Introduction

This open issue of Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment features a diverse range of scholarship on questions related to the tools that farmers, conservationists, and other actors develop and use to manage their lives and livelihoods.

Drawing on the notion of “horizoning work” (Petryna, 2018, 2022), Holly Brause shows how various actors in the drought-prone Mesilla and Rincon Valleys of New Mexico navigate conflicting spatial and, crucially, temporal scales in their attempts to articulate and realize a more water secure future. The challenge of multi-scalar horizoning work, according to Brause, is that it must situate “actionable strategies” within geographical, temporal, and political horizons that are necessarily much broader; the way to achieve this is by cultivating participatory approaches to resource management.

A similar theme emerges in Baines and Miis's analysis of the way different terms get defined in the pursuit of a good life, and how important these definitions are in determining whether a good life is actually achieved. They examine the extent to which a vision document produced by the Maya Leaders Alliance, “The Future We Dream,” not only reflected a community-driven aspiration to embed Indigenous, more-than-human relationalities in future land management strategies, but was translated into more concrete plans for forest management vis-à-vis agricultural livelihoods. Maya forest management practices sit uneasily at the intersection of embodied cultural knowledge, lived experiences, and technoscientific environmentalist framings, but as Baines and Miis show, these intersections can be productive sites of an emergent environmental politics.

Isidore Lobnibe and Jane-Frances Lobnibe also investigate the relationship between the local and the global, focusing on articulations of social entrepreneurship and economic viability in the development of banana as a cash crop at the Ghana-Burkina Faso border. They focus in particular on the role that local elites and local farmers played in both the discursive and agricultural establishment of the viability of banana farming, and the ways in which these dynamics intersected with efforts to promote Ghanaian agriculture at other scales.

From Ghana, we move back to the United States, where Andrew Flachs and colleagues examine the increasing importance of digital accounting technologies—specifically spreadsheets—among small farmers since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and that various restrictions that were put in place to limit its spread. Drawing on insights from critical accounting studies and the social study of quantification, they argue that the rapid adoption of these tools in the context of local food production led to a subtle shift in small farmers' prioritization of issues like local labor dynamics and crop diversity, with a newly central focus on profitability. Such a shift, they suggest, is at least in part a function of spreadsheets themselves, which facilitate only certain kinds of data collection and therefore circumscribe the kinds of concerns that can be reflected and addressed through data-driven optimization strategies. Their findings, which are derived through a thematic analysis of interviews with farmers and retailers involved in local food production and distribution across the United States, are applicable to the adoption of other technologies in the agricultural industry, and they serve as a potent reminder of the sociality of technology and metrology more generally.

The issue closes with an invited commentary on the state of food and agriculture in the West Bank by Omar Qassis, who situates the rapid deterioration of agricultural livelihoods and food security in the West Bank since October 7th in both a broader regional conflict around the Israeli government's current (and intensifying) onslaught on Gaza and in a much longer history of dispossession extending to the 1948 Nakba and beyond. At the time of writing, in the seven months since October 7th, the Israeli government has killed tens of thousands of civilians—up to half of whom are children—in Gaza, an act that many commentators have characterized as a textbook example of genocidal collective punishment. On top of this, more than a million people living in Gaza face the acute threat of starvation, and many are falling ill due to malnutrition, unsafe drinking water, and lack of medical treatments, problems that are exacerbated by attacks on aid trucks by both the Israeli military and by settlers operating under the cover of the military. Beyond Gaza, settler and military attacks on farmers, pastoralists, and other civilians in the West Bank and Lebanon have intensified.

In the introduction to the previous issue of this journal, which was written a few weeks after October 7th, we noted the importance of critical, anthropological approaches to the politics of food and agriculture in conflict zones. Qassis's commentary is a brilliant example of this, offering a grounded analysis of the political ecology of agricultural livelihoods under violent occupation, an analysis that demonstrates the inherently ecocidal tendency of settler colonialism.

From every river to every sea, those who are colonized will eventually be free. Anthropologists of food, agriculture, and the environment can—and, in the opinion of this editor, should—be active in these liberations.