Mikelis Grivins

• PhD in Sociology
• Senior Researcher at Baltic Studies Centre

The European Union (EU) circular economy action plan aims to double its use of recycled material by 2030. We argue that waste-centric approach to resources may have adverse consequences to this ambition. The aim of the work was to find out the factors limiting or promoting the use of waste from primary food sector in countries with the same cultura...

If foraging is considered only as a practice of engaging with wild products, then all foragers might look the same. However, if diverse knowledge claims, diverse motivations, and diverse uses of wild products are considered, then the people behind the practice start to appear very different. This chapter engages with this diversity by reflecting on...

Sustainability targets set by the United Nations, such as Zero Hunger by 2030, encourage the search for innovative solutions to enhance food production while preserving the environment. Alternative protein sources for feed, while conventional resources like soymeal and fishmeal become more expensive and scarcer, is one of the possibilities. Studies...

While farming practices such as intercropping, cover cropping, and green manuring are promoted as contributors to environment-friendly agriculture by balancing agricultural production with environmental sustainability, their uptake by farmers has still been limited. This paper provides a holistic global view of the adoption factors of such agri-env...

It is widely accepted that digitalisation can allow us to tackle the social, economic and even environmental challenges that agro-food systems are currently facing. There is a vibrant debate regarding the challenges one might face when adopting digital tools. This article engages in this discussion by exploring how barriers farmers encounter when i...

Circular economic principals of production are based on material flows through the system with minimum external inputs, recycling of resources, generating minimum waste, emissions, or pollution. Agriculture presents a major opportunity for the utilization of wastes, by‐products and co‐products in the development of a circular economy via the design...

The complexity of contemporary territorial development challenges – such as uneven growth trajectories triggered by monocentric development, social and economic inequalities, depopulation of rural and remote territories, environmental degradation – calls for addressing them in a systemic, multi-level and cross-sectoral manner. Collaborative and par...

PLANNING THE OBSCURE: HOW TO ENGAGE WITH THE EVERMORE AMBIGUOUS FUTURE The shifts changing the reality we are living in are becoming ever faster, the global and local challenges we deal with are increasingly more complex, and this is happening while we are becoming more aware of the limitations of the assumptions we have been using to explain the...

Small farms are a key part of the system of food flows that happen outside of marketing channels, and which is a crucial source of food for to the most vulnerable part of the world population living in the rural or connected to the rural through family and other social links. Food Self-Provisioning (FSP) is the largest share of these informal flows...

Purpose The paper investigates the multi-actor processes of knowledge co-production in the implementation of research-based on-farm demonstration with a focus on collaboration arrangements and areas of contention. Design/Methodology/Approach Building on science studies and literature on farmer participatory research and extension, the paper uses a...

The policy measures integrated within the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (EU) offer potential for fostering the contribution of small farms to Food and Nutrition Security (FNS) in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). However, these measures require appropriate ‘programming’ by national/regional authorities during the post 2020...

Access to financing is crucial for farmers to ensure competitiveness and to facilitate change. A better understanding of how farmers can access funds could help farmers to remain profitable and to adopt more sustainable farming practices. However, most of the academic literature discussing agricultural financing depicts farmers’ access to funds as...

Purpose: The paper identifies, outlines, and categorises establishment and operational factors that contribute to successful agricultural on-farm demonstration. Design/Methodology/approach: The paper is based on a literature review on demonstration activities and meta-analysis of 24 original case study reports from 12 European countries. Findings:...

Topics concerning food and diets have gained prominence in academic writing, policy debates and media coverage, not least due to public health problems, sedentary lifestyles, and concerns regarding dietary habits and the impact of food production on climate change. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the ways dietary practices have been framed i...

This document is a contribution of the EU-funded project DESIRA to the debate on the ‘Long-term vision for rural areas’ (LTVRA), offering a multi-actor research and innovation-based perspective and evidence. We focus on a question, ‘How can digitalisation shape and influence the future of rural areas in 2040?’ in terms of its impact on rural areas/...

Some estimates suggest that almost a quarter of European households have members that forage, that is, pick wild products. Thus, foraging remains to be an important way for people to engage with their surrounding environment. Foraging has been associated both with the potential negative impacts it may have and with the potential positive effects it...

Small farms dominate the European agricultural landscape, but they are much less represented in agricultural decision-making structures than larger farms. The weak political representation of small farms diminishes the degree to which their needs are addressed in public agricultural policies and support measures. This underrepresentation has been c...

For more than two decades market conditions for European producers have changed significantly due to liberalization and increasing price volatility. The objective of this article is to analyze how farming systems in five European countries (Denmark, Greece, France, Latvia, and the United Kingdom) have reacted to the emerging instability of the milk...

The importance of small farms is well established and recognized in developing countries, but far less is known about their role in Europe, where agriculture is largely industrialized. In this paper we use a comparative analysis of evidence from 15 European countries to assess the contribution of small farms to regional food production and availabi...

The capacity of the food system to respond to the economic, demographic and environmental challenges ahead has become a topic of increasing interest, with particular attention to the roles and responsibilities of the different actors to ensure more sustainable food systems that can guarantee food and nutrition security for all. In this paper we app...

Drawing on our long-term research experiences, in this deliberately provocative but also reflexive paper we argue that international food and agriculture studies constitute a research area that would particularly benefit from insights obtained from research conducted in the world's peripheries—in this case, specifically from insights on East Europe...

In contemporary societies there is a continuous process of creation and destruction of ethics. Shared norms are fuzzy, as actors tend to share core principles but interpret them differently. In this paper we analyse three cases of ethical dispute in the agri-food sector by employing the distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern pro...

Rather than having a consistent food policy, countries often tend to regulate food from the margins of other policy domains such as agricultural, environmental, welfare or educational policies. Regulatory interventions perceive food as an instrument rather than a domain with its own specific set of policy issues and view food provision as an activi...

There is growing recognition that agri-food commodity markets are moving increasingly towards market-focused arrangements. In some sectors (e.g. dairy) we have already seen the development of new contracts (e.g. between farmer groups and processors) and various risk management-type strategies. Agricultural markets have always been characterised by...

The economic hardship of rural communities and the interest multinational processors have shown in local wild blueberries has facilitated the quick growth of the wild blueberry trade in Latvia. With this trade, rural areas have witnessed the emergence of new market structures and new roles supporting the sector. However, despite the growing number...

In this article we apply the bricolage concept to compare the organisational dynamics of two alternative food networks (AFNs) in Riga and Bristol respectively. The concept “bricolage” refers to the free use of any materials at hand. Bricoleurs accept that these materials might not be ideal, but nevertheless use them as long as they offer characteri...

The goal of this paper is twofold: to comparatively analyze the social performance of global and local berry supply chains and to explore the ways in which the social dimension is embedded in the overall performance of food supply chains. To achieve this goal, the social performance of five global and local food supply chains in two countries are a...

Wild product picking in most cases is considered as a backward activity that cannot be associated with important macro or micro level gains. However, significant amount of research shows otherwise - illustrating how wild products support local communities and can become to be a noteworthy economic sector. The contradiction between forest product pe...

The paper investigates the dynamics and volution of issues on the agenda of Baltic environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) since the collapse of communism. The past research on Baltic environment activism suggests that these enjoy high visibility because they tapped the core societal views of natural environment as a crucial asset of a...

This article critically reflects on the literature that addresses the complexity of food systems, which is often caught in application of simplistic binary oppositions of local vs. global, short vs. long, sustainable vs. intensive, etc. It then goes on to show, through a case study analysis of food-system discourses in Latvia how the binary opposit...

This report forms part of the deliverables from a project called "IMPRESA" which has been awarded financial support by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme. The project aims to evaluate the impact of EU research on agriculture, collecting data on recent trends in investment in agricultural research, and developing a framework c...

Cities have witnessed unprecedented growth during the last half of the century. This growth has resulted in several social, economic, ecological and other problems the global society faces today. The growing interest among urban and peri-urban inhabitants of food related problems and willingness to participate in the search for new ways of how to b...

This research illustrates how pupil grouping within primary education influences their possibilities to achieve high education results. Paper aims to show how does pupils’ achievements and education interpretation are constructed and how such constructs are connected to teacher interpretation of pupils’ abilities. Analysis is concerned with micro i...

Several theorists who have analysed education on the micro-level have illustrated how mutual relations and process interpretation influence the education results. Furthermore, these authors show why relations are more beneficial to some pupils than to others. However, explanations why some pupils tend to benefit more are still simplistic, addressin...

Questions concerning education decentralization have been in the center of discussions for several decades now. The article supplements this discussion by analyzing how the decentralization of education policy is shaped at the national level and how its goals are elaborated at the local municipal level. To do this, the article analyzes per capita e...