The interdisciplinary agrifood literature has paid significant attention to power imbalances between supermarkets and suppliers, identifying fresh produce growers as particularly vulnerable to exploitative procurement practices. However, less work has examined the temporal characteristics of fresh produce that contribute to this vulnerability, and how these plays out in value chain relationships dominated by large retailers. In addressing this gap, our analysis draws on data from the recent ACCC Supermarkets Inquiry in Australia, a public inquiry run by Australia's national competition, consumer, fair trading and product safety regulator. We highlight two temporal characteristics that distinguish the fresh produce market. First, long biological growth cycles of many fruits and vegetables require growers to take on investment risks well in advance of returns; second, the short material lifespan of fresh produce limits growers’ bargaining capacity. While these characteristics have been established in other studies of temporality and agri-food systems, our novel contribution foregrounds the frictions between these ‘temporalities of nature’ and the temporalities of retailers – i.e., flexibility and freshness – and shows how these frictions exacerbate power asymmetries within horticultural value chains. Furthermore, growers’ attempt to address these frictions via overproduction results in significant negative environmental impacts. Given the importance of fresh food production to healthy diets and sustainable regional economies, our findings point to the need for policymaking to address temporal frictions to improve both fairness in value chains and sustainable horticultural production.

A long-standing debate in agrifood sociological work explores how consumer attitudes and behaviours regarding food consumption contribute to healthy food systems. This debate is particularly evident in the study of Alternative Local Food Systems (ALFS), where the potential of 'ethical consumption' to reorient food production-consumption relationships and improve human and ecological health, including food security, remains a subject of ongoing inquiry. Individual consumption from systems of alternative forms of food production (organics, agroecology) and distribution (cooperatives, food hubs) reflect changing consumer values and practices towards sustainable diets. This paper contributes to health sociology by taking a theoretical approach to this debate and drawing on scholarship exploring the relationship between ethical consumption and systems transformation. By examining how different consumption theories (ethical, sustainable, green and political) grapple with the individual-collective dilemma, it offers insights into the determinants of health by demonstrating how ethical consumption, ranging from individual values to collective activism, can influence access to heathy food and ultimately shape health outcomes. It also examines ALFS' contributions to promote collective modes of consumption. This sheds light on how collective agency might prompt deeper food democratic shifts beyond individual consumption, potentially supporting healthy and sustainable diets.

Civic food networks increasingly seek to increase their impact in building fairer and more sustainable food systems through solidarity financing. This represents a counterpoint to financialisation in industrialised food systems through alignment with the values and practices of solidarity economy such as localisation, reciprocity, cooperation, resilience and food justice. Of growing interest is the potential for sourcing finance from the wider community; people who may be willing to contribute to civic initiatives’ goals and share in their risks and opportunities. Crowdfunding is one such approach in solidarity finance, appealing to both new and seasoned investors interested in supporting local sustainable food initiatives. This paper considers two case studies of equity crowdfunding in Australia to examine the relationships emerging between solidarity financing and food producers, consumers and investors in civic food networks, and the implications for progressing food democracy. Our findings describe the investors and their financial and non-financial motivations to participate in solidarity financing, and specifically to support crowdfunding; and the goals, strategies, and governance structures that characterise the experiments under study. These themes reveal how crowdfunding financiers assess the potential impacts of investments, especially on ecologies and food justice outcomes. We argue that these cases of solidarity financing are producing new forms of ‘citizen-financiers’, in parallel to the growing networks of ‘citizen-consumers’ and ‘citizen-producers’ that underscore shifts towards food democracy. Understanding the characteristics of this emerging category of civic actors contributes new understandings of the potential for food system transformation through solidarity economy, alternative finance and civil society.

Australia's coastal horticultural regions are being reshaped through their deepening integration into global production networks (GPNs). Focusing on the north-eastern coastal strip (NECS), we explain how global market, financial, labour, intellectual property (IP) and environmental governance networks (presented as five network types) intersect with territorially specific conditions - including climate, land markets, regulatory frameworks, water systems and multifunctional rural transitions - to produce uneven regional development trajectories. Through case studies of mandarins in the North Burnett, macadamia investment in Bundaberg, labour mobility programs across various sites, proprietary berry genetics in Coffs Harbour, and reef-related environmental regulation in Far North Queensland, we show that global forces do not simply impact upon rural regions but co-constitute them. Each of the five networks generate distinctive forms of value creation, contestations and governance outcomes. The analysis demonstrates that Australia's horticultural regions are increasingly governed through polycentric systems in which globally networked actors influence territorial change. We argue that understanding contemporary rural governance requires recognising how regional futures are shaped through these multi-scalar, mutually constitutive processes.

In its most recent report, the Academy of the Social Sciences Australia (ASSA, 2021: 10) identified social inequality as a "grand challenge" for the social sciences, arguing that social scientists have a pivotal role to play in "understanding, addressing and guiding us towards a narrowing of a two-tier society." Nevertheless, the social sciences continue to be regularly positioned as "soft" and esoteric in relation to the natural sciences, while also sustaining disproportionate funding cuts. In this article, we-a multidisciplinary group of social science researchers forming part of the Inequalities and Social Action Research Cluster based at The University of Queensland (Australia)-draw on the existing literature and our diverse experiences to reflexively consider how academic social scientists might play the active role that ASSA foresees to address social inequalities into the future. This includes by countering the inherent imperialism of the Western academy itself. We explore the roles, barriers and tensions that social scientists face and conclude by offering a framework of key strategies to improve the translational impacts of social science research for addressing social inequalities.

Through the lens of food utopias, this article explores the opportunities and dilemmas experienced by selected civic food networks (CFNs) in Australia as they seek to scale-up from local initiatives, to regional coalitions, to national social movements. Findings from qualitative analysis of key informant interviews indicate the ways that scaling up is both a micro- and macro-level process. While local initiatives focus on different problems (food waste, hunger, health, ecology), establishing shared visions that emphasise systems reform has shaped coalition building and collective action beyond the local. As problem and solution definitions converge and diverge around justice and rights, however, limitations in the representation, positioning and 'voice' of marginalised stakeholders - specifically, indigenous people and those most affected by hunger - have emerged. This has opened up new spaces of contestation that today take central place in determining the trajectory of 'values-based territorial food networks' in Australia.

Tracking farmland purchases is central to interpreting transnational finance's growing power in agrarian restructuring. Australia's public Register of foreign land ownership reveals little about agrarian change, however. In presenting the first comprehensive mapping of farmland purchases made between 2008 and 2020, this paper examines the ways that financial investments are altering farm ownership patterns in Australia. First, we show that most foreign owned land has been purchased by only 10 pastoral companies, which are implicated in speculative development activities. Second, foreign investment in cropping and horticulture is more significant than it appears in the Register , with investments in agricultural infrastructure increasingly driving land use change. Third, we illustrate the deepening entrenchment of institutional finance. By engaging with the findings from our dataset as well as with the politics of data that have shaped the availability of information, the paper progresses understandings of the financialization of farmland in both its material and ideational aspects.

The Elgar Encyclopedia of Development is a ground-breaking resource that provides a starting point for those wishing to grasp how and why development occurs, while also providing further expansion appropriate for more experienced academics.

Historically and now, the rural is frequently relegated to the periphery of broader public and policy debates, and within the discipline of sociology. At this moment in time, where the world needs radical re-imagining for the future, rural perspectives and realities must be visible and addressed. This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Sociology which seeks to articulate how rural sociology is a crucial field of study for (re)imaging rural futures. In this article, we provide an overview of the research included in the collection, which draws much needed attention to some of the specific contemporary challenges encountered in rural places and some of the possibilities for transforming rural futures, and rural sociology. We argue that rural places are a key site where transformative change can, and does occur, and that rural sociologists are ideally positioned to work with and for rural communities in effecting desired change.

Food security is influenced by various factors and policy settings. The related concept of food sovereignty, which emphasizes the rights of communities to 'define their own food systems', is also informed by political power. For Indigenous Australians, food security and food sovereignty are intimately linked with connections and access to land and water, which have been systematically disrupted under settler colonialism. Social policies continue to disrupt these connections and undermine access to food. In this paper, we explore relationships between food security, food sovereignty, and Australia's remote 'workfare' policy, the Community Development Programme (CDP), which disproportionately affects Indigenous Australians. We find that CDP undermines food security and food sovereignty by influencing the conditions for access to land, income, time and power. A lack of coordination across food and social policies creates complex, negative impacts, but sovereignty is central to improving Indigenous Australians' wellbeing and outcomes across food and work.

The future of food and agriculture in Australasia will be defined by multiple social, economic, political and environmental tensions – with climate change and social inequalities playing a central role in the re-imagining of food systems in crisis. This article argues that rural sociology will continue to be well-served by the sociological research into the farming and food industries undertaken by antipodean scholars – especially those from Australia and New Zealand where agri-food scholarship has flourished. Analyses of the future dynamics of rural social/economic change, natural resource management (including land, water and minerals), new relations of work, labour and identity, emerging agricultural technologies, Indigenous and post-colonial politics, and food system governance will benefit from agri-food studies’ insights into agrarian transformation and governance, social and environmental sustainability, health and wellbeing, and the growth of resistance and alternatives.

Background: This paper examines the exclusion of public health from social license narratives within an increasingly financialised food system, through a case study of foreign ownership in the Australian sugar industry. As finance actors such as asset management firms, pension funds, private equity funds, state owned enterprises and sovereign wealth funds engage in speculative farmland investment, commodity futures trading, and the conversion of farmland into a financial asset, power within agro-industrial food supply chains becomes increasingly concentrated. This has been associated with increased food prices and more processed food, contributing to obesogenic diets, hunger, and poorer health outcomes for many. The potential for negative social and environmental impacts has prompted awareness of the need for financial actors to demonstrate sustainability, responsibility and accountability in their farmland investments. Methods: This paper uses thematic analysis of qualitative interviews and key documents to assess four recent acquisitions of sugarcane land in North Queensland. We consider how companies’ efforts to establish or maintain a social license to operate (SLO) intersect with their capital accumulation strategies. Results: Our findings demonstrate that the link between the commodification of ‘unhealthy’ food inputs (such as sugar) and financialisation remains outside the purview of financiers. Instead, agribusiness firms use narratives centred on biofuels investment and energy/food security to justify their legitimacy in the sugar sector. We organise our findings according to two ‘narratives:’ constructing trust and credibility through ethical compliance; and, biofuels expansion as a legitimate response to climate change. The concept of social license is much stronger in the second narrative, but health is largely missing. Conclusion: The ‘distancing’ between responsibility and health outcomes highlights the limits to principles of responsible financial investment, and to the legitimacy of finance to claim an SLO – the ongoing approval and acceptance by society to conduct its activities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major stress test for the agri-food system. While most research has analysed the impact of the pandemic on mainstream food systems, this article examines how alternative and local food systems (ALFS) in 13 countries responded in the first months of the crisis. Using primary and secondary data and combining the Multi-Level Perspective with social innovation approaches, we highlight the innovations and adaptations that emerged in ALFS, and how these changes have created or supported the sustainability transition in production and consumption systems. In particular, we show how the combination of social and technological innovation, greater citizen involvement, and the increased interest of policy-makers and retailers have enabled ALFS to extend their scope and engage new actors in more sustainable practices. Finally, we make recommendations concerning how to support ALFS' upscaling to embrace the opportunities arising from the crisis and strengthen the sustainability transition.

ABSTRACT Indigenous Australian landowners are increasingly seeking to develop agricultural production on their lands to improve the welfare and economic opportunities of their communities. This can require substantial capital input and, in the absence of enough government funding, Indigenous groups are turning to private investors. Development literature has explored private sector‐led and ‘financialized’ approaches to development at a macro level as something that is done to communities; however, less research has examined how remote communities themselves seek to develop their natural assets through partnerships with businesses and with global finance. This article examines the work being done to prepare land for external investment. It provides an example of emergent assetization processes being undertaken outside the financial sector, driven by social outcomes seemingly beyond the domain of shareholder value. Paradoxically, individuals engaged in these asset‐making processes may oppose the withdrawal of direct funding for community development associated with a financialization of development, yet they are left with few options but to further these efforts by seeking private finance themselves — facilitating financialization for development. This interaction of structural effects and local agency complicates narratives of financialization as they are commonly presented and has important implications for Indigenous economic development in Northern Australia.

This chapter investigates the social, political and environmental characteristics and impacts of food and farming in the current era of neoliberal globalization. Drawing from environmental sociology, political economy and political ecology, we consider the ways that problems with capital, labour and land intersect with ecological constraints (such as climate change and declining fossil fuels). Productivist agriculture, industrialisation, supermarketization and financialization have contributed to the demise of local food systems, the promotion of ‘obesogenic’ diets, the creation of food waste and the global ‘land rush’, with implications for both the natural environment and for deteriorating conditions for labour. Farmers have shifted from feeding nations to producing for a global economy in which food is overproduced while global hunger increases. These contradictions have prompted significant social, political, and financial struggles. Multiple ‘neoliberalisms’ have therefore emerged, and neoliberal food and farming is highly contested. The chapter concludes with a discussion of alter-globalization; an alternative to neoliberal globalization that challenges the notion of capitalist growth, highlights limits to consumption, and largely rejects market solutions to environmental problems. The right to food, ‘food sovereignty’, redistributive land reform, smallholder and family farming, de-corporatization, agro-ecology and improved democracy are discussed as key elements informing critique and resistance.

This submission addresses the impact of proposed foreign investment on market concentration and competition (TOR-B); the role of the Foreign Investment Review Board (TOR-C); and other matters related to foreign ownership and control of Australia’s agri-food resources (TOR-G).

Growing investments in food and farmland have raised concerns about the potential implications of the financialisation of the Australian agri-food sector. However, little is known about how these investments are negotiated in practice - what people and tools structure agricultural investments and drive their outcomes. Emerging research on this topic has largely focussed on private sector actors, with the state positioned as a structural driver which, through broad neoliberal policies, creates conditions which promote financialisation. Indeed, the 2015 White Paper on ‘Developing Northern Australia’ articulates a governance rationality that indicates the responsibility for allocation of economic resources should rest with financial investors. Yet excessive attention to this agenda risks underplaying the difficult, uncertain, work of government officials seeking to translate this into practice. This research explores the work of local Northern Territory government officials as they seek to translate two key aspects of the Developing the North program into practice: attracting finance capital, and moderating its activities. An appreciation for the difficult work of translation allows us to move beyond a view of the state as a merely passive actor in financialisation, to consider ways that individuals within government work actively to assemble patterns of financial investment.