Project description
Valuing food crops: From agrobiodiverse to agroindustrial fields
The cultivation of crop varieties is deeply impacted by major contemporary concerns – from ecological degradation to financial deregulation and demographic explosion. Therefore, the value of food crops should not be assessed only in economic terms. Ethical values that motivate farmers to ensure biodiversity are just as important. Focused on potato cultivation in Peru, maize in Mexico and rice in Laos, the EU-funded SeedsValues project will study the ethics of seed growing as well as the manifold appreciations of seeds in exchange and consumption. By exploring the links between growers and seeds it will address the split between economic and ethical studies on value.
Objective
AgricultureAgriculture condenses the most pressing challenges we are facing today: ecological degradation, financial deregulation and demographic explosion. Value discrepancies are key obstacles toward integrated agriculture which are not rewarding in the capitalist economy overwhelmed by a profit-driven agroindustry. However, we still lack fundamental knowledge to identify the manifold values of agricultural assets. While the value of crop varieties is usually assessed in economic terms, we need to also consider the ethical values that incentivies farmers to perpetuate biodiverse agriculture. Beside empirical timeliness, this study contributes to the elaboration of a general anthropology of value still lacking to date. The SeedsValues contends that agriculture offers a unique object to overcome the current split between the economic and the ethical studies on value. This will be achieved by producing interspecies ethnographies into seed-human relatedness - both affective and instrumental - in three agrobiodiversity hotspots: potato cultivation in Peru, maize in Mexico and rice in Laos. Prominent on global markets, also distinguished by international institutions as highly promising to reach global food security, these crops bear outstanding value to the Indigenous people who cultivate and eat them daily. Sometimes, they are treated as organisms imbued with a subjectivity, challenging Western dichotomies between object and subject, nature and culture. In this light, this project aims at unravelling (a) the ethics of seed growing, (b) the appreciation of seeds in exchange and consumption, and (c) the entanglements between growers' and seeds’ qualities. Beside addressing critical ecological questions regarding the sustainable feeding of an increasing human population, this research at the interface of anthropology and biology promises significant theoretical advances in the anthropology of value by investigating a vital object: the cultivation of flourishing seeds.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences sociology anthropology
- medical and health sciences health sciences nutrition
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries agriculture grains and oilseeds cereals
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
ERC-STG - Starting Grant
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
1050 BRUXELLES
Belgium
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