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- Paperback ISBN: 9781552664438
- Paperback Price: $24.95 CAD
- Publication Date: Sep 2011
- Rights: World
- Pages: 232
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Request Examination CopyFood Sovereignty in Canada
Creating Just and Sustainable Food Systems
Edited by Annette Aurélie Desmarais, Nettie Wiebe, Hannah Wittman
Contemporary Canadian agricultural and food policies are contributing to the current global food crisis: the industrialized, high-input, export-driven agricultural production sector, coupled with concentrated corporate processing and retailing, are ecologically unsustainable, increasingly unaffordable, unhealthy and socially unjust. Employing an interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral approach, Food Sovereignty in Canada explores how communities all over the country are actively engaged in implementing alternative agricultural and food models within the framework of food sovereignty — taking control over food-producing resources, markets and agricultural policy. This framework offers Canadian citizens, researchers and policymakers the opportunity to build alternative agricultural and food models that are less environmentally damaging and that keep farmers on the land while ensuring that those living in cities have access to healthy and safe food. Achieving food sovereignty requires conceptual and practical changes, reshaping menus, farming, communities, relationships, values and policy, but, as the authors clearly demonstrate, the urgent work of building food sovereignty in Canada is well under way.
In case studies of practical action, Food Sovereignty in Canada provides an analysis of indigenous food sovereignty, orderly marketing, community gardens, the political engagement of nutritionists, experiences with urban agriculture and the strengthening of links between rural and urban communities. It also highlights policy-related challenges to building community-based agriculture and food systems that are ecologically sustainable and socially just. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in holistic, healthy and sustainable food production and consumption.
Contents
Section 1 – Why Should Canada Pursue Food Sovereignty? – Nurturing Food Sovereignty in Canada (Nettie Wiebe & Kevin Wipf) • The State of Agriculture in Canada and the Need for Food Sovereignty (Darrin Qualman) • Food Sovereignty and the National Farmers Union: Grassroots Issues and Challenges (Naomi Beingessner) • Women Farmers Define a Food Sovereignty Policy for Canada (Annette Aurélie Desmarais, Carla Roppel & Diane Martz) Section 2 – Implementing Food Sovereignty – Community Nutrition Practice and Research: Integrating a Food Sovereignty Approach (Rachel Engler-Stringer) • Food Secure Canada: Where Agriculture, Environment, Health, Food and Justice Intersect (Cathleen Kneen) • Growing Community: Community Gardens as a Local Practice of Food Sovereignty (Yolanda Hansen) • Food Sovereignty in the Golden Horseshoe Region of Ontario (Harriet Friedmann) • Indigenous Food Sovereignty: A Model for Social Learning (Dawn Morrison) • The Limits of Farmer Control: Food Sovereignty and Conflicts over the Canadian Wheat Board (André Magnan) • The Potential for Food Sovereignty in British Columbia: Food Regime Contradictions and Local Resistance (Hannah Wittman & Herb Barbolet)
About the Authors
Annette Aurelie Desmarais was a farmer for 14 years. She has a MA in Gender and Development from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and received a PhD in Geography from the University of Calgary. She is currently Associate Professor in the International Studies Program at the University of Regina. Her key areas of research are food sovereignty, globalization and agrarian change, rural social movements and social justice, development theory and practice, gender and international development. She is currently involved in on-going research with the international peasant and farm movement, La Vía Campesina.
Annette’s book La Vía Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants was nominated for the Chadwick F. Alger Award and the Lionel Gelber Prize; it has been published in French, Spanish and Italian. She was awarded the Eric Wolf Prize by the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) for the article entitled “The Vía Campesina: Consolidating an International Peasant and Farm Movement.”
Annette is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Journal of Peasant Studies and the Editorial Board of Human Geography. She is a Research Associate with the Centro de Estudios para el Cambio en el Campo Mexicano (CECCAM), Mexico City. Annette is also on the Advisory Committee of the Centre Europe – Tiers Monde (CETIM, Geneva) and the Resource Rights Advisory Committee–Grassroots International Resource Rights for All, and is an Advisor to the International Programme Committee of the National Farmers Union.
Hannah Wittman is an assistant professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Simon Fraser Univeristy. She conducts collaborative research on local food systems, farmer networks and agrarian citizenship in British Columbia, and in Latin America with Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) and La Via Campesina. Her research interests are in environmental sociology, agrarian citizenship and agrarian social movements.
Excerpt
Reviews
Creating a New Food Paradigm: A Review of Food Sovereignty in Canada
Food issues abound these days, from northern communities that lack access to affordable food, to foodborne illnesses initiated by poor industrial hygiene practices, to community-driven initiatives connecting rural food to urban centres.
Instead of being seen through a community-defined lens, food is too often considered only in terms of buyers and sellers, importers and exporters, or as calories to be added or subtracted. Seeing food as a commodity, or reducing it to empty numbers, rather than valuing its inherent worth and questioning the society that creates it, has led to challenges such as the destruction of the livelihood of small-scale farmers, the increase in food bank use, and the loss of connection between urban and rural residents.
So what needs to change?
Some of the needed changes are explored in the book Food Sovereignty in Canada: Creating Just and Sustainable Food Systems, edited by Wittman et al, with food sovereignty representing an alternative paradigm through which to frame food issues. The book was launched on November 24th, 2011, at Foodshare, the Toronto example of the approach to food that the book advocates.
This book seeks to move the food discussion beyond food security – which is basically being able to access affordable food that meets nutritional needs – to one based on food sovereignty, “broadly defined as the right of nations and peoples to control their own food systems, including their own markets, production modes, food cultures, and environments.” In other words, state the editors, “Food sovereignty, by definition, must be ‘home-grown.’” The authors use the analogy of a web to emphasize the interconnectedness of various components of the food system. This change in discourse means shifting from accepting power imbalances inherent in a neoliberal profit-driven food system, to having a system grounded in justice and community-based control.
Authors from across the country illustrate their points with qualitative and quantitative research, case studies, and anecdotes. The initial chapters focus on the state of agriculture and farms in Canada, emphasizing the harm caused by Canada’s growing dependence on an export-oriented corporate farming model. Other chapters give overviews of indigenous food sovereignty, the National Farmers Union, the role of women farmers, the Canadian Wheat Board, community nutrition and community gardens, and food systems in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe region and BC.
If you were wondering exactly what the whole Canadian Wheat Board discussion is about – Why is it so important to farmers? Why is its destruction based on ideology rather than creating a sustainable food system? – you can learn about both the CWB’s history as well as its current relevance. If you want to learn more about how the community garden in your neighbourhood is a form of political resistance, read the chapter on “growing community.”
If you’re new to food issues, you may find this book too dense to be an introduction. Instead, you could start with something like In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, or Wayne Roberts’ No-Nonsense Guide to World Food. For Canada-specific information, you could look up the People’s Food Policy Project, a series of policy documents available online through Food Secure Canada. Then pick up this book for a nuanced discussion of specific issues vital to food sovereignty in Canada.
—By Monkia Dutt, The Toronto Review of Books, March 21, 2012