A Frontline Metropolitan Food System: Urban/Rural Connections and Displacement

Keywords: food justice, climate justice, urban agriculture, peri-urban agriculture, metropolitan food systems
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Expanding on recommendations found in Hammelman et al. (2020), this project utilizes a metropolitan-scale geographical analysis to evaluate the social aspects of the relationship between climate change and market-oriented food production on the Louisiana Gulf Coast frontlines. Why does production persist despite the significant barriers to financially viable production in the metropolitan New Orleans area? Preliminary findings suggest that producers understand climate change through its discrete ecological manifestations such as increased frequency and severity of hurricanes, flooding, droughts, etc. which are impactful to operations as such, but also have spillover effects in terms of increased pest pressures, increased labor requirements, intense and evolving knowledge acquisition and transferal processes, etc. Climate impacts intertwine with urban restructuring as skyrocketing land costs and increasing ecological unpredictability differentially push growers out- either out of production entirely, and often out of the area, or into peri-urban spaces. It appears as though growers with greater access to financial capital, or human capital through formal agricultural or business education, are moving operations into peri-urban spaces where land is cheaper and more abundant for growing “at scale”. These urban-to-peri-urban producers maintain discrete connections to the urban core and urban market through their housing, marketing, or social networks. The question then becomes: is this a bifurcated process of displacement within urban production? And, if we consider access to capital and power, is this an avenue towards rural repopulation and/or gentrification in the face of urban ecological and economic crisis/collapse?