AAFNs work “against the logic of bulk [high volume, low cost] commodity production, alternative food networks redistribute value through the food chain, reconvene ‘trust’ between producers and consumers, and articulate new forms of political association and market governance” . They are often, but not always, rooted in agroecological farming practices . AAFNs regularly use the trust and engagement generated through alternative forms of distribution to increase access to healthy, fresh, and diverse foods among consumers while providing farmers with diverse revenue streams, and risk sharing and direct marketing strategies that cut the costs of distribution and decrease reliance on industrialized agri-food systems. AAFNs generally emerge as partnerships connecting DFS farmers with citizens, consumers, governments, food and agricultural enterprises, and environmental and social justice organizations through the development of various institutions ranging from farmers’ markets, urban gardens, and community-supported agriculture at local and regional scales, to fair trade producer cooperatives, slow food movements, and peasant organizations at the global scale . These partnerships represent a new wave of social activism as Northern and Southern communities and NGOs increasingly focus on the politics and cultures of food, pipp racking system and identify economic incentives to transform industrialized agrifood into alternative systems that seek to produce and distribute healthy, environmentally sustainable, and socially just food.

The equitable treatment of producers is central to achieving broader adoption of DFS. If farmers are impoverished or are forced to compete with subsidized producers or importers from the industrialized food system, they are less likely to sustain diversified farming practices. Farmers markets are one example of efforts that more equitably support small-scale producers, as well as urban consumers. The estimated 7525 farmer markets in the U.S. offer local civic outlets that may generate social, economic, and cultural incentives for DFS among local farmers while encouraging a more diverse diet of fresh foods among eaters . Farmers markets can provide a mechanism for farmers to reach consumers directly, educate them about DFS practices, and bypass the processing and distribution infrastructure of the industrialized agri-food systems. Yet, while farmers markets and other AAFNs may help develop and maintain DFS and vice versa, they do not yet adequately recognize ecological diversification and sustainability as core values. Farmers markets often provide a venue for organic agriculture, but they rarely use ecological sustainability as a criterion for allowing producer participation, and such markets may also include organic foods harvested from industrial monoculture . In addition, while farmers markets may improve equity for smaller scale growers, they may not provide equity for consumers. Although recent policies have sought to address these challenges, less than 20% of farmers markets accepted food assistance vouchers in 2009 . Farmers markets may not reach poorer socioeconomic groups, due to both price and location.

Efforts are underway to increase the number of farmers markets accepting government food assistance vouchers . In Northern countries, environmental justice advocates have recently started to promote sustainable agriculture and/or agroecology as part of a multi-pronged, holistic strategy for pursuing food and environmental justice across the entire production chain to remedy the environmental inequalities associated with industrialized agricultural systems . These inequalities can be traced back to how, under what conditions, and by whom food is produced, processed, distributed, and consumed, and the role of corporations and governments in shaping these conditions. Food justice issues include the unfair treatment of workers in housing, health, and labor conditions ; agrochemical exposure health risks to workers, communities, and consumers ; loss of ecosystem services such as water and soil ; creation of pollution/wastes that affect surrounding communities ; lack of farm and food worker access to healthy foods ; and loss of access to land . By addressing these issues, food justice activism is evolving toward a strategy that encompasses both social justice and ecological sustainability . These local and national efforts are complemented by several international projects to create AAFNs and connect them to sustainable agriculture. One example is the global fair trade movement, which aims to enable consumers, often in developed countries, to pay more equitable prices to cover the full costs of production and ensure sustainable farmer livelihoods. Fair trade is not synonymous with DFS or sustainable agriculture because its criteria focus primarily on the social and economic aspects of trade and production.

However, the Mesoamerican smallholders who cofounded this movement with political and religious activists manage agricultural systems that are far closer to DFS than industrial monocultures . Their shade coffee systems now often resemble native forests and help conserve biodiversity, reduce soil erosion, conserve water, improve microclimates and resist hurricane damage . Farmers’ connections to smallholder cooperatives and global fair trade networks also partially mitigated vulnerability to crashing coffee commodity prices . New social movements also increasingly promote agroecology as central to their agenda for transforming the industrialized agri-food system at local, national, and global scales . In particular, a food sovereignty agenda has emerged from the aspirations and survival needs of smallholders and indigenous social movement leaders in the Global South . Food sovereignty refers to the right of local peoples to control their own agricultural and food systems, including markets, resources, food cultures, and production modes, in the face of an increasingly globalized economic system. This approach contrasts with charity-based food security models that have occasionally buffered human populations from famines , yet do not address root causes of hunger and care little for how, where, and by whom food is produced . It also contrasts with dominant neoclassical trade liberalization policies that open up domestic markets worldwide to competition from multinational corporations, which has often resulted in import dumping, the erosion of smallholder livelihoods, and greater industrialization of agriculture . Food sovereignty movements promote agrarian reforms, resist state and corporate land grabs, and critique proposals that contribute to farmer debt and dependence . In recent decades, the food sovereignty movement has endorsed the agroecological approaches and the social process methodologies promoted through the Campesino-aCampesino movement . Despite the potential of AAFNs such as farmers markets and fair trade networks to sustain and promote DFS, many alternative agri-food activities have come to resemble the industrialized agri-food systems they set out to transform. For example, the dramatic growth in organic sales in the past two decades facilitated by product certification has promoted the expansion of large-scale industrialized organic monocultures to supply this new demand even though the founding principles of organic agriculture included DFS practices . Alternative producers sometimes justify this by arguing that large-scale, industrialized methods are the fastest way to “scale up” alternative farming practices so that they can compete in supply chains with conventionally managed systems . In search of new markets, many dominant food corporations have purchased and integrated successful organic producers and alternative food companies into their product portfolios . This trend of purchasing “sustainable” product businesses is also observed in other sectors, such as personal care, paper, and cleaning chemicals. A growing body of literature on green consumerism raises the issue of corporate “green washing”. Researchers suggest that expanding corporate control over alternative products can generate some benefits . Yet these changes may accelerate efforts to industrialize production rather than expand alternative systems . These developments call for careful scrutiny of the changing standards, price premiums, ingredients, farm level practices, and benefits to producers and consumers .In parallel, fair trade labeling organizations initially certified exports from smallholder organizations only, thus frequently supporting DFS. However, recent changes to standards now allow transnational agricultural trade companies to export certified Fair Trade products in direct and potentially unfair competition with the smallholder organizations that this system intended to empower .

The dominant U.S. Fair Trade certification agency has ignored strong protests from smallholder farmer organizations in recently allowing large coffee plantations to sell certified Fair Trade coffee. For instance, a growing portion of Fair Trade certified coffee sold in the U.S. now originates in Brazil and Colombia in production systems supporting fewer and less diverse shade trees than Mesoamerican smallholders . In this light, pipp vertical racks many enterprises and organizations within the rapidly mainstreaming AAFNs are now trying to restrengthen their connections to sustainable agriculture and their original social goals through innovative organizational reforms. They are de-emphasizing the certification systems that they once pioneered and moving toward food sovereignty and food justice that promote the power of participants to control or coordinate their parts of the larger food system. These trends could enable the spread of DFS while simultaneously promoting the often overlooked social equity and participatory process dimensions of sustainable agriculture . However, until recently, these movements have represented relatively small counter trends compared to the dominant certified and organic components of the industrialized agrifood system. Certifications and market-based incentives could be an important component of many DFS oriented transition processes. However, broader institutional support is certainly needed. Furthermore, the leading sustainability certifications increasingly do not appear to reward the diverse forms of ownership, management, and local collaboration that would be needed to ensure the landscape-scale nature of DFS, and their standards have become increasingly flexible as they increasingly include industrial production systems .The expansion of large-scale industrialized monoculture systems of agriculture often occurs at the expense of more diversified farming systems. The widespread transformation of agriculture to large-scale monoculture systems began with the European colonial plantations of the 1500-1800s , and expanded with the mechanization of agriculture in the late 1800s and the introduction of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides by the mid 20th century. By the 1960s, a wave of agricultural science and technological innovations had created the “Green Revolution,” an integrated system of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and genetically uniform and high-yielding crop varieties that governments, companies, and foundations vigorously promoted around the world . In the subsequent fifty years, the expansion of industrialized agriculture increased global nitrogen use eight fold, phosphorus use tri-fold, and global pesticide production eleven-fold . By 2000, Green Revolution crop varieties were broadly adopted throughout the developing world, e.g., circa 90% of Latin America for the area under wheat, and circa 80 % in Asia for the area under rice , and the world’s irrigated cropland doubled in area . Encouraged by a range of economic factors, including the incentives of U.S. federal commodity programs, the pressures of global market competition, neoliberal economic reforms, historically inexpensive synthetic inputs, and the advantages of economies of scale, field and farm sizes increased in some areas, while non-crop areas in and around farms decreased, leading to higher levels of homogeneity at both the field and landscape scale . Several recent signs of the continued expansion of industrial agriculture are seen in the rapid growth of land grabs, bio-fuel production, and plantations across the Global South. Land grabbing refers to the practice of agri-food companies, commodity traders, pension funds, and nationally-owned investment banks buying land in other countries for eventual large-scale food and resource production in response to food security concerns and food speculation . For example, the provincial government of Rio Negro in Argentina recently agreed to lease up to 320,000 ha of land to Beidahuang, a Chinese government-owned agri-food company, to produce soybeans, wheat, and oilseed rape primarily for animal feed . Local farming communities are now organizing against the deal, contending that they will be displaced by the industrialized irrigation methods being planned. Estimates of the global scale of land grabbing are scarce and largely based on media reports. Whereas the International Food Policy Research Institute estimates that 20 million ha of land were sold for land grabs between 2005 and 2009, the World Bank calculates that around 57 million ha have attracted foreign interest . The expansion of large-scale commercial agriculture has also caused deforestation of some of the most bio-diverse forests in the world, such as in the Amazon, for soybean production , and in Southeast Asian rain forests, for oil palm . Since the 1990s, particularly in Brazil and Indonesia where the greatest amount of deforestation occurred, the agents of deforestation shifted from primarily smallholder to enterprise-driven agriculture for global markets . Much recent forest loss, along with agricultural land conversion, can be attributed to the rapid growth in bio-fuel production, centering in Southeast Asia and Latin America but expanding to Africa.