Rockhampton-based researcher Stewart Lockie is embarking on a major 3-year study into how people can be mobilised throughout the food chain to protect the biodiversity of farming regions.

The Australian Research Council-funded study will go to the core of the contemporary politics of food.

It recognises there are pressures for simplification of farm environments but also a need for continued biodiversity to ensure they remain resilient.

The research will examine ways that agricultural biodiversity is translated into market values, and how these values are transferred through food chains.

Also worthy of study are the influence of regulation, whether market-based environmental protection can be enhanced by other measures and the capacity of institutions and policy settings.

The study aims to contribute to development of policy and other strategies to support more sustainable food production-consumption networks.

Wide-reaching case studies of Queensland and the Philippines will be used to identify practical strategies for biodiversity protection – vital for the social and economic welfare of rural Australia.

And in the process, Dr Lockie hopes to reshape the theoretical future of agrifood studies so it can develop a holistic account of food production-consumption networks.

He hopes to identify ‘centres of calculation’ (those worthy to use as clear entry points in complex networks) through which attempts are made to order specific agricultural biodiversity networks.

The Central Queensland University Associate Professor said that, until now, comparatively little attention has been paid to how key players such as agribusiness firms and retailers (and their market and regulatory relationships with farmers) affect on-farm biodiversity management.

“Faced with tightening terms of trade, farmers have little choice but to intensify production while addressing only the most obvious and immediate symptoms of environmental degradation,” Dr Lockie said.

He said, however, that environmental concerns were now reverberating throughout the entire chain of food production and consumption, reflected in growing demand for ‘clean green’ products.