welcome to alternative food network rijnmond #
what is afnr? #
Alternative Food Network Rijnmond (AFNR) is a bottom-up project that emerged from questions found in our team’s participation in transformative food intiatives around Rotterdam.
While there are an abundance of urban and rural initiatives contributing to sustainability and justice goals around the Rijnmond region (and many existing connections and collaborations between them!), these alternative food system dynamics often times fail and find it very difficult to develop into strenghtened, alternative food networks.
The reason for this is that the existing infrastructure of global markets is considered more fluid and reliable than local markets. This mean it is often ‘cheaper’ and ’easier’ from an industrial food system perspective to depend on moving food halfway across the world than from rural areas in the same country.
Our team is keen to explore this phenomenon on the ground. By focusing on better understanding the dynamics that exist between diverse food system actors, their needs, struggles, and successes, we hope to contribute to the development of more resilient alternative food networks, and more sustainable food systems.
Interested in how we define alternative? Head over to our research tab ;)
how do we plan to do this? #
This project’s aim is to explore the initiatives and dynamics that make up the alternative food network in the Rijnmond region to identify experienced barriers and cocreate strategies that can strengthen initiatives’ participation or the network itself.
In doing so, we can find key points in the networks that strengthen and solidify critical, albeit invisible, rural-urban solidarity that these transitions, so far invisibly, hinge on.
Our primary research question is: How do urban and rural initiatives taking part in agroecological food system transitions around the Rijnmond region perceive, communicate, and relate to each other to create Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), and what barriers to strengthening existing AFN dynamics, or creating new connections, exist?
We plan to answer this question in a couple of ways:
- By having conversations with diverse food system actors. However, rather than the typical interviews that would otherwise be archived and never heard, we want to set our participants at the forefront of the project through live radio conversations.
- By mapping existing relationships
- By analyzing our conversations to find some of the barriers that currently exist to resilient alternative food networks around the Rijnmond region
Reach out to us if you’re keen to participate.
our funders #
convergence resilient delta initiative #
The Resilient Delta initiative is one of five programs of Convergence, an alliance between TU Delft, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Erasmus MC. At the Resilient Delta initiative, we collaborate across disciplines to design real-world solutions to the global challenges we face – from climate change to growing social inequality. With the Dutch delta as our living lab, our pioneering research aims to help the Netherlands and delta regions across the world navigate towards a resilient future.