While there is a growing body of literature on food sovereignty at a global level, much less is known about what food sovereignty movements look like in specific places and how their expression is largely shaped by local and regional histories, cultures, politics and ecologies. This article provides a critical analysis of how a diverse range of intentions, strategies, tactics and discourses collide under the ‘big tent’ of food sovereignty in Canada. We are particularly interested in looking at how food sovereignty has been incorporated in the food policy discourse across diverse sectors of Canadian society, each of whom attribute distinct meanings and practices to the framework. In assessing the political impact of using a food sovereignty framework in a Northern context, the article explores the various meanings of food sovereignty developed by distinct social movements and other actors in the Canadian context and discusses the interactions and dynamics among the various movements to better understand existing tensions and convergences. This leads us to question the existence of a consolidated food sovereignty movement in Canada. Among the most prominent social actors in Canada using the food sovereignty approach are the National Farmers Union, Québec’s Union Paysanne, the Food Secure Canada coalition and Indigenous peoples. Each of these has followed a unique path to food sovereignty and each has a distinct social and political agenda in using this framework. Food sovereignty was initially introduced in Canada through the work of the National Farmers Union (NFU) and the Union Paysanne, the two Canadian members of La Vía Campesina. While representatives of the NFU had been central to shaping the international debates on food sovereignty within La Vía Campesina, it took years before the NFU began using the framework in Canada. Meanwhile, food sovereignty was central to Québec’s Union Paysanne when it emerged in 2001. Consequently, in Canada, food sovereignty remained focused primarily on production issues. This changed after the Nyéléni International Forum on Food Sovereignty held in 2007 when the Canadians who participated in that event came back to home committed to working together to consolidate a national food sovereignty movement. Food Secure Canada played a key leadership role in developing the People’s Food Policy Project (PFPP) that successfully integrated urban populations, including “foodies” and urban agrarians, in using food sovereignty language to redefine food and agricultural policies for Canada. While some Indigenous peoples actively participated in the PFPP, several leading indigenous organizations also sought to deepen their own indigenous food sovereignty approach, an approach highly critical of a version they view as agriculture-centric. Indigenous food sovereignty activists stress the importance of including fishing, hunting and gathering as key elements of a food sovereignty approach to sustainable food systems in Canada, and highlight the complexity of issues of rights, equity, land access and (re) distribution that are central to the food sovereignty framework. In conclusion, this paper will critically assess how the “unity in diversity” principle of food sovereignty works (or doesn’t work) in a Canadian context, paying particular attention to power relations and policy implications of debates about the meaning of food sovereignty.
About the authors
Annette Aurélie Desmarais, Associate Professor 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 co-edited Food sovereignty: Reconnecting food, nature, and community and Food Sovereignty in Canada.
Hannah Wittman, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Land and Food Systems and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. 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.
The Food Sovereignty Conference:
A fundamentally contested concept, food sovereignty has — as a political project and campaign, an alternative, a social movement, and an analytical framework — barged into global agrarian discourse over the last two decades. Since then, it has inspired and mobilized diverse publics: workers, scholars and public intellectuals, farmers and peasant movements, NGOs and human rights activists in the North and global South. The term has become a challenging subject for social science research, and has been interpreted and reinterpreted in a variety of ways by various groups and individuals. Indeed, it is a concept that is broadly defined as the right of peoples to democratically control or determine the shape of their food system, and to produce sufficient and healthy food in culturally appropriate and ecologically sustainable ways in and near their territory. As such it spans issues such as food politics, agroecology, land reform, biofuels, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), urban gardening, the patenting of life forms, labor migration, the feeding of volatile cities, ecological sustainability, and subsistence rights.
