20.07.2021

Online-Workshop on “Beyond Productivity: Reimagining Futures of Agriculture and Bioeconomy”

The BMBF-funded International Research Project BATATA will conduct their first common online-workshop. It is a cooperation of the IZEW, University of Tübingen, and the chair of economic geography at the University of Bayreuth.

Politically dominant strategies in the fields of agriculture and bioeconomy - even those which take Sustainable Development Goals seriously – stick to what might be called a ‘Productivity Paradigm’: increasing productivity is considered to be necessary to alleviate the rising biomass demand and the resulting competition on land use.
However, a lot of visions of agriculture and bioeconomy endorsed by politically subdominant groups both in the Global North and the Global South implicitly question a main pillar of the politically dominant positions: the necessity of productivity increase. This, in turn, is often brought forward as an objection against the subdominant visions. The workshop aims to reflect on this controversy.

• What are the normative presuppositions of the Productivity Paradigm?
• How do decolonized visions of an agriculture and bioeconomy independent of productivity growth look like?
• How could decolonized visions capture both discursive and material space?
Inputs (selection):
• Julien-François Gerber (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
• Emmanuel Sulle (University of Western Cape, South Africa)
• Wendy Wilson-Fall (Lafayette College)
• Theodora Pius (MVIWATA, Tanzania)

08th of October 2021, 10:00 am-3:00 pm. The workshop will be held online.
Registration: via email at

More details: http://batata-bioeconomy.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Beyond-Productivity_Workshop-Synopsis.pdf