Life of Bryan: Working the magic of sustainable food's sweet spot, Part 2

2025-03-19 22:03:56 | Contributor(s): Wayne Roberts | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i1.69

Bryan Gilvesy is one of Canada’s most-recognized farm innovators, as well as one of the country’s best-known leaders of the food movement. That combination is unusual in any region or country—one of the ways that Gilvesy exemplifies both the hallmarks of the food movement in Canada, as well as...

Borders, boundaries, and becoming food studies: Looking back, pushing forward

2025-03-19 22:03:56 | Contributor(s): Jennifer Brady, Charles Z Levkoe, David Szanto | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i1.56

On May 25, 2014, at the ninth annual assembly of the Canadian Association for Food Studies (CAFS), we (the authors) organized a plenary panel that assembled a number of leading food scholars from across North America to reflect on the current state of food studies. This commentary brings...

GFG - SYNTHESIS - Thinking forward in global food governance

2025-03-19 22:03:56 | Contributor(s): Michelle Metzger | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.120

Global food governance is ever evolving as political leaders become increasingly aware of the complexity and dynamic nature of managing the global food system in a sustainable manner. Calls for reform of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in the early 2000s...

SFSGEC - Peasant agriculture, seeds, and biodiversity

2025-03-19 22:03:55 | Contributor(s): Faris Ahmed | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.106

Farmers and food providers have created and maintained the knowledge and biodiversity that is the basis for the planet’s food supply for thousands of years. Yet seeds and biodiversity have been at the margins of the mainstream discourses on food security. New thinking and global events are...

SFSGEC - Sustainable food systems and global environmental change

2025-03-19 22:03:55 | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.127

There is growing evidence and concern of the role of mainstream industrial agriculture in contributing to environmental degradation and global climate change. In this section we examine three different aspects of the relationship between agriculture, nature, and society.

SFSGEC - Meatification and the madness of the doubling narrative

2025-03-19 22:03:55 | Contributor(s): Tony Weis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.105

Since 2008, there has been an increasingly influential narrative that world crop production must (“sustainably”) double from current levels in order to feed over nine billion people by 2050 (FAO, 2009; Ray, Mueller, West, & Foley, 2013; Soil Association, 2010; Tilman, Balzer, Hill &...

SFSGEC - Learning from the failures of biofuels governance

2025-03-19 22:03:55 | Contributor(s): Carol Hunsberger | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.102

While many policies designed to increase the use of biofuels were promoted at least in part as a climate change solution, biofuels made from agricultural crops are increasingly seen as part of the problem when considering global environmental change. Research on the greenhouse gas emissions...

SFSGEC - SYNTHESIS - Sustainable food systems and global environmental change

2025-03-19 22:03:55 | Contributor(s): Helena Shilomboleni | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.110

This article responds to the debates surrounding how best to merge sustainable food systems and sustainability goals in the context of biofuel production, industrial livestock operations, and peasant agriculture. Various new initiatives meant to improve the “sustainability” of agricultural...

GFG - Global food governance in an era of crisis

2025-03-19 22:03:55 | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.81

There have been multiple and significant changes in the global food landscape when it comes to governance. The 2008 Global Food Crisis heightened attention to and action for food security; this is reflected in the expanding food security agenda across the United Nations system, the World Bank...

GFG - Global food governance in an era of crisis: Lessons from the United Nations Committee on World Food Security

2025-03-19 22:03:55 | Contributor(s): Nora McKeon | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.134

The increasingly destructive impacts that today’s global food system visits upon local food provision, biodiversity, and the environment have been highlighted by a number of contributors in this special issue. Viewed through a global governance lens, public responsibility has been...

GFG - "Greening" global food governance

2025-03-19 22:03:55 | Contributor(s): Jessica Duncan | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.104

It has been argued that there are two broad criteria to judge humanity’s success in feeding itself: “(i) the proportion of people whose access to basic nutritional requirements is secure; and (ii) the extent to which global food production is sustainable” (Daily et al., 1998, p. 1291)....

FFS - SYNTHESIS - The state of time in this financial moment: Financialization in the food system

2025-03-19 22:03:54 | Contributor(s): Sarah J Martin | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.93

The three papers and workshop discussion draw attention to the various ways that finance and food come together through new financial actors and tools, and in new political contexts, or financialization in the food system. The term financialization began to emerge in the late 1990s and it is...

FFS - Finance and the global land rush: Understanding the growing role of investment funds in land deals and large-scale farming

2025-03-19 22:03:54 | Contributor(s): Oane Visser | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.122

In the wake of the 2007–08 food crisis, we have seen the combined development of a rapid financialization of agriculture with the expansion of large-scale corporate farming through large-scale land deals, in particular in developing countries and emerging economies. The rapidly growing...

FFS - Small farmer vulnerability and climate risk: Index insurance as a financial fix

2025-03-19 22:03:54 | Contributor(s): S. Ryan Isakson | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.109

By its very nature, agriculture is a risky endeavor. Farmers not only face natural threats from pests, plant disease, and inclement weather, but many must also worry about fluctuating input costs, uncertain prices for their output, and, ultimately, their ability to repay debts and support...

FFS - How financialization influences the dynamics of the food supply chain

2025-03-19 22:03:54 | Contributor(s): Myriam Vander Stichele | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.135

The growing interlinkages between the financial and agrifood sectors have to a large extent shaped the dynamics in the latter, from land ownership to food retail. This article describes the different ways and means, and ever deeper levels of financialization that continue to develop. The...

GRAB - Persistent narratives, persistent failures: Why GM crops do not—and will not—“feed the world”

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Contributor(s): Taarini Chopra | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.123

It has been almost two decades since genetically modified (GM; also called genetically engineered or GE) crops were first commercialized in North America, and anywhere from five to ten years since they have been grown in various countries in the Global South. Though short, their entire history...

GRAB - GMO 2.0: Genetically modified crops and the push for Africa’s green revolution

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Contributor(s): Matthew A. Schnurr | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.97

Genetically modified (GM) crops are plants in which the DNA has been engineered using laboratory techniques to express a beneficial trait. Their reception across the globe has been mixed: they form a dominant part of North American agriculture, they have been met with widespread disapproval in...

GRAB - Plant genetic resources in an age of global capitalism

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Contributor(s): Noah Zerbe | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.117

Early in the 20th century, a scramble for the world’s genetic resources was sparked by Nikolai Vavilov’s articulation of the geographic centers of origin for major cereals and other crops. European and American governments sent expeditions to remote corners of the world, all in an effort to...

GRAB - Genetic resources and agricultural biotechnology

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.89

Genetically modified crops have been a lightning rod in debates over the future of food and agriculture over the past two decades. The debate has sparked critical questions about the potential role for science in addressing hunger and in rural development. Corporate actors, with a strong...

FS - Repeasantization, agroecology and the tactics of food sovereignty

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Contributor(s): Blain Snipstal | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.132

From the dawn of the 21stcentury, we have seen and experienced at the global and local levels several severe world food crises, the advancement of global land grabbing and land speculation phenomena, the further entrenchment of the agribusiness model of agriculture and land/resource...