Alan Hall

Organic Farmers in Ontario: An Examination of the Conventionalization Argument

Increasing concerns have been expressed about whether the alternative character of the organic farming movement is being maintained as it grows in size and popularity. This paper examines this question with respect to organic farming in Ontario, Canada. Using survey and case study data, a number of production, marketing, ideology, and farm size characteristics are assessed as indicators of overall conventionalization as well as the bifurcation of organic farming into two distinct groups. While signs of conventionalization and bifurcation are demonstrated, particularly in the area of field crop farming, the overall analysis suggests that most organic farms retain the central features of an alternative approach, including an emphasis on small, diverse, mixed operations, marketing directly and locally to consumers

Organic Farming, Gender, and the Labor Process.

Abstract  This paper seeks to explain variations in gender participation in farm production and decision-making through an analysis of organic farm types, sizes, and orientations. Based on both survey and case study data, the analysis shows that female farmers on vegetable farms and mixed livestock/cash crop farms are more likely to be involved in farm production and management than women on field crop farms, where mechanization and capital intensive production is much higher. The links to ideological orientations and motivations are also examined, suggesting that farmers with more conventional orientations to organic farming are also less likely to support gender equality.

The Marketing Practices of Ontario's Organic Farmers: Local or Global?

The post-war model of agriculture has had a profound impact on the social and technical relations of production and their spatial expression. One often-noted consequence is the widespread destruction of direct and localized links between agricultural producers and consumers. Within the conventional industrial paradigm, and enhanced by globalization, producers have become providers of agricultural inputs which are processed, transformed, and shipped great distances to urban consumers who rarely have any direct contact with farmers or food in its original form. By distancing food production from consumption, producers forced consumers to rely on huge supermarket chains to provide them with their daily bread with little understanding of how and why food is produced and processed in certain ways, or what the consequences are of operating in this fashion. While the lack of consumer knowledge and control over the food we eat has become somewhat more visible in recent years with the genetic engineering and other food-related controversies, consumers are largely unaware of the enormous financial costs associated with subsidization, transportation, and processing, the harmful impact on food quality and diet, the environmental pollution and soil degradation, and the continued loss of family farms to bankruptcy .2

Pesticide Reforms and Globalization: Making the Farmers Responsible.

This paper examines a regulative shift in Canadian pesticide legislation which directs attention away from the agrichemical companies to individual farmers as the focus for preventing pesticide pollution. There are three parts to the analysis, each of which makes a particular connection between the globalization of agriculture and the development of the new regulative approach and discourse. The shift is first understood as a way in which agribusiness was able to resist environmentalist demands for increased control over the corporate promotion and development of pesticides. The link between the ideologies of globalization and agricultures strategic responses to the environmentalist pressures are examined. The second part of the analysis looks at the broader restructuring of Canadian agricultural production and market relations to show how the intensification of agriculture within globalization helped to create significant political-economic crises within agriculture. It is argued that the policy and regulative focus on pesticide use practices and pesticide users was partly an effort to deal with these crises and the pressures to accumulate. Finally, the analysis looks at the link between globalization and the strategies and ideologies of the environmental and health movements.

Book Review: The Struggle for Workers' Health: A Study of Six Industrialized Countries, by Ray H. Elling. Fanningdale, New York: Baywood Publishing, 1986

the case material between a theoretical introduction including a &dquo;review of the literature&dquo; and a conclusion. But this frequently leads to a descriptive and piecemeal use of the case studies, rather than integrating theory with illustration, thus informing analysis with the lives and stories of real people. Finding the right balance and structure is extremely hard; it is never easy to organize the plethora of observation and transcript, to maintain precious, painstakingly won color without losing the thread of