DTA

Dottorato

DE GREGORIO, VALENTINA

etd-12162024-172423

Relational recomposition between humans and nonhumans in European agriculture policy framework.

SPS/01

Istituto di Diritto, Politica e Sviluppo - PHD IN HUMAN RIGHTS AND GLOBAL POLITICS: LEGAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND ECONOMIC CHALLENGES

relatore Prof.ssa HENRY, BARBARA

• Nessuna parola chiave trovata

02/04/2025;

completa

This thesis undertakes a philosophical exploration of the relational patterns between humans and nonhuman cultivable plants within the context of European agriculture. European agriculture is currently navigating a crossroads of multiple challenges, three of which have proven particularly pivotal to both its present and future: climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These crises have collectively exposed the fragility of Europe’s agricultural production system, forcing it to confront diverse vulnerabilities (Galanakis 2023): the unpredictability of crop yields driven by global warming, labor shortages caused by the lack of seasonal workers during the pandemic (Clapp & Moseley 2020), and disruptions to the production and distribution of essential agricultural products resulting from the war in Ukraine (Abdullaieva et al. 2022). In response, European institutions have sought to adapt agricultural policies to confront these interconnected crises, aiming to balance the imperatives of food security with the demands of ecological sustainability (Galli et al. 2018). In this context, two primary political trends seem to emerge. The first emphasizes the push to increase agricultural production to ensure food self-sufficiency, achieved through strategies such as utilizing available farmland and advancing technological innovation, including the development of climate-resilient cultivars (Nerkar et al. 2022). The second prioritizes the protection and restoration of biodiversity —including agricultural biodiversity— as an essential resource for enhancing the resilience of food systems and ensuring food security (Mommer et al. 2022). These trends appear to reflect competing objectives. The drive to produce focuses on maximizing agricultural output and efficiency, while the goal to protect emphasizes the conservation and restoration of ecological systems. However, a more critical and in-depth analysis may suggest the persistence of an anthropocentric approach to managing nonhuman relations in agriculture. To undertake this analysis, this thesis adopts an interdisciplinary methodology that combines agri-food law with the theoretical and critical perspectives of political philosophy, drawing on insights from posthuman feminist thought, materialist, new materialist, and decolonial perspectives. This composite approach reframes agriculture not merely as a productive system but as a nexus of human and nonhuman relational dynamics, shaped by specific epistemological, political and cultural models of relationality. These frameworks of interaction are questioned and re-imagined in this thesis, offering new perspectives on how European agricultural policies deal with these dynamics amid global challenges. Notably, the influence of political responses to such crises on human-nonhuman relations remains largely underexplored in academic scholarship. This thesis aims to address this gap by analyzing whether and how the European agricultural framework reinforces or moves beyond traditional patterns of relationality in managing nonhuman plant species for food production. To this attempt, the thesis is structured into four chapters. Chapter I describes the trouble with and within the current European agricultural scenario, identifying the entanglement of the three major events that have defined it since 2020 ‒namely, the ongoing climate emergency, the lingering socio-economic and logistical impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine— and the two key political trends emerging in response. The first trend ‒which prioritizes increasing agricultural output— is illustrated by two examples: the EU Regulation 2022/1317, which encourages the use of fallow lands for improving Europe’s food self-sufficiency, and the European endorsement of new genetic techniques to enhance agricultural productivity while addressing sustainability. The second political trend ‒centered on biodiversity protection and restoration‒ is exemplified by the policy direction outlined in the global nature-positive agenda within the European political framework (Locke et al. 2021), resulting in the adoption of the European Nature Restoration Law (Regulation 2024/1991), which aims to recover degraded ecosystems. Chapter II critically investigates the relational dynamics arising from the intersection of these two political trends (Puar 2012). While the goals of increased production and biodiversity protection might appear contradictory, their convergence reveals shared rationales, underlying the human tendency to relate with the nonhuman plant world to secure its productive and reproductive capacities for human purposes that prioritize economic gain over ecological balance (Cooper 2011, Braidotti 2013). To contextualize this analysis, the chapter employs the broad category of biopolitics, tracing how human-plant relations have historically exhibited patterns of control, shaping both systems of human production and reproduction from the early modern period to the present (Federici 2015). Specifically, the chapter analyzes how the interplay between Western modern scientific advancements and economic paradigms —such as capitalism, neoliberalism, and advanced capitalism— have consolidated mechanisms of control over nonhuman plants’ bodies and their reproductive power, including the deliberate regulation of certain nonhuman species extinction to secure those being reliable sources of human re/production (Marten 2020). Chapter III shifts its focus to the possibility of envisioning alternative inter-species relational imaginaries (Balzano 2021). As the pars construens of the thesis, this chapter draws on feminist epistemologies to propose relational models grounded in scientific perspectives emphasizing horizontality and ethical responsibility, while also acknowledging the agency of the nonhuman (Barad 2007). These frameworks challenge the hierarchical and dichotomous structures deeply embedded in Western thought, calling for more reciprocal engagements with the nonhuman world (Ferrante 2022). Building on the relational models introduced in chapter III, chapter IV explores how these alternative epistemological and ontological approaches to inter-species relationality might politically inspire the re-organization of human-nonhuman interactions within European agriculture. Central to this chapter is the concept of recomposition (Haraway 1992, 2016, Clarke & Haraway 2018), which ‒understood as emphasizing the integration of human and nonhuman dimensions in agricultural systems in ways extending beyond profit-driven logics— is proposed as a political framework for re-thinking the relational structure underlying European agriculture.

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