“There came a point where I realised that the industry I was in – advertising – was literally making the world a worse place,” says Dr Luke Metelerkamp, explaining his transition from commercial photography to food systems research
This sense of career disillusionment prompted a return from Italy to Stellenbosch University’s Sustainability Institute where he completed an MPhil in Sustainable Development before beginning to work at the Institute.
“Following about 8 years at the Institute, the challenges I experienced in designing agricultural training for youth inspired me to undertake a PhD as a means of taking a step back from short term goals to focus on longer term solutions.”
“The global food system exists in a state of increasing dysfunction for both people and planet. The need for a deep systemic transition of the food system is increasingly apparent, as is the need for research into understanding how innovations can be fostered to support these transitions.”
Luke’s dissertation, Learning for change: youth and niche environments in food system transitions, considered the fact that from an employment perspective, the rapid corporatisation of the food system has driven a major restructuring of work opportunities within agriculture and its associated value chains. Moving into the future, this agricultural restructuring will have major implications for Africa, where the working lives of the majority of the 800 million youth predicted enter the workforce by 2050 will be directly affected by the form the food system takes.
Within the South African context, which was the focus of this study, 50 percent of youth are ensnared in a complex and intractable unemployment crisis that is being driven, in part, by a transition toward a highly corporatised food regime. This is particularly true for the formal agricultural sector which, despite being identified as a powerful engine for job creation, is amassing considerable profits while shedding jobs. Concurrently, in the informal sector, many youth are turning their backs on traditional subsistence and small-scale farming livelihoods in spite of high unemployment.
Against this backdrop, the study set out on a dual line of enquiry: One, to probe this paradoxical turn away from small-scale agriculture – trying to understand what a sustainable, employment intensive agricultural future would look like in the eyes of South African youth. The second, to understand where the new knowledge and competencies for such a system could come from, as well as how to improve youth access to this. In doing so, the research aimed to enable food system change by offering practical tools and insights to youth and other food systems actors seeking to transgress the systemic limitations of the current food regime.
“I decided to approach this study a little bit differently. I’ve seen so many colleagues and friends reach a pretty dark place during their doctorate studies and I didn’t want that. During my first year, I completed my proposal and data collection and so on and then spent 3 months at the Stockholm Resilience Centre which was fantastic. I then packed up my South African life and moved to South America. I wrote the bulk of my PhD from the back of a van.”
The agreement was that if he fell behind on his writing, he’d have to come back.
“This provided such good incentive for me to keep on top of my work. A small solar panel powered my laptop and I also spent a lot of time working in public libraries.”
“While this kind of approach obviously wouldn’t work for everybody, for me it was an amazing opportunity to make the most of what a PhD can offer; a lot of freedom. I was more productive traveling a new continent than I ever could have been sitting in a formal work environment and I’m so grateful for supervisors who were willing to support my desire to step outside the box a bit and explore the concept of academic balance.”
Luke’s thesis highlights the fact that the needs and aspirations of youth present an opportunity for transformation in the food system. To achieve this, local civil society, alternative food retail cooperatives and aspirant farming communities will need to be equipped with new tools for amplifying latent and fragmented knowledge resources in their specific contexts. Niche networks will also need a ramping up of support and investment.
Following his graduation in December, Luke relocated to a farm in the Cedarberg which he hopes to develop into a model of sustainable agriculture.