Orb River and its fish supply.

The Nenets have survived on fish and reindeer, supplemented by berries and a few plant-based foods. They migrate with their herds up to 1,200 km annually (Stammler 2005), retreating from the northern Arctic chill in winter and returning north before from the insect storms from the South in summer. The Nenets remain a rare example of the pastoral or nomadic lifestyle. The reindeer are semi-domesticated, with available food resources determining migration patterns. The herds provide most essentials, including transport and when slaughtered food, warm clothing, skins for constructing household tents, and binding for sleighs. Fish, mostly caught in summer with occasional catches through winter ice-holes, supply valuable protein supplements and essential oils. Trade in these products also provides a small income for purchasing imported goods. Satellite dishes and mobile phones are now in evidence but purchased for their usefulness in the context of communication across their dispersed community and, when necessary, the rest of the world, rather than primarily as a platform for entertainment (Stammler 2009).

Figure 9.4a Aerial photograph of the frozen Yamul Peninsula within the Arctic Circle with meandering rivers, scant riverine forest, and interfluvial tundra.

Figure 9.4b Traditional shelters of the migratory Nenets, along the Yamul Peninsula, who are dependent on reindeer and fish for food.

Figure 9.4c Semi-domesticated reindeer herded by dogs and Nenets on sleighs along the Yamul Peninsula.

Figure 9.4d An abattoir and marketing company set up for the Nenets to improve their income and enable a more modern lifestyle with schooling, access to communications, and other consumables. 

The Nenets population survived for centuries in modest numbers of a few tens of thousands, and about 350,000 reindeer, with limited, if any, support from outside the ecosystem. The ecosystem still functions in the face of ongoing change, including the suppression of carnivores mostly by non-natives and impacts on vegetation from burgeoning numbers of herbivores (Forbes 1999; Kyrazhimsky et al. 2012). At times these impacts are associated with dramatic infectious outbreaks. Over the last century, anthrax, associated with soil exposures, periodically surfaced, with its most recent appearance in 2016 when climatic warming likely led to exposure of previously frozen reindeer carcasses carrying the bacterium (Simonova et al. 2017).

Even as authorities tread cautiously around the Nenets culture, centres of trade and growing administrative hubs have been established, mostly engaged in seeking, exploiting and supporting natural resources extraction in the region, primarily oil and gas (Degteva and Nelleman 2013). These small cities are visible by their columns of smoke from coal-fired boilers, heating large buildings, and vehicles and helicopters moving to-and-fro. The centres offer some benefits to the Nenets, including abattoirs for the reindeer and a small industry in processing reindeer meat for export. These facilities enable some cash liquidity and readier access to modern consumables, medicine and education.

On the other hand, gas-field construction, commercial fishing in the Kara Sea, and increasing environmental damage to lake systems together with construction and industrial activity associated with vast storage and processing facilities, roads, and industrial housing for large workforces have disturbed reindeer and fish migration and reduced fish stocks, resulting in a lower fish intake among Nenets (Degteva and Nelleman 2013; Forbes 2013).

Fishers and traders meanwhile seek the higher prices paid by the new industrial and urban communities, which, when combined with highly processed food and an increasing percentage of Nenets becoming sedentary, is shifting the nutrient composition of their diet. With alcohol and cigarettes added, the prevalence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is now comparable to urban counterparts in Russia where there are exceptional levels of obesity, CVD, diabetes and ill health especially among women (Petrenya 2014). Kozlov et al. (2014) demonstrate a decline in vitamin D status in these populations as they shift from a traditional diet to a Westernised one. The health shift may exemplify the sociospatial connectivity across systems that, as pointed out above, can drive even a resilient order under (Wallace et al. 2007).

Will Nenets children, now placed in state boarding schools and offered a pathway to modernity, continue to follow the traditional lifestyle? Is health resilience shifting as presented in Figure 9.2? Will sedentary urban life become prevalent, with reindeer herding at best a tourism venture? Will an industrialised diet and associated habits pushed by the prevalent political economy – increasing consumerism, dependence on fossil fuels, access to material goods, inactivity, and alternate transportation and housing – end the community as we know it? Will this unique human culture disappear in the local wake of global circuits of capital?

The lesson underpinning the current scientific debate is less about what is possible and what is ‘productive’, but rather the value, sustainability and beauty that remains of environmentally integrated communities. Should metrics of Nenets health and wellbeing extend to cultural mode? This is not to suggest that the population return to an arbitrary point in the past. Growing evidence implies, however, that development narratives are often connected to ill-supported and expedient assumptions about progress (Wallace et al. 2015). The health and wellbeing of integrated human–animal communities extend to self-determination. Respecting cultures may be as utilitarian as it is ‘just’. Regime shifts may unexpectedly reverse as humanity crosses environmental tipping points, infusing life in the frozen north, even buffeted by climate change, with a greater appeal than the system failures of capital-led globalisation.

Regionalising a ‘probiotic’ food landscape in Victoria, Australia

Other alternatives are growing from the centres of modern food production. The shires of Hepburn, Macedon Ranges and Mount Alexander in the central highlands of Victoria, Australia, northwest of Melbourne, are well-beaten trails for food connoisseurs (Municipal Association of Victoria 2009). Their restaurants and cafes are bustling while other country towns decline. Where the town of Daylesford is arguably the heart of regional tourism, Castlemaine is affectionately known as ‘north Northcote’, marking its growing population of urban refugees from Melbourne’s northern suburbs. Kyneton and Woodend are corridor towns for those commuters still split between the livelihood of the city and the lifestyle of the country. Hepburn Springs, just north of Daylesford, is home to Australia’s largest concentration of mineral springs (Department of Transport, Planning and Local Infrastructure 2014). ‘Spa Country’ was the first draw for tourism in the 19th century, coupled with the architectural heritage of the region’s early Swiss and Italian settlers who prospected for gold in the 1850s.

The rich red volcanic soils make for high quality cropping country, long supporting a major potato-growing sector. But over the past decade, global food giant McCain Foods, the country’s main buyer, gutted the crop system, marginalising local farmers in favour of cheap imports. The decline in contract potato was concurrent with growth in small-scale agroecological farming – free-range pigs and poultry, organic and heirloom vegetables – and an emerging niche wine sector. The pairing has increased farms for the first time in decades. In a major break from the model of industrialised commodity farming, most of the new producers sell directly to consumers.

The significant market advantage of its locality – just over an hour from a major international city with a reputation as the food capital of Australia (House 2014) – gives the central highlands the impetus to test strategies in agroecology and resilience across larger regional food production. Can a system of ecosystemically integrated production be developed in the face of a variety of challenges, including a highly centralised food system, climate change and an historically prevalent ethos of rugged individualism that can undermine collective action?

Benedict Anderson (1991) famously coined the phrase ‘imagined communities’ in his seminal work on the roots of nationalism, applicable to such an agricultural community already rethinking its identity and landscape. A group of disparate people, neighbours and strangers, have over the past two decades begun to view themselves as part of a community of growers, makers and eaters of artisanal, ecological and ethical food. For thousands of years, the area was defined by another imaginarium – of the dreamtime of the Dja Dja Wurrung people, with traditional inhabitants, the Munal gundidj clan, living closest to present-day Daylesford (Clark 1995). The region is still scored by scar trees, rock wells, seed grinding grooves, oven mounds, shell middens and Aboriginal place names (Stewart 2009). Squatters grazing sheep and cattle undertook the earliest of settler expropriation, largely between the late 1830s – when the Blood Hole and Campaspe Plains massacres were perpetrated – and 1850s when gold fever produced a population boom.

A hundred years later, what started with the food-focused cultures of the Swiss and Italians transitioned into fine dining for tourists travelling to Hepburn for the mineral waters. As the restaurant culture grew, so did the population of producers who supply the hospitality market. Good soils, enviable rainfall in a very dry state, proximity to Melbourne, and a thriving tourism industry rationalised a new model of farming across the central highlands. The population of new farmers includes former chefs, academics and professionals.

The new farmers grow an impressive variety of heritage breeds of animals, fruits and vegetables, and until recently did so with camaraderie but without co-ordination or collectivisation. While most confirm the importance of biodiversity and incorporate it on their farms, the farmers are only now thinking about planning biodiversity for agroecological resilience at the regional level. The new vision includes operationalising the benefits of shared value-chain infrastructure and collaborative distribution.

Regional pig farmers appear ahead of their poultry counterparts in growing heritage and rare-breed pigs and moving away from industrial breeds. The Wessex Saddleback is a local success story championed first by Fiona Chambers of Fernleigh Free Range who worked through the 1990s and 2000s to restore the breed from near extinction in Australia (Chambers 2004). Today there are over a hundred breeding sows of Wessex Saddleback across the country. Tamworth, Berkshire and large black pigs have also risen in popularity. Conscious narratives around the ethics and quality of meat from paddock-raised animals, as opposed to conventional agricultural yield set by corporate buyers at the farm gate, have enabled farmers to price their meat accordingly.

Whereas the slower growth rates of heritage breeds were once considered commercially unviable in an industry that over the past century was totally reliant on purpose-grown grain for animal feed, the new farmers look to predecessors for inspiration and solutions. The farmers are innovating access to and processing so-called waste-stream produce to create nutritious feed. They are weaning themselves off industrial grain, with financial and ecological benefits. Localising supply chains and utilising one farm’s surplus yield as another’s primary feed source reduces reliance on petrochemicals and strengthens local relationships.

Poultry farmers have also started diversifying breeds of chickens and ducks. One of Australia’s best-known pastured chicken farmers raises a new breed bred from old genetics, the Sommerlad bird, in a diverse silviculture that provides shade, protection from aerial predation, and seasonal fodder for these excellent foragers (Sommerlad Poultry 2016). However, most meat chicken farmers still rely on the industrial Ross and Cobb birds, bought as day-olds and flown in from Queensland. Regional farmers have long been attuned to the welfare of industrial birds grown too fast, a mode of production inducing stress morbidities, including pecking wounds and tibial dyschohdroplasia. The community is now developing understanding of the role biodiversity across farms plays in protecting each farm’s husbandry from major ecological and public health threats should a virulent strain of influenza or other pathogen emerge out of the industrial sheds to the north and south of the region (Deng et al. 2012; Regional Development Victoria 2016; Wallace 2018).

In tandem with the Australia-wide movement of new regenerative farmers collaborating and learning by way of social media and at Deep Winter Agrarians, an annual off-season convergence, local farmers have founded a new collective, the Central Highlands Deep Roots Farmers and Allies. The collective is moving towards building a regional abattoir on the old Daylesford abattoir site to regain control of the last part of the supply chain that currently eludes them. The site already hosts an emerging food hub, with farmers and makers processing, packing, storing and distributing a variety of food goods, including wild fermented vegetables, kombucha and pastured eggs.

While the early focus has been on improving local farmers’ access to value chain infrastructure in the region, the community is also sharing agroecological methods for continual improvement. Regional farmer-to-farmer sharing of knowledge, itself a pillar of agroecological practice (FAO 2017), includes notes on potential supplies of waste-stream feed; watering systems that are designed to support the growth of new trees for shade, protection and fodder as well as for watering animals in mobile systems; and the ecological and cultural benefits of biodiversity of animals and seeds. Another complication still requires address in the central highlands: connecting the ecological to the economic. How are farmers to overcome the commercial difficulties of working with slow-growing animals with limited genetic pools from which to draw?

From production to processing to distributing the fruits of their labour, these central highlands farmers of Victoria are re-localising the food system, reducing reliance on external inputs, cycling nutrients on their farms, and increasing biodiversity on-site and across the region. They are building greater resilience to epizootic and economic perturbations into their ecological and social structures. Could such a program in agroecological resilience successfully juxtapose regional economic and ecological demands and services?

Conclusion

A recent editorial in Monthly Review, a political journal, denounced the concept of socioecological resilience because neoliberals and neocons had appropriated it as the next generation in eugenics (Editors 2017). Affluent societies, the argument goes, are better able to survive disasters. But are they inherently better? A ‘survival of the most resilient’ philosophy that places claims upon our global future and naturalises the market economy is one that destroys the poorest societies (Cox and Cox 2016). Detailed study, however, indicates that ‘advanced’ countries are turning increasingly fragile under the very neoliberal programs they celebrate (Rotz and Fraser 2015; Wallace et al. 2007; Wallace and Wallace 2016). So the starting premise holds little support. In addition, it seems terrible strategy abandoning key scientific concepts because proponents of policies to which we object aim to appropriate the ideas for their own uses.

Resilience is indubitably a political object (Armitage and Johnson 2006; Cretney 2014; Hornborg 2009; Robertson 2007). Indeed, new political practices must be instituted from the local village to the global economy. If a community’s wealth is found in part in its landscape, a notion upon which our three examples here converge, rather than solely in wages from externally sourced capital or a small plot’s seasonal output, then taking care of the land and local wildlife, and cultivating probiotic ecologies able to self-modulate biological control against pathogens and metabolic disorders, turns into a prime directive even in a global marketplace (Wallace 2016; Wallace and Kock 2012). Wealth – in a shared commons of human, wildlife and livestock population health – turns back into the kind of value neoclassical economics has long abandoned. Lauderdale’s paradox, by which the market rewards efforts to destroy earth’s remaining resources, may be better resolved in favour of populations that conserve the environments they consume (Foster, Clark and York 2010; Wallace and Kock 2012).

Resilience, putting health before medicine, arises in part from communal ownership of resolving the problem of the metabolic rift between ecology and economy, including recycling physical and social resources for the next season, the next year, and the next generation. Such communities in common are unlikely – even unable – to engage in the ‘spatial fixes’ routinely undertaken by agribusiness as operational practice, skirting from plot to plot when surplus capital is locked up or resources depleted, species by species, mineral by mineral, and region by region (Harvey 1982/2006; Wallace and Kock 2012).

Because political economies are embedded in relational geographies spanning the world, the political project of resilience extends beyond immediate landscapes to unpacking the machinery of global expropriation, the assumptions and practices of which have been stitched into the fabric of capitalist metaphysics as early as 1419 (Moore 2015; Patel and Moore 2017). The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) (2016) offers one such program, noting, ‘The way food systems are currently structured allows value to accrue to a limited number of actors, reinforcing their economic and political power, and thus their ability to influence the governance of food systems’. Qualman (2017) reports that over the past three decades, transnational agribusiness has captured 98 per cent of Canadian farmers’ revenues by extracting almost all value from the value chain with sales for inputs and services, leaving farmers with little, in some years placing a nation of farmers collectively in debt. The remaining contract farmers have survived on off-farm employment, federal subsidies, and loans. The concentration of political power rationalises measures of success synonymised with company margins, unbreakable path dependency, export-led production, productivist narratives of ‘feeding the world’ at the world’s expense, and expectations of cheap food that short-changes farmers across the globe (Chappell 2018; Clapp and Fuchs 2009).

Figure 9.5 Schematic showing interventions that turn sociopolitical lock-ins in industrial food production into entry points for change compatible with agroecological resilience. Adapted from International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (2016).

IPES-Food summarises a variety of interventions that are turning these lock-ins into entry points for change (Figure 9.5). As the villages of Tanzania and Zambia show, food systems can develop new indicators of sustainability. Outside Melbourne, as elsewhere, shorter supply chains and alternate retail structures are emerging. Agroecology can also be strengthened both in research and as a political platform behind which the public can rally in support. As to community resilience directly, Rotz and Fraser (2015), connecting ownership structure to ecosystemic outcomes, recommend:

Chappell (2018) warns food system reformers that even shovel-ready programs, however necessary, are insufficient. Success is dependent upon whether the problem, policy and politics streams of society align enough to take advantage of suddenly open policy windows. As agribusiness loses its credibility and authority, alienating a growing roster of constituencies upon which it externalises costs of production – governments, indigenous peoples, farmers, food labour, consumers, taxpayers and environmentalists – such alignments become more likely (Montenegro de Wit and Iles 2016; Wallace 2016). The future of agroecologically resilient food landscapes may be already here. The transitions appear to be arising out of a combination of conscious design and historically emergent practice across nature and society.

Acknowledgements

Funding provided by the Australian government, especially the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (FSC/2012/023), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the Crawford Fund in support of research on disease prevention and improved food and nutrition security is gratefully acknowledged.

​Works cited