Annette Aurélie Desmarais

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. 

 

Books by Annette Aurélie Desmarais

La Vía Campesina

La Vía Campesina

Globalization and the Power of Peasants

Annette Aurélie Desmarais

In 1993, 46 farm leaders from various countries met in Mons, Belgium, determined to develop a strategy to challenge the devastation caused to their communities by a neoliberal international economic agenda. Over the next decade they and millions of peasants and small-scale farmers around the world used La Vía Campesina to forge a powerful and radical force of opposition. Where did they find the capacity and strength to challenge multinational agribusiness corporations and international institutions… (more information)

Food Sovereignty in Canada

Food 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… (more information)

Food Sovereignty

Food Sovereignty

Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community

Edited by Annette Aurélie Desmarais, Nettie Wiebe, Hannah Wittman

Advocating a practical, radical change to the way much of our food system currently operates, this book argues that food sovereignty is the means to achieving a system that will provide for the food needs of all people while respecting the principles of environmental sustainability, local empowerment and agrarian citizenship. The current high input, industrialized, market-driven food system fails on all these counts. The UN-endorsed goal of food security is becoming increasingly distant as indicated… (more information)