Food Sovereignty in Canada

Overview

Employing an interdisciplinary and multifaceted approach, this book 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 of food-producing resources, markets, and agricultural policy. This reference offers 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. Acknowledging that achieving food sovereignty requires conceptual and practical changes, reshaping menus, farming, communities, relationships, values, and policy, it is clearly demonstrated how the urgent work of building food sovereignty is well under way. Through case studies of practical action, an analysis is provided 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. Policy-related challenges to building community-based agriculture and food systems that are ecologically sustainable and socially just are also highlighted.

Author Biography

Annette Aurelie Desmarais is a former farmer and an associate professor in the International Studies Program at the University of Regina. She is the author of La Via Campesina. She lives in Regina, Saskatchewan. Nettie Wiebe is an organic farmer and a professor of ethics at St. Andrew’s College at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the former women’s president of the National Farmers Union—the first and only woman to have led a national farmers’ organization in Canada—as well as a member of La Via Campesina’s International Coordinating Commission. She lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Hannah Wittman is an assistant professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Simon Fraser University. 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 and La Via Campesina. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. They are the coauthors of Food Sovereignty: Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community.