Democratising food : the case for a deliberative approach

Prevailing political and ethical approaches that have been used to both critique and propose alternatives to the existing food system are lacking. Although food security, food sovereignty, food justice, and food democracy all offer something important to our reflection on the global food system, none is adequate as an alternative to the status quo. This article analyses each in order to identify the prerequisites for such an alternative approach to food governance. These include a focus on goods like nutrition and health, equitable distribution, supporting livelihoods, environmental sustainability, and social justice. However, other goods, like the interests of non-human animals, are not presently represented. Moreover, incorporating all of these goods is incredibly demanding, and some are in tension. This raises the question of how each can be appropriately accommodated and balanced. The article proposes that this ought to be done through deliberative democratic processes that incorporate the interests of all relevant parties at the local, national, regional, and global levels. In other words, the article calls for a deliberative approach to the democratisation of food. It also proposes that one promising potential for incorporating the interests of all affected parties and addressing power imbalances lies in organising the scope and remit of deliberation around food type

Cultivating ‘new’ gendered food producers : intersections of power and identity in the postcolonial nation of Trinidad

This paper advances a critical gendered analysis of the ways in which food-producing identities are constructed and mobilised in Trinidad. Utilising a historical and intersectional feminist lens, it shows how gendered identities and subjectivities both shape and are shaped by the political economy, and are intimately intertwined with race, class and nation. The research draws on fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2016. Through historical analysis of secondary literature and visual analysis of a billboard campaign that attempted to cultivate ‘new’ images of farmers and agriculture, it shows how traditional Caribbean identities – informed by distinctive colonial legacies – are both reproduced and reformulated in the contemporary neoliberal era. The paper argues that the construction of food-producing identities is a complex combination of colonial history, positionality, self-making and aspiration, and how actors encounter, experience and engender these has implications for how we understand relations between the state, capital and food producers. It makes three key contributions. Firstly, it enriches Feminist IPE scholarship with an intersectional analysis of situated gendered identities and their relationship to political-economic processes beyond class. Secondly, it highlights the importance of studying peripheralised regions in the global South and applying the insights of their feminist scholars for understanding broader power relations in the Global Political Economy (GPE). Finally, it demonstrates how an intersectional framework can shed light on why local food and agricultural policy plays out in distinct ways

Still searching for (food) sovereignty: Why are radical discourses only partially mobilised in the independent Anglo-Caribbean?

The notion of ‘food sovereignty’ is often surprisingly absent in food and agricultural discourses in the Anglo-Caribbean, where over the past half century policy-making has aligned with conventional ‘food security’ approaches. This paper argues that, in addition to its contemporary entrenchment within a neoliberal environment, this is also due to the nature of ‘sovereignty’ itself in a region which has been shaped by a distinctive colonial, social and economic history. In order to demonstrate this, firstly, it makes the case for why, in the context of rising food imports and enduring structural legacies, food sovereignty matters in the Anglo-Caribbean. Secondly, it charts changes in the regional policy of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to show how, despite repeated calls to increase self-sufficiency, conventional neoliberal approaches to agricultural development and food security have predominated since the 1970s. Finally, it identifies and analyses limited instances where food sovereignty discourses have been mobilized, by farmers’ groups and political actors, and interrogates the meaning of both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ sovereignty itself in this post-colonial context. It finds mobilisations of food sovereignty to be characterised by a repeated conflation of domestic food production with the concept’s ideological principles as a political project, and a particular understanding of sovereignty that places an emphasis on ‘the state’ and ‘the region’ over ‘the people’. This shows that the very nature of ‘sovereignty’ itself plays a critical role in both the translation of, and possibilities for mobilising ‘food sovereignty’ as a radical project as envisaged in the wider literature

A Generic Agent Organisation Framework For Autonomic Systems

Autonomic computing is being advocated as a tool for managing large, complex computing systems. Specifically, self-organisation provides a suitable approach for developing such autonomic systems by incorporating self-management and adaptation properties into large-scale distributed systems. To aid in this development, this paper details a generic problem-solving agent organisation framework that can act as a modelling and simulation platform for autonomic systems. Our framework describes a set of service-providing agents accomplishing tasks through social interactions in dynamically changing organisations. We particularly focus on the organisational structure as it can be used as the basis for the design, development and evaluation of generic algorithms for self-organisation and other approaches towards autonomic systems

Chess endgames: 6-man data and strategy

While Nalimov’s endgame tables for Western Chess are the most used today, their Depth-to-Mate metric is not the most efficient or effective in use. The authors have developed and used new programs to create tables to alternative metrics and recommend better strategies for endgame play

Effect of continuum couplings in fusion of halo 11^{11}Be on 208^{208}Pb around the Coulomb barrier

The effect of continuum couplings in the fusion of the halo nucleus $^{11}$Be on $^{208}$Pb around the Coulomb barrier is studied using a three-body model within a coupled discretised continuum channels (CDCC) formalism. We investigate in particular the role of continuum-continuum couplings. These are found to hinder total, complete and incomplete fusion processes. Couplings to the projectile $1p_{1/2}$ bound excited state redistribute the complete and incomplete fusion cross sections, but the total fusion cross section remains nearly constant. Results show that continuum-continuum couplings enhance the irreversibility of breakup and reduce the flux that penetrates the Coulomb barrier. Converged total fusion cross sections agree with the experimental ones for energies around the Coulomb barrier, but underestimate those for energies well above the Coulomb barrier.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, accepted in Phys. Rev.

Resonant Absorption as Mode Conversion?

Resonant absorption and mode conversion are both extensively studied mechanisms for wave "absorption" in solar magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). But are they really distinct? We re-examine a well-known simple resonant absorption model in a cold MHD plasma that places the resonance inside an evanescent region. The normal mode solutions display the standard singular resonant features. However, these same normal modes may be used to construct a ray bundle which very clearly undergoes mode conversion to an Alfv\'en wave with no singularities. We therefore conclude that resonant absorption and mode conversion are in fact the same thing, at least for this model problem. The prime distinguishing characteristic that determines which of the two descriptions is most natural in a given circumstance is whether the converted wave can provide a net escape of energy from the conversion/absorption region of physical space. If it cannot, it is forced to run away in wavenumber space instead, thereby generating the arbitrarily small scales in situ that we recognize as fundamental to resonant absorption and phase mixing. On the other hand, if the converted wave takes net energy way, singularities do not develop, though phase mixing may still develop with distance as the wave recedes.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables; accepted by Solar Phys (July 9 2010

Scaling and Interference in the Dissociation of Halo Nuclei

The dissociation of halo nuclei through their collision with light and heavy targets is considered within the Continuum Discretized Coupled Channels theory. We study the one-proton halo nucleus $^8$B and the one-neutron halo nucleus $^{11}$Be, as well as the more normal $^7$Be. The procedure previously employed to extract the Coulomb dissociation cross section by subtracting the nuclear one is critically assessed, and the scaling law usually assumed for the target mass dependence of the nuclear breakup cross section is also tested. It is found that the nuclear breakup cross section for these very loosely bound nuclei does indeed behave as $a+bA^{1/3}$. However, it does not have the geometrically inspired form of a circular ring which seems to be the case for normal nuclei such as $^{7}$Be. We find further that we cannot ignore Coulomb-nuclear interference effects, which may be constructive or destructive in nature, and so the errors in previously extracted B(E1) using the subtraction procedure are almost certainly underestimated.Comment: version submitted to PRL + minor text change