Exploring a concept. Meanings of Food Sustainability of local farmers in Rome

Over the past two decades, analyses by experts and international organizations (e.g., FAO, IPES-Food) have developed the conceptual relationship between the concept sustainability and food systems policies. In particular, the scholarly debate has developed two prevailing narratives about food systems: the need for a transition to sustainability and the failure of food systems to ensure food security (Béné et al., 2019). Therefore, sustainability can be understood as a policy-frame (Rein & Schön, 2002), accepted, and legitimized by actors involved in the multiscalar governance of food systems, upon which the interpretation of problems and selection of policy solutions is based. On the one hand, the concept of food sustainability has been incorporated into the global agendas of international organizations-United Nations Agenda 2030 (2015), supranational policy strategies-European Union Farm to Fork (2020), and urban food policies - Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (2015). On the other hand, environmental, social, and economic sustainability is a challenge for large companies in the food supply chain and a criterion for food consumption choices. Food security, understood as «when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food» (World Food Summit, 1996), is a priority concept-target of global and local agendas of food systems sustainability (e.g., SDG No. 2 Zero Hunger). However, in the same decades, other conceptualizations of food sustainability have been developed often opposed to institutionalized one. In particular, the concept/paradigm of Food Sovereignty, developed in 1996 by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina during the 1996 World Food Summit, proposes a model for achieving sustainability and Food Security based on the control of food production by small-scale producers (Pimbert, 2009; Shattuck & Holt-Giménez, 2010). On the one hand, this paradigm aims to ensure economic and environmental sustainability, pointing to aims and solutions opposed to the food globalization processes; on the other, it claims the right of farmers to self-control production techniques, quality certifications, and products prices. These concepts are part of the glossary of Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) actors developed in the early 1990s in opposition to the conventional food system (Ilbery & Maye, 2005; Goodman & Goodman, 2009). Social sciences have highlighted the political conflict actions of AFNs practices (DuPuis & Goodman, 2005) carried out in the context of critical consumption choices (Rebughini, 2008; Forno & Graziano, 2016) and conducted, for example, by Solidarity Purchasing Groups (GAS). At the same time, local markets' space as «a relational arrangement of living beings and social goods» (Löw, 2016, p. 135) represents the place and the dynamic spatial structure where meanings and representations are (re)produced. In this sense, spacing and operation of synthesis of social goods and people (Löw, 2016) allow an understanding of how different conceptualizations of Food Sustainability are (re)produced by the usage of space (Gans, 2002) in local markets. So, the paper aims to investigate the representations of local farmers involved in AFN circuits on different conceptualizations of food sustainability, food security, and food sovereignty, to bring out convergences, evolutions of meaning, tensions, and ambiguities related to them. The research involves actors of AFN circuits in Lazio and, in particular, in the metropolitan city of Rome, where 43 farmers' markets and 50 GAS were mapped (Marino et al., 2022). The research includes producers from two types of farmers' markets that are more or less formalized in terms of both practices and relationships with institutional actors: - (high formalization) the markets of the Campagna Amica Foundation. Born in 2008 on the initiative of Coldiretti, they promote Made in Italy and support local producers by selling their products directly. Among them, we highlight the case of the Circo Massimo Campagna Amica Market. - (low formalization) the terra/Terra markets, «without merchants», part of the Genuino Clandestino movement. The markets, housed in the Forte Prenestino Occupied Self-Managed Social Center and in The City of Utopia, were created to experiment with an economic model in which producers and consumers have a mutual responsibility to ensure short-cycle agriculture, to subvert the mechanisms related to supply chains and food quality certification. The analysis, which combines interpretive and spatial approaches, was conducted by observing the relationship between spaces and practice and conducting targeted interviews with local producers in some of Rome's AFNs markets. More specifically, the analysis shows the thematic nodes on which the meanings of Food Sustainability rest in the considered AFNs practices; on the other hand, the research explores the debate among local producers on the relationship between Food Sustainability, Food Security, and Food Sovereignty.