Harrowing, insightful, and critical. . . Sonia Faruqi unveils the "Truth About Our Food" (original) (raw)
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...
Five Global Threats to the Survival of Family Farms in the International Year of Family Farming
2014
On November 22, 2013, the United Nations launched the International Year of Family Farming – IYFF (2014) with the goal of highlighting “the potential family farmers have to eradicate hunger, preserve natural resources and promote sustainable development.” The IYFF is a coup for the millions of family farmers, fishers and pastoralists worldwide who have struggled under anti-peasant policies for decades, and whose disappearance has been predicted, hoped-for and orchestrated time and time again in the name of “progress.” This victory is a testament to the resilience of small-scale, diversified food production. It also speaks to the capacity of small farmers and peasants to build strong social movements— locally, nationally and globally—and to wield unprecedented influence in the international development arena. At the same time, we must be careful not to fetishize the “family farm” as a space free of internal contradictions and power relations—e.g. between men and women, elders and youth. Upon closer analysis, it may be that the family farm “ideal” scarcely resembles most of the world’s real and existing family farms, many of which have been torn asunder by out-migration and must engage in various (off-farm or non-agricultural) survival strategies. Dealing honestly with these realities, while supporting indigenous, farmer and community-led organizations3 also needs to be part of the conversation about the democratization of our global food system. The IYFF is justifiably billed as a long-overdue “celebration” of family farming’s persistent contributions to development, food security and ecological resilience. Nonetheless, it comes at a time when family farmers worldwide face perhaps the steepest challenges ever to their very survival. If the IYFF is to be truly meaningful, it must highlight those challenges that most severely threaten to undermine or even decimate family farming and community-based food systems.
The question “where has the farm gone in food chain?” in part begs two additional
The question "where has the farm gone in food chain?" in part begs two additional questions; first, has it gone anywhere? And second, if it has, why? The second question has been given considerable attention by the scholarly community; however, it has largely been assumed that conventional farming is giving way to industrial farming. The idea that the farm has undergone a fundamental shift towards a corporate industrial model alongside urbanisation has received little critical attention. This paper will explore a small selection of scholarly material surrounding these issues. Superficially, using Douglas Allen and Dean Lueck's article "The Nature of the Farm" as a guide, we will conclude that the corporatisation and industrialisation of farming is considerably more ambiguous than popular literature has led us to believe. What do we mean by "farm?" Without getting bogged down in semantics we do need to explore what is specifically meant by the farm. In general we can agree that there is a pastoral ideal within North American culture which visualizes the family farm as the pinnacle of the national ideal; small, diversified, and honest, whereby the virtuous farmer produces authentic products.
FASTing in the mid-west?: A theoretical assessment of ‘feminist agrifoods systems theory’
Agriculture and Human Values, 2019
In this article, we assess the generalizability of the feminist agrifood systems (FAST) model developed by Sachs et al. (The rise of women farmers and sustainable agriculture, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2016). We ask to what extent might these findings generated from the study of Pennsylvania women farmers be generalized to other regions of the U.S. We define and situate the FAST theory to the Michigan, U.S. context in order to better understand how the shifts in agriculture and women's roles in the U.S. based on our data, align or depart with that experienced by women farmers in the northeast. We find that there are many similarities in the experiences of these two populations, but there are also some differences. Five primary differences in the two populations are articulated. Michigan women farmers appear to (1) struggle to assert the identity of a farmer; (2) struggle to access land via inheritance; (3) are income dependent on males; (4) often work in value-added production that does not challenge traditionally-coded 'women's work'; and (5) perpetuate on-farm education/ networks based on nostalgia which may further the distance between producers and consumers. We conclude with a brief discussion of what may account for these differences.