Farmers, foodies and First Nations: getting to food sovereignty in Canada

Abstract

This paper examines how the concept and framework of food sovereignty has been incorporated in food policy agendas across diverse sectors of Canadian society, particularly in the work and discourse of the National Farmers Union, Québec's Union Paysanne, Food Secure Canada and movements for Indigenous food sovereignty. This analysis highlights both the challenges to conceptualizing food sovereignty and the tensions in defining inclusive policies that engage with food sovereignty at distinct, and often overlapping, scales. We critically assess how the ‘unity in diversity’ principle of food sovereignty functions in the Canadian context, paying particular attention to the policy implications of debates about the meaning of food sovereignty. What is most evident in examining the demands of a wide range of actors using food sovereignty language in Canada is a shared aim to reclaim a public voice in shaping the food system and a growing convergence around ideals of social justice, environmental sustainability and diversity. But, if food sovereignty is about fundamental transformation of the food system, it is yet in initial stages in this country.

Keywords:

• food sovereignty
• Canada
• indigenous food systems
• urban food movements
• National Farmers Union
• Union Paysanne
• Food Secure Canada

The authors are grateful to Dawn Morrison and other members of the BC Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty for ongoing conversations on the intersection between agrarian and indigenous visions of food sovereignty. We also thank Anelyse Weiler for research assistance and the two external reviewers for helpful suggestions to improve the paper.

Notes

¹The NFU also includes non-farmer (Associate) members, comprising about 8 percent of the membership in 2012. Overall, the rural landscape in Canada is populated by numerous agricultural commodity organizations that function primarily to improve the marketing and increase sales of a specific commodity for an integrated national and international market. Examples of such organizations are the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, Western Canadian Barley Association and the Canadian Canola Growers Association; (See Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council, n.d.)

² Malbouffe, literally meaning ‘bad food’, is usually translated as junk food. It is a concept used by the Confédération Paysanne in France in its struggle against industrial agriculture. Shortly after the Union Paysanne was formed they invited José Bové, then spokesperson for the Confédération Paysanne, to Québec to exchange ideas about organizing strategies.

³The non-farmer members of the Union Paysanne have their own space along with an administrative council and full voting privileges at the Annual Congress.

⁴While Food Secure Canada was instrumental in supporting the People's Food Policy Project, these operated as distinct entities.

⁵In the Canadian context, ‘First Nations’ refers to aboriginal peoples who are recognized by the constitution. First Nations are distinct from the Inuit and the Métis; while First Nations is a contested term, many Indigenous peoples refer to their communities as First Nations. In this contribution we use First Nations and Indigenous peoples interchangeably.

⁶Among some peasant organizations, there had been some references to earlier articulations of food sovereignty by ASOCODE in Central America (Edelman 1999), and also in Mexico. Further consolidation of the meaning of food sovereignty emerged as a result of debates within La Vía Campesina. For discussions of the origins of food sovereignty within La Vía Campesina see Desmarais (2007) and Wittman et al. (2010).

⁷Due to space limitations we mention only several key contributions. For a recent and more complete review see Wittman (2011).

⁸For a discussion of the conceptual limitations of food security, see Fairbairn (2010) who situates the neoliberal foundations of household food security in the corporate food regime.

⁹Farm owners/operators plus paid farmworkers comprised less than 2 percent of Canada's total population in 2011.

¹⁰Supply management is a legislated marketing tool designed to stabilize supply and prices for producers and consumers. In Canada, supply management is used to control the production of dairy, eggs and poultry by allocating a quota. Unlike the other unregulated commodities, farmers in this system are able to recover costs of production because prices are set by a government agency (i.e. the Dairy Commission) that uses a cost-of-production analysis reflecting real on-farm costs. Single desk selling refers to the system whereby the Canadian Wheat Board had a legal monopoly on the sale of wheat and barley from the western provinces in Canada.

¹¹Resistance to the CWB began much earlier, from several fronts. The Palliser Wheat Growers Association, formed in 1970 and predecessor to the WCWGA, sought the outright abolishment of the CWB (Magnan 2011, 116). Magnan (2011) suggests that the WCWGA together with the provincial government of Alberta and conservative federal governments attacked the CWB's single-desk selling monopoly primarily because they saw it as an ‘illegitimate infringement on the right of farmers to market their grain independently’, and argued for dual marketing within the CWB. That is, marketing through the CWB should be voluntary to enable farmers to exercise the right to choose how they want their grain marketed, either through the CWB or through private companies. Foreign interests such as commodity groups and transnational grain companies have also tried to end the CWB's single-desk selling power and they have enlisted government support to do so. The government of the United States of America has pursued numerous (14 to date) legal trade challenges – all have been unsuccessful (Magnan 2011, 117).

¹²This farmer market power and democratic decision is now on hold. The NFU reports: ‘In 2011 the federal government passed a law, Bill C-18, to dismantle the 75-year-old Canadian Wheat Board . . . . The law was passed in defiance of a Federal Court ruling that deemed the introduction of the bill to be contrary to the rule of law, because the binding farmer vote on proposed changes to the single desk was not held as required under the Canadian Wheat Board Act in force at the time. The federal government began implementing Bill C-18 regardless of the court ruling, yet it is also appealing the ruling. Farmers have launched a class action lawsuit to overturn Bill C-18 (see www.cwbclassaction.ca). Their claim includes charges under Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including breach of the Right to Freedom of Association and of the Right to Freedom of Expression’ (NFU 2012b).

¹³Special thanks to Stephanie Wang for reviewing carefully our discussion of farm politics in Québec and the Union Paysanne's work.

¹⁴These ideological divergences exhibited at the local and national levels are also manifested at the international level, mainly through La Vía Campesina and the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP) which had diametrically opposing positions and strategies on key agricultural issues (Desmarais 2007, Borras 2010). The Union Paysanne formally joined La Vía Campesina in 2004 and the UPA, through its membership to the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, had been a member of the IFAP for many years. IFAP was formally dissolved in November 2010 (ILO 2012).

¹⁵In 2006, the Government of Québec constituted the Commission sur l'Avenir de l'Agriculture et de l'Agroalimentaire Québecois (The Commission on the Future of Agriculture and Agri-food of Québec) to examine current challenges and existing public policies and make recommendations for improvements within the agriculture and agrifood sector. The Commission, headed by Jean Pronovost, engaged in extensive consultations holding public sessions (in 15 regions and 27 municipalities) that included 770 presentations by different stakeholders. The 2008 report (Agriculture and agrifood: securing and building the future) is most often referred to as the Pronovost Report. (See Commission sur L'Avenir de l'Agriculture et de l'Agroalimentaire Québecois 2008)

¹⁶The anti-GM wheat struggle occurred some years after GM canola had been accepted and spread quickly and widely across the Canadian rural landscape. The Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group), formerly known as the Rural Advancement Foundation International, has played a key role in the Canadian resistance to biotechnology (and nanotechnology) in agriculture and food (Peekhaus 2013).

¹⁷Until September 2013, the French name of the organization was Sécurité Alimentaire.

¹⁸A similar consultative and participatory cross-sectoral process, called the People's Food Commission, had been organized by civil society organizations in the late 1970s in Canada (People's Food Commission 1980).

¹⁹See http://www.foodshare.net and http://www.thestop.org/. For analysis of various food initiatives in Ontario see Friedmann (2007 and 2011).

²⁰youngagrarians.org/about.

²¹The term ‘foodie’ is politically contested, perceived by some as a symbol of elitism and exclusion divorced from the issues of social justice, and by others as simply a term that describes an ‘eater’ who is engaged with learning about food and the food system (cf. Johnston and Baumann 2010). We use it here in the latter sense.

²²The Idle No More movement ‘revolves around Indigenous Ways of Knowing rooted in Indigenous Sovereignty to protect water, air, land and all creation for future generations’. The movement seeks the ‘revitalization of Indigenous peoples through Awareness and Empowerment’ (Idle no more 2013). See http://idlenomore.ca for more information.

Additional information

Annette Aurélie Desmarais is Canada Research Chair in Human Rights, Social Justice and Food Sovereignty at the University of Manitoba. She is the author of La Vía Campesina: globalization and the power of peasants (Fernwood Publishing and Pluto Press, 2007) which has been published in various languages. Annette is also co-editor of Food sovereignty: reconnecting food, nature, and community, and Food sovereignty in Canada: creating just and sustainable food systems.

Hannah Wittman is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Land and Food Systems and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. She conducts collaborative research on food sovereignty, local food systems and agrarian citizenship in Brazil and Canada and is co-editor of Environment and citizenship in Latin America: natures, subjects, and struggles, Food sovereignty: reconnecting food, nature, and community and Food sovereignty in Canada. Email: [email protected]