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Drawing upon Alfred Sohn-Rethel's work, we argue that, just as capitalism produces abstract labor, it coproduces both abstract mind and abstract life. Abstract mind is the split between mind and nature and between subject/observer and observed object that characterizes scientific epistemology. Abstract mind reflects an abstracted objectified world of nature as a means to be exploited. Biological life is rendered as abstract life by capitalist exploitation and by the reification and technologization of organisms by contemporary technoscience. What Alberto Toscano has called “the culture of abstraction” imposes market rationality onto nature and the living world, disrupting biotic communities and transforming organisms into what Finn Bowring calls “functional bio-machines.”

This chapter considers the place of responsibility in confronting ecological sustainability and social equity problems in the food system. We present two illustrations addressing the following question: In what ways does responsibility present a way to close the metabolic rift in line with the vision of the global food sovereignty movement? First, using the example of Metro-Vancouver in Canada, we consider the ways in which urban people claim responsibility for land protection through the concept of urban agrarianism, defined as an urban ethic of care for foodlands, with an associated responsibility to exercise solidarity with those who cultivate and harvest food. Second, we discuss how deepening relational responsibility in legal and regulatory frameworks might hold the corporate food regime accountable in the Canadian context to address their role in and responsibility for mitigating an increasingly risky world, as evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the responsibility of urban people to mobilise in solidarity with food movements, and against the corporate food regime in particular, will play a critical role in supporting the transition to sustainable and just food systems. This applies both to finding new ways to claim responsibility for this transition and to hold those actors that have disproportionately benefitted from the corporate food regime responsible. Such a reworking of responsibility is especially necessary as the context for food systems change becomes increasingly urbanised and risky.

From an interdisciplinary position, I discuss the historical and epistemological roots of the objectification and commodification of nature, which emerged from the hegemony of instrumental rationality. This rationality—synthetically, a technological, political, social, ethical, and esthetical universe of thought and action—has created both wealth and environmental destruction due to the progressive domination of nature through science and technology. The objectification of nature and nonhuman animals is associated with the legacy of René Descartes based on some excerpts of his famous Discourse on the Method in which the idea of animals as machines established a powerful and pervasive metaphor that remains today. Speciesism, which involves forms of discrimination practiced by humans against other animal species, also dominates Western perspectives. However, studies reveal that nonhuman animal sentience and conscience is a scientific fact. While there is no ethical or scientific ground to support speciesism, the colossal number of animals commodified in a myriad of contexts, especially in animal agriculture, proves that our society is very far from overcoming this issue. A possible path to change is education. Nevertheless, profound transformations are mandatory as formal education—even “environmental education”—carries in its philosophical foundations the Cartesian, instrumental paradigm that favors the objectification and commodification of nature. I present how the concept of instrumental rationality, especially as proposed by Herbert Marcuse, establishes as a unifying and solid ground to address the roots of the objectification and commodification of nature (including nonhuman animals), as well as to confront the epistemological bedrock of our speciesist nonenvironmental, traditional education.

This essay provides evidence that the invention of agriculture was not a dramatic technological advance in the history of humankind and that agriculture was quite consistent with nomadic hunting and gathering. The available clues also suggest that exact origins of agriculture do not seem important. Rather, the crucial question is why certain societies dramatically increased their dependency on agriculture for subsistence two to ten millennia ago. Unfortunately, most of the major theories purporting to explain the neolithic revolution – either the origins or the spread of agriculture – are either untestable or inconsistent with the available evidence. What is at stake for economic historians is to rethink the process of the adoption of agriculture using a multi-causal approach.

Possible reasons for using kites to kill gazelles are comprehensively reviewed in this article. Even though they are now well inventoried and documented, desert kites are still not well understood, as exemplified by the recurrent controversies about their function and dating. According to the dominant view, kites were hunting structures used to drive and to mass kill large herds of wild ungulates, particularly gazelles. Although kites were intensively used during the Early Bronze Age, some of them could have been built and used before that. Beyond these issues, the cultural and socioeconomic aspects of the kites phenomenon are even less understood, and therefore, we focus on changing reasons for the long-lasting use of kites as hunting devices. We contend that the reasons why they were used during the period of utilization for hunting gazelles changed, in most cases, in response to socioeconomic development. It is hypothesized, for example, that, as a result of urban development, kites may have been increasingly (but not exclusively) used to kill gazelles to trade their products with urban communities and farmers, even though they had other uses as well which are also considered. The main hypothesis presented in this article enables diverse opinions about the types of uses and reasons for utilizing desert kites to be reconciled, including in particular varied reasons given in the literature about why they were used for killing gazelles.

Burkina Faso is a land-locked country, sharing a border with six other countries, namely Mali, Niger, Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Cote D'Ivoire in the zone of West Africa (Fig. 1). Due to the geographical location of the Sahel region, the country's climate is characterized by rainy and dry seasons. According to the Human Development Report in 2010, the country has a very weak economy with a GDP of 522 USD per habitant, principally based on agriculture (25%), animal production (12%), and forestry/fishery (3%) (MECV & SP/CONEDD, 2006a). The population growth is extremely high at 2.8%, with 46.4% of the population living below the national poverty line and 81.2% living on less than $2 a day (UNDP, 2009). The biomass energy is the largest primary energy source covering 80% of total consumption, thus accelerating soil degradation as well as deforestation.

Purpose – Dairy has been the backbone of agriculture in regional Norway, and the processing of milk has been dominated by co-operatives owned by milk farmers. During the social democratic order (1945–1979), productivist agriculture thrived, while a more multifunctional agriculture was developed after 1980. As a measure against overproduction, a quota system was introduced in 1983. The purpose of this study is to see if there are signs of a neo-productivism revival after climate change and other global shocks, like the food crisis, featured prominently on the political agenda.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter reviews the radical structural changes in Norwegian dairy production since the early 1960s, which reduced the number of milk farms radically from 148,000 in 1959 to almost 16,000 in 2009. According to the Agricultural Agreement between the Norwegian government and the farmers' organisations, the co-operatives are given an important semi-public role as market-price regulators and stock keepers. This Norwegian system may be described as a classical regulated dairy regime. The Norwegian dairy regime has been through several deregulations and re-regulations over the last 20 years, partly forced by internal pressures and partly inspired by liberalisation tendencies abroad.

Findings – After mid-1990s, there has been an increase in the number of joint dairy farms, where individual ownership of land is maintained while herds, buildings and machinery are merged. Three thousand six hundred thirty dairy farmers are now participating in 1,510 joint farming firms, producing 29 per cent of the milk in Norway. This rapid growth of joint farming is transforming the dairy sector in Norway. Analysis has shown that its evolution is closely tied to farmer socio-economic demands, including social benefits, such as increased leisure time, and security during illness. While there has been pressure to increase productivity, the food crisis changed attitudes, making the current policy of import tariffs and subsidies easier to defend.

Originality/value – This chapter shows that neo-liberalism in Norway was not pursued as far as in most other OECD countries, although some deregulation was taking place. Norwegian agricultural policies are still regulating the sector to a substantial degree, with the annual Agricultural Agreement negotiations serving as a centrepiece. Norway has ambitious climate goals, and by 2020 greenhouse gases emissions should be reduced to 30 per cent of the 1990 rate. A further goal is that Norway will be carbon neutral by 2030. As part of the implementation of its climate policy, a White Paper on agriculture and climate change was put forward in May 2009. For Norwegian food production as a whole, a change towards more grazing at the expense of crops would improve carbon storage and reduce the overall use of fertiliser. Such a shift in land use would benefit the dairy sector, in part because of easier access to domestically grown cow feed.

The corporate food regime is presented here as a vector of the project of global development. As such, it expresses not only the social and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also the world-historical conjuncture in which the deployment of price and credit relations are key mechanisms of ‘accumulation through dispossession.’ The global displacement of peasant cultures of provision by dumping, the supermarket revolution, and conversion of land for agro-exports, incubate ‘food sovereignty’ movements expressing alternative relationships to the land, farming and food.