Sustainable food consumption practices of middle class consumers

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christoph Dittrich
• Subject Area: Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Policy, Agricultural Sociology
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 279374797

C04 starts from the assumption that middle class consumers are major drivers of social-economic and environmental transition and increasingly important demanders for rural-urban ecosystem services. C04 aims at understanding changing food consumption practices and food choices of middle class consumers in relation to their impact on supply chains, land use and the rural-urban environment. C04 also investigates potentials and obstacles for food transition toward sustainability. Sustainability issues concerning food, health and lifestyles are becoming increasingly important in the social discourse of middle class consumers. The already observable shift towards sustainable food consumption and governance may feedback to ecosystem processes and may open up new options to conserve and restore biodiversity and other ecosystem services.The major objectives of C04 are to provide an evidence-based and process-oriented understanding of middle class households state of food practices in transition, to reveal drivers, social discourses, governance procedures and policies regarding the transition toward food sustainability, and to estimate impacts of middle class food practices on the rural-urban food system. This is complementary to issues on food/market access and security studied in C05, and in the context of rural-urban transitions is needed to cover the full range of socio-spatial dynamics. Data collection will primarily address GH3 and and add the project specific key questions (1) How do food consumption practices of middle class consumers change (concerning intake, diversity, purchasing practices, preferences) under circumstances of socio-economic transition, globalizing urbanization and threatened natural resource systems?, (2) What is the current state of food transition toward sustainability among middle class consumers?, (3) What are implications of changing food practices on rural-urban food production, processing, marketing, and modes of food governance? C04 builts on data input from A01, B01, A03, B02, and B03. Data collection will be carried out in collaboration with B02 and C05. To elucidate the role of middle class consumers as demanders of ecosystem services C04 is linked to C03. C04 will contribute to the overall theoretical framework by analyzing resource system dynamics concerning socio-economic factors and the state of food transition among middle classes. It will estimate quantitative and qualitative dimensions (economic and socio-cultural factors, discourses, modes of governance and policies) of rural-urban food system transition, and provide spatially explicit data on patterns of middle class consumption preferences and the state of transition toward food sustainability. Concepts on food systems (Ericksen, 2008) have been developed in parallel to more socio-politically oriented SES frameworks (Ostrom, 2009), but C04 will consider them as example of SES and as such integrate this approach into the joint framework of FOR2432.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2432: Social-Ecological Systems in the Indian Rural-Urban Interface: Functions, Scales, and Dynamics of Transition
• International Connection: India
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Shamshad Begum S, Ph.D.; Dr. D. Vijayalakshmi