More-Than-Human Politics of Short Food Supply Chains in Landscapes of Human-Plant Migration
摘要
How do the dynamics activated by mobile humans and plants in order to sustain life far away from home, without following political programmes yet co-creating resilient infrastructures, prefigure desirable futures? Building on fieldwork, this chapter presents the case of humans and seeds migrating from Bangladesh and co-engendering transformation in Italy’s food supply chains. It addresses the physical and virtual, technological and affective, socio-ecological infrastructures enabling multi-level cooperations between the Bangladeshi cultivators, connecting across two continents, and the deshi sobji, ‘vegetables of the native country’, thriving in fields across Italy and reaching regional markets and shops as far as Central Europe. The lens of prefigurative politics here helps to offer a fresh perspective on three debated topics. It puts (climate) migrants at the centre of a possible transformation of food systems, where short supply chains, hybrid agricultural knowledges, and plants fit for the changing climate play the lead role. Shaking discourses that frame the involved human and vegetal actants as ‘illegal’, ‘alien’, or ‘invasive’, this chapter corroborates calls to revise the EU’s migration policy