AFTER--Agri-Food Transformation for Equitable Resilience: towards social, economic, and environmental sustainability in Spain’s almond sector

Transforming food systems to confront climate change, inequality, and biodiversity loss has become a defining challenge of the present era. Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement will require food system reform.

Yet, how to reduce the environmental and climate impacts of food production without compromising the livelihoods and resilience of rural communities remains the focus of intense debate.

The proposed project offers a novel interdisciplinary framework for examining how diverse food system actors, institutions, and policies can catalyze equitable food system transformation.

It examines Spain’s rapidly changing almond sector, which offers an opportunity to consider how trade-offs among social, environmental, and economic dimensions of sustainability are negotiated in real time.The project´s overall aim is to identify systemic obstacles to sustainability and to work with stakeholders to develop plans for overcoming these barriers.

Through detailed fieldwork with diverse food system actors, I will examine 1) How and why unsustainable paths have evolved in Spain´s almond sector; 2) What factors (eg gender, age, class) and institutions enable farmers to adopt and benefit from agroecological practices; and 3) what policy measures and programs can support the realization of these goals.

Findings will inform programs and policies that aim to expand access to healthy, sustainably produced food while promoting equitable rural development.