Harrowing, insightful, and critical. . . Sonia Faruqi unveils the "Truth About Our Food" (original) (raw)
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Voices in Bioethics
Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur on Unsplash ABSTRACT The UK-based campaign group Scrap Factory Farming has launched a legal challenge against industrial animal agriculture; the challenge is in the process of judicial review. While a fringe movement, Scrap Factory Farming has already accrued some serious backers, including the legal team of Michael Mansfield QC. The premise is that factory farming is a danger not just to animals or the environment but also to human health. According to its stated goals, governments should be given until 2025 to phase out industrialized “concentrated animal feeding organizations” (CAFOs) in favor of more sustainable and safer agriculture. This paper will discuss the bioethical issues involved in Scrap Factory Farming’s legal challenge and argue that an overhaul of factory farming is long overdue. INTRODUCTION A CAFO is a subset of animal feeding operations that has a highly concentrated animal population. CAFOs house at least 1000 beef cows, 2500 pigs, or 1...
Regulatory enclosures: small scale women livestock farmers
2008
There are efforts by a variety of social movements and civil society organizations to encourage the development of alternative agri-food networks that are socially just, ecological, humane and which ensure food security and food sovereignty. Many activists focus their critiques on the role of large multinational corporations in restructuring and globalizing the agri-food system. They offer in its place a vision of locally oriented, small scale ecological farming. Drawing on the gendered experience of small scale women farmers on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada who are developing local markets for their farm products and the impact of new Provincial food safety regulations, this paper argues if such social change initiatives are to be successful, one will need to look at how food safety regulations accomplish outcomes that have relatively little to do with food safety but effectively close the possibilities for more ecologically grounded and locally focused food production and distribut...
Canadian food studies, 2020
is an important first-hand account of the activism of the National Farmers Union (NFU) over the past five decades. Written for a general audience, this book is organized by chapters based on various struggles in which the NFU has been involved. Each chapter begins with an introduction that includes contextual information necessary to understand the issues. The majority of each chapter is devoted to a transcribed conversation between NFU members involved in that struggle. This conversational approach allows nuances to emerge and complexity to be explored. It also allows small-scale farmers to share their considerable expertise based on their intimate, lived experiences on the land. This exploration of the diverse struggles and campaigns waged by NFU members against the corporatization of the food system provides an important account of the agrarian movement in Canada. The NFU's steadfast commitment to ecological and social justice, and to working in solidarity with other social movements, is a common thread throughout Frontline Farmers. The NFU represents thousands of small-scale farmers across Canada. The campaigns that the NFU has waged against the corporatization of the food system are noteworthy due to both the scale of organizing and their impact. Although a much smaller organization than commoditybased farmer organizations, the NFU has engaged in highly effective campaigns that utilise a diversity of activist tactics and strategies including direct action, rolling blockades, mass leafletting, and the building of alliances that cross divides, most notably the urban/rural divide. For example, during the Boycott of Kraft Foods in the 1970s, NFU activists employed mass picketing in cities across the country as well as urban-based protests and actions. The chapter on the closing of the prison farms in Kingston, ON in 2010 is especially illustrative in detailing the
2021
The number of women farmers in the US continues to grow even at a time when the number of men farmers is decreasing. But even as women are experiencing growing representation in this historically men-dominated occupation, they are more likely to operate smaller farm operations, own less land, and earn less than men farmers. Additionally, there are barriers to accessing the full farmer identity due to their invisibility in the largely patriarchal structure of agriculture. In this dissertation, I endeavor to learn more about how women farmers navigate the gendered structure of farming, including barriers to accessing occupation-related resources and their farmer identity, and how women farmers are “doing” or “undoing” gender. Utilizing in-depth qualitative interviews, I interviewed 32 women farmers from 11 states and the country of Italy. I find that three main gendered structural barriers were experienced by the women farmers in this study, including access to capital-related resourc...
The Canadian family farm, in literature and practice
Journal of Rural Studies, 2019
Many sociologists and food policy activists are preoccupied with the fate of the family farm. In this paper we ask whether tacit normative tendencies to counterpoise the family farm with the realization of industrial food systems hold up to empirical scrutiny? Using a grounded theoretical approach, we build an understanding of the relationship structures defining the contemporary family farm in its wider assemblages and food system relations. We engage 36 self-identified family farmers in Canada in qualitative interviews from which we constitute a definition of the contemporary family farm and its role in food politics. Our interviews reveal incredible variation in labour arrangements, production styles and strategies as well non-uniform commitments to alternative foodways among farmers. The interviews also, perhaps most crucially, reveal some of our participants trading upon stereotypes of “family farm” and mobilizing what we claim is a “floating signifier” (Laclau, 1989) for a variety of food system interests.
The process of …, 2011
Summary This report covers the project outcome Deliverable 4.2 'Analysis completed after a joint effort to identify possibilities in each country as how to facilitate the best possible dialogue regarding animal health and welfare' as part of the European CORE Organic project ' ...