Peter Andrée

Civil society and the political economy of GMO failures in Canada: a neo-Gramscian analysis

Despite the government of Canadas close relationship with the biotechnology industry, critical social movement organisations have had a significant impact on the adoption of genetically modified organisms in that country. Two cases of products rejected after widespread resistance – recombinant bovine growth hormone (1999) and herbicide-tolerant Roundup Ready (RR) Wheat (2004) – are revisited. Informed by empirical research that brings to light new factors shaping the RR wheat outcome in particular, two theoretical arguments are advanced. First, in response to those critics of a neo-Gramscian framing of hegemony who see it as overly deterministic, these cases highlight just how deeply alliances with hegemonic ambitions may be forced to compromise. Second, these cases demonstrate that any study of civil society must still pay close attention to institutional and material ‘relations of force’ when seeking to explain the impact of social movements on environmental governance.

Business and Environmental Politics in Canada

Business and Environmental Politics in Canada , Douglas MacDonald, Peterborough ON: Broadview Press, 2007, pp. xi, 224. Whether because of Al Gore, increasingly stern warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the strange weather of late, this past year has seen political actors of all stripes—business leaders prominent among them—restate their commitment to the environment. MacDonalds new book is thus a timely contribution, offering a historical perspective that may lead readers to treat the latest round of corporate “greening” with caution. This study of shifting business interests, strategies and power in relation to environmental policy making demonstrates how firms have worked over the last fifty years, notwithstanding public statements and even some sincere efforts to the contrary, to minimize the threats posed by new environmental regulations.

Barriers to the local food movement: Ontario's community food projects and the capacity for convergence

This article presents results from a survey of community food projects, and explores the relationships between organisational type, rationales and the barriers that prevent each from increasing the scale of their operations. Organisations were divided according to their primary rationale (e.g. rural economic development and distribution), and then subdivided – by form – as a non-profit, private business, governmental agency or cooperative. Data from the interviews and surveys were coded using a qualitative grounded theory approach, to reveal the barriers experienced by each. Overall, access to long-term stable income is a recurrent theme across all types of projects, but income sources dramatically change how these organisations prioritise barriers. Similarly, the organisations primary rationale and experiences influence the interpretation and approach to collaboration and education. Despite these differences, our results suggest a large degree of convergence that cuts across organisational forms and rationales, and offers a base for broader regional food system conversations.

Visualising community-based food projects in Ontario

In seeking to help address the question about what is distinctive about “alternative” food networks and “food hubs” in particular, this paper explores the strengths and limitations of using concept-mapping software to illustrate the organisational structures of community-based food projects in Ontario. As part of a larger research project, the authors developed concept maps that illustrate inputs, activities and assets, as well as different types of resources (public, private, citizen, etc.). This paper focuses on the benefits and challenges of choosing to share research results with the use of a visual tool, including the benefits of the process of our mapping exercise for the research team, for the research participants, and for dialogue among them all. Challenges include the difficulties of balancing nuance and uniformity, as well as complexity and simplicity, while visually representing networks that often blur the lines between governmental, public, non-profit, cooperative, multi-stakeholder and private.

Neoliberalism and the making of food politics in Eastern Ontario

Despite their opposition to the dominant agri-food system, alternative agri-food initiatives may unwittingly reproduce central features of neoliberalism. Julie Guthman has been a particularly strong proponent of this view, arguing that food activism and neoliberalism have shaped one another dialectically in California in recent decades. This paper responds to her argument, with a view to distinguishing between what it reveals and what it may conceal about the transformative potential of alternative agri-food initiatives in North America. Drawing on primary research on a variety of community-based food initiatives in Eastern Ontario, Canada, we show how a neoliberal lens does help to illuminate some problematic characteristics of these initiatives, including assumptions about market-based solutions and focus on self-improvement at the expense of state involvement. However, this lens underestimates those aspects of community-based food initiatives that may appear commensurate with neoliberal rationalities but which also push in more progressive directions.

Building Unlikely Alliances Around Food Sovereignty in Canada

The article by Peter Andree, Miranda Cobb, Leanne Moussa, and Emily Norgang, “Building Unlikely Alliances Around Food Sovereignty in Canada,” is concerned with the efforts of the People’s Food Policy Project (PFPP) to influence food policy and to build a counterhegemonic food sovereignty movement. In an empirically rich and provocative set of case studies, the authors argue against an overly sharp distinction between hegemonic and counterhegemonic blocs.

Learning, Food, and Sustainability in Community-Campus Engagement: Teaching and Research Partnerships That Strengthen the Food Sovereignty Movement

In this chapter, we consider how movements for food sovereignty and community-campus engagement (CCE) can work together, both in theory and practice. We argue that CCE can, and in many cases already does, strengthen the food sovereignty movement, especially when CCE challenges traditional assumptions about the role of academics. This is particularly important given that academic institutions have a history of exploitative research relationships and often reinforce hierarchical assumptions about whose knowledge “counts” and how knowledge is produced.

Connecting Food Access and Housing Security: Lessons from Peterborough, Ontario

Housing security and food access are two fundamentally related social issues: materially, through the experience of living with poverty and through the spatial organization of our communities; and conceptually, through discussions about the right to the city and distributive justice. Drawing on a broad literature review and fieldwork in Eastern Ontario , this chapter highlights strategies that could address housing security and food access in a more seamless, integrated way. We analyze the case study of Peterborough, Ontario, which exemplifies persistent challenges related to both food and housing. We trace the history of social, political and economic changes that led to this situation, and explore the extent to which governments and community-based initiatives (CBIs) have tried to address it. While Peterborough CBIs have introduced innovative programs to address these two issues, a crisis continues which requires more concerted action on all levels. We conclude with reflections on the benefits and limits of looking at food access and housing security through an integrated lens, identifying new research avenues that the lens opens.

Can community-based initiatives address the conundrum of improving household food access while supporting local smallholder farmer livelihoods?

Community food security (CFS) is widely defined as “a situation in which all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice ” (Hamm and Bellows 2003, 37). The CFS concept has also been widely adopted in Canada by community-based organizations, including public health units across Ontario, in their efforts to tackle household-level food insecurity while also supporting local efforts to (re)build sustainable agriculture. This chapter explores this conundrum at the heart of CFS: Can community-based initiatives help address household food insecurity and support fair livelihoods for local smallholder farmers? Our research shows that responding to both sets of needs through community-based initiatives is possible, and could be seen as an important step towards broader food system transformation based on a more cooperative approach to economic relations. However, the evidence also shows that these initiatives can prove challenging to organize and administer, and should not be seen as a substitute for income support provided by the state to the food insecure.

Putting food sovereignty to work: civil society governmentalities and Canada’s people’s food policy project (2008–2011)

ABSTRACT The People’s Food Policy Project (PFPP) used ‘food sovereignty’ to unite civil society organizations and build a national food policy agenda in Canada from 2008 to 2011. Agri-food scholarship largely highlights the resistance and empowerment dynamic of food sovereignty in the context of neoliberal capital relations. We propose that the story of what food sovereignty discourse does, or could do, in the work of civil society organizations (CSOs), is more complicated. This article contributes to agri-food literature and CSOs studies by examining the governmentalities of the PFPP. We find that the PFPP’s food sovereignty produced at least two discourses: food sovereignty as ethic, or a governmentality of resistance and agrarian empowerment; and food sovereignty as tactic, which we see as a governmentality of administration by CSOs. While PFPP activists increasingly share a spoken commitment to food sovereignty, the analytic of governmentality allows us to show these important differences in the movement, rooted in how CSO actors understand their day-to-day work, and the tensions these differences bring to their seemingly united agenda.