Examining the evolution of the specificities of agricultural and agrifood innovations in a context of globalization has led us to examine three sets of factors, each associated with a different approach to agriculture and its innovations. From an anthropological perspective, we first showed that relationships with nature, space and society continue to mark the sector’s innovations, but through a dialectic in which forces that are attempting to exclude nature, space or society are pitted against those that seek to renew and re-emphasize their expression, and thus to reconstruct a sectoral specificity. The analysis of the configurations of institutions, actors and knowledge then confirmed that agricultural and agrifood innovations remain highly dependent on sectoral innovation systems, which are traversed by a variety of processes that can challenge or recompose them. Finally, by referring to the approaches to transition, we examined a set of global challenges facing agricultural and agrifood innovations, highlighting their unprecedented convergence and their very political dimension in the current context.
Globalization has therefore not eliminated the specificities of agricultural and agrifood innovations. Indeed, it even tends to renew them, given the convergence of the transitions in which the sector is engaged. The specificity of these innovations emerges from the co-evolution of the anthropological relationships that underpin these activities, the innovation systems built to regulate them and the global challenges they must address. Influenced by numerous, sometimes contradictory, processes, the specificity of these innovations is neither a given nor is immutable. Three observations help us maintain an open perspective on the future evolution of agricultural and agrifood innovations and the regimes to which they belong:
– our general approach to innovation should not obscure the diversity of their concrete forms, more or less specific depending on the products, geographical location, activities (ranging from agriculture to catering) or the nature of innovations (technical or organizational, incremental or radical, exogenous or endogenous); this diversity is not only part of the overall functioning and regulation of the sector, but can also be a basis for its possible breakup;
– these innovations refer to different agricultural and food production models that go beyond the ‘industrial vs alternative’ divide (Touzard and Fournier, 2014), and in particular to models of differentiated quality (naturalistic, ethical, or pertaining to heritage or proximity); the coexistence of these models in most countries appears both as a feature of globalization and as a sectoral specificity; while innovations can be part of each of these models, they can also result from their combinations and interactions; the dominant position of the agro-industrial model, and in particular its control over biotechnologies, suggests however the long-term possibility of a loss of sectoral specificity, through, for example, the pursuit of artificialization of food production, such as in vitro meat production, and this, despite the sustained challenges that this model is being subjected to;
– the very political dimension of innovation emphasized by our analysis highlights how transitions are managed at different scales, from the local to the international; however, at the international level, political agreements remain largely open, between the revival of a neoliberal governance of agriculture and food production, a return to bilateral relationships associated with regional regulations or the construction of a multilateral and civic world governance.
Each option reflects a different view of the place of agriculture and food production, its innovations and its specificities. The issue of the sector’s contributions to the production of public goods is thus key and open to debate. The recognition of these contributions could then give agricultural and agrifood innovations a more secure and specific position in the transitions currently underway.
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