Introductions

Greetings all

Let me dare to suggest that we start a thread for people to briefly introduce themselves... I am sure Bill knows everyone who will be joining, and lots of you will know many others, but it would be a help for some of us (esp from further afield) to know who's who and what they are interested in.

So let me be so bold as to start. I am based at the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape: we are a policy research institute focussing mostly on land and land tenure related issues. We do research on land reform, community-based natural resource management, artisanal fishing, poverty and agrifood systems. We are currently finding that circumstances require us to pay more and more attention to how land reform articulates with broader questions of agro-food restructuring.

My own research interests include change on South African fruit and wine farms, and I have dome some work on agro-food re-regulation, especially with reference to Fair and Ethical Trade and, more lately, 'Black empowerment' in the wine industry. In recent years I have retreated a bit from agriculture related research to look at chronic poverty and marginalised livelihoods n South Africa more generally, and at the moment I am writing a bit about informal social protection in migrant livelihoods. These issues, too, take me back to agrifood related issues, particularly as they all relate to the dynamics of de-agrarianization, de-industrialization and massive food retail concentration in South Africa. The current global food price crisis is not impacting as heavily in SA as it is elsewhere, but it is impacting, and important questions are being raised about agricultural policy and food security in SA. In the next few years (as funding permits) I hope to do more work on relating these issues to an account of the nature of food commodity systems and chains in SA.

That should tell you-all a bit about where my comments and questions might be coming from...

Next person?