Category Archives: Guest Blogs

Understanding the Role of Environmental Sustainability in a Social Economy of Food: A case study of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in Ontario

M.A. Lemay, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Guelph
As a globally recognized sustainable agriculture practice, integrated pest management (IPM) represents an excellent case for better understanding the role of the environmental sustainability in a social economy of food.

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The IPM and Social Economy of Food case study is part of the Social and Informal Economies of Food Series, a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC): The Social Economy of Food: Informal, under-recognized contributions to community prosperity and resilience. It combines a profile of IPM in Ontario with analysis of the peer-reviewed literature to show how IPM could serve a social economy of food by building adaptive and resilient agro-ecosystems and increasing the social capital of the stakeholders who collaborate in successful IPM programs.

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Yellow sticky traps and weather station are used to monitor pest populations and weather patterns in an onion field in the Holland Marsh, Ontario. Photo: T. Cranmer, OMAFRA

Worldwide, up to 40% of crops are damaged by pests. Climate change is expected to increase crop losses from pests. Protecting crops from a vast range of insect, rodent, bird, weed and disease pests is vital to food security, human health and overall social wellbeing. Pesticides have played a major role in crop protection for the past 60 years. With the growing awareness of the detrimental environmental, health and economic consequences of indiscriminate pesticide use, sustainable methods of crop protection have become a priority. IPM was introduced in the 1960s as a more sustainable approach to crop protection. It is now the preferred method of crop protection and is seen as fundamental in the transition to sustainable agriculture.

IPM is an ecology-based approach to sustainable crop protection that combines biological, cultural, physical and chemical tools in ways that reduce the environmental, health and economic risks posed by pests and pest management practices. IPM integrates and applies knowledge of pest-crop-natural enemy, biology and interactions, ecosystem dynamics, local weather patterns and crop production practices. It is a data-intensive practice that involves regular monitoring of pest populations, crop damage and weather conditions to determine if and when crop protection interventions are necessary.

Physical management strategies, such as yellow sticky tape and traps are used to mass trap pests in the greenhouse. Photo: S. Jandricic, OMAFRA

Beyond the environmental and economic benefits of reduced pesticide use, IPM enhances the ecological resilience of agroecosystems. Applying IPM at the landscape or agroecosystem scale provides private financial benefits directly to farmers and public goods benefits, such as the provision of essential ecosystem services, protecting public health and rural economic development. This multi-functional nature of IPM is crucial to its role in contributing to the overall adaptive capacity and resilience of the agri-food system.

Cultural management practices, such as planting ‘cover crops’ between rows in the vineyard provides habitat for beneficial insects, enhances biodiversity and increases the capacity of the agroecosystem to provide essential ecosystem services. Photo: J. Lasnier, Ag-Cord Inc.

Successful IPM requires the cooperation of multiple stakeholders taking part in various activities (Table 1). Crop monitoring, knowledge sharing, networking, training and research bring stakeholders together in collaborative relationships that build trust and reciprocity. The participatory nature of IPM, the reciprocal learning and the skills development are powerful means by which the social capital of all stakeholders is enhanced.

Because it is accessible and available to all crop production approaches and can be practiced regardless of socio-economic status, IPM contributes to increasing prosperity for marginalized groups, specifically addressing inequalities by leveling the playing field between conventional production and alternative food production approaches that are advocated within a social economy paradigm.

Parasitic wasps search for aphids on mint in a greenhouse. Biological control is the use of natural enemies to manage pests. Ontario’s greenhouse sector is second only to Europe in its adoption of biological control. Photo: J. Lemay, Eco-habitat Agri-Services

IPM is a priority in Ontario and supported by diverse stakeholders (Table 1), but the lack of a provincial IPM policy or strategy leaves Ontario at a disadvantage compared to other jurisdictions. The European Union’s (EU) recent pesticides packageincludes two Directives and two regulations, which makes IPM mandatory for state members. It has positioned IPM as The EU has also committed significant funding to the coordination of IPM research and knowledge mobilization among member states, which has triggered new initiatives that support the development and implementation of advanced, agroecosystem based IPM (Barzman et al 2015).

Envisioning IPM within a social economy of food has implications for several of OMAFRA’s current agri-food and rural policy priorities, including increased adoption of environmental beneficial management practices, innovation in IPM, the transition to sustainable production and the expansion of local food to improve the health of Ontarians (OMAFRA 2018). Connecting policies for IPM and a social economy of food represents a novel policy approach for supporting the transition to sustainable agriculture through food production systems that are socially acceptable, ecologically responsible and economically viable.

How Green is My Alley

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…from Wayne Roberts:

Why the Low-Hanging Fruit of Food Security, Urban Agriculture and Community Development Can Be Found in Parks, Boulevards, Alleyways, Schoolyards and Institutional Lawns

I remember when my food career was just beginning during the 1990s, and urban agriculture was considered radical and weird because so few people thought of cities as places with enough space to grow food.

Today, urban agriculture on public land seems just as radical and weird, because so few people have even thought about how much land governments own, how much could be made available for food production, and how many public benefits could be harvested from that decision.

Honouring Cathleen Kneen

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The family, friends, and admirers of Cathleen Kneen (1943-2016) invite you to a potluck supper on International Women’s Day to honour her amazing life, work, and legacy.

When: 6-8pm, March 8 2016
Where: FoodShare Cafeteria, 90 Croatia Street, Toronto

Salads, desserts, or donations will be gratefully received. A main course will be provided. Please bring a story or memento to share, if you wish. A temporary gallery will be co-created.

Please RSVP to help us prepare by visiting: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/honouring-cathleen-kneen-1943-2016-tickets-22434581437. Cathleen Kneen

Remembering Cathleen Kneen

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from CFICE, Tuesday, February 23, 2016

On February 21st, 2016, our friend and colleague, Cathleen Kneen, passed away. Cathleen has been a huge part of the CFICE community since the beginning. As the former director of Food Secure Canada, she served as community co-lead in the Community Food Security hub. Cathleen strongly believed in CFICE and in the potential power of knowledge co-creation between community researchers and academic researchers to address the many social and environmental challenges facing Canada. Her strength of vision will continue to guide us moving forward.

To find out more about Cathleen, or how to make a donation in her memory, visit our website.

Responsible Innovation

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Guest Post by Kelly Bronson

On November 24, 2015, 10 “experts” from around the world gathered to inform a vision for the Norwegian governance of agricultural biotechnologies under the rubric of responsible innovation. Among the attendees were Drs. Brian Wynne (Lancaster, retired) and Sir Erik Millstone (Sussex). The workshop was funded by the Research Council of Norway and was held in Tromso—an arctic environment described by craggy mountains and dark mid-day skies.

Within a responsible innovation approach, the stewardship of innovation includes what is called “upstream” reflection on the purposes of innovation. Said differently, responsible innovation is shaped according to early consideration about what the technology is intended to do (not only what it is hoped it will not do): What are the motivations behind the innovation? Who might benefit and who not? As you can see, responsible innovation is necessarily forward-looking; it aims not just to regulate “end products,” and thus hazards that appear after the introduction of innovations. Responsible innovation emphasizes the need for care and responsiveness among scientists and decision-makers (like regulators).

At the workshop we discussed how to execute a responsible innovation framework for agricultural biotechnology governance in Europe; Norway is in the midst of applying biotechnology to the aquaculture sector. Those of us from outside of Europe also discussed how responsible innovation might be applied to agricultural biotechnology governance in North America. Unfortunately, Canada missed the boat on inclusive reflection and public deliberation over the motivations behind the development of those agricultural biotechnologies, which have existed in our food system for several decades. The purpose behind innovations like RoundupReady canola was and still is quite simple: boost farm-level productivity and contribute to a competitive biotechnology industry and economically robust agri-food sector. But what if the goal driving investments in innovation in the later 20^th century had been deliberated upon by a wide variety of farmers and other stakeholders? What if alternative goals—say, environmental sustainability, local community sustainability—had surfaced over productivist ones?

Arguably, pretty serious losses have resulted from a lack of institutionally embedded deliberation on agricultural governance goals, and not just environmental and social ones. In 2005, Monsanto was forced to shelve its RoundupReady wheat because they made assumptions of need for the technology among reduced-tillage farmers, who ultimately became RoundupReady wheat’s worst critics and prevented its swift regulatory approval.

There are other ways, however, in which the responsible innovation framework could still be applied in Canada. For instance, we could adopt a precautionary approach to risk assessment (like in Europe) instead of our current backward-facing strategy that focuses on the end products of biotechnology innovation and on impacts, as they arise. Responsible innovation is, after all, about creating a responsive or flexible governance system that leaves space open for alternatives. I remain open to an alternative agri-food future.

Dr. Kelly Bronson is the Acting Director of the Science and Technology Studies program at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, NB.

Hungry for Change

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The final report of the year-long Fabian Commission on Food and Poverty sets out how a fairer food system can be built that works better for people on low incomes.

Drawing on public hearings, expert testimony and the insights of people with experience of managing poverty, the Commission has uncovered a crisis of food access for many households in the UK. There are multiple cases of parents – usually mothers – going hungry to feed their children or having to prioritise calories over nutrients to afford their weekly food shop. Many people are feeling a deep sense of anxiety from the struggle to manage serious squeezes in household budgets that arises from the cost of living rising faster than income.

… from the preface by Geoff Tansey, Chair of the Fabian Commission on Food and Poverty…

We named this independent inquiry the Fabian Commission on Food and Poverty in order to broaden the debate on the connection between these two issues in the UK. People on low incomes in the UK face a new struggle to acquire sufficient quantities and adequate qualities of food. Many people are caught between the pincers of rising food prices, household bills and housing costs on one side and stagnant incomes on the other. Something has to give for these families and the only thing to squeeze is spending on food.

Recent discussion of food and poverty has been too narrow, focusing on the growth of charitable food provision, such as food banks, and the role it plays in feeding hungry people. But charitable food provision is the tip of the iceberg – the links between food and poverty extend far beyond food banks. Critically, we need to recognise that food banks and charitable food providers are not solutions to household food insecurity, they are symptoms of society’s failure to ensure everybody is sustainably well-fed.

Strong #EatThinkVote campaign points to need for Canadian Food Policy Council

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… from The Hill Times online, Wed Nov. 4, 2015
By Peter Andrée

Food issues are cross-cutting and complex. Who better to deliberate on them than a council that brings together the best minds from the relevant levels of government, industry, and civil society? A food policy council would consist of stakeholders and representatives from all parts of the food system.

In the recent election campaign, we saw a new player exerting its political muscle on the Canadian food and agricultural scene. Food Secure Canada’s #EatThinkVote campaign brought to the fore the issues of poverty-related food insecurity, the obstacles facing new farmers, and the challenges in accessing safe and affordable food faced by northern indigenous communities. The campaign represents a growing alignment of actors who are connecting around issues across the policy silos of health, agriculture, trade, environment, and more.
Read more…

Imagining the future of animal farming: Natureculture and technosciences

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Call for papers: Imagining the future of animal farming: Natureculture and technosciences.

(AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016)

Transgenic animals (Clark 2014, 2015; Rucinska 2011), in vitro meat (Stephens 2010), insects farms, pig towers (Driessen and Khortals 2012) and robotic milking machines (Holloway, Bear, and Wilkinson 2014) are just a few examples of where science & technology is currently being deployed to meet the growing global demand for meat and animal products. These innovations, along with the new types of meats they promise to produce, generate public controversies (Callon et al., 2009), since they are profoundly political, in the sense that they concern the production and distribution of societal benefits and risks, cultural in that, by intervening in nature, innovations such as transgenic animals and ‘in vitro meat’ powerfully impact upon on social meanings and identities and ethical, in that they raise significant questions about our relationship with processes of life.
Animal geographers are beginning to engage with these debates (for example: Emel and Neo, 2015) and with this session we invite presentations that engage with and expand the following topics:

● What are the potential distributional consequences and ethical implications of these new technologies and innovations?
● Who will play or should play a role in designing the future of animal farming?
● Is the questioning of meat consumption a way of forging new human-animal relations or rendering livestock animals obsolete?
● What are the implications of these new technologies and innovations for human/animal relations?
● What might it be like to be a transgenic animal or an animal in a high tech space?
● Where is the animal or what becomes of the animal in a post-domestic era?

We invite empirical and theoretical papers around these themes but are not limited to them. Please send an abstract (max 250 words) with short bio to Karolina Rucinska (rucinskaka@cardiff.ac.uk) and Mara Miele (mielem@cardiff.ac.uk) by the 24th of October 2015.
References:

Clark, J. L. (2015). Killing the Enviropigs. Journal of Animal Ethics, 5(1), 20-30.

Cross, J. A. (2014). Continuity and Change: Amish Dairy Farming in Wisconsin Over The Past Decade. Geographical Review, 104(1), 52-70

Driessen, C., & Korthals, M. (2012). Pig towers and in vitro meat: disclosing moral worlds by design. Social Studies of Science, 42(6), 797-820.

Emel, J. and Neo, H. (eds) (2015) The Political Ecologies of Meat Production, London: Earthscan

Holloway, L., Bear, C., & Wilkinson, K. (2014). Robotic milking technologies and renegotiating situated ethical relationships on UK dairy farms. Agriculture and human values, 31(2), 185-199.

Rucinska, K. (2011) Public perception of biotechnological innovation in agriculture- the Enviropig™. MSc Thesis, Cardiff University

Stephens, N. (2010). In vitro meat: Zombies on the menu. SCRIPTed, 7(2), 394-401.

Announcing Farm 2.0 – A sustainable food hackerspace

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Farm 2.0 is a new project that explores how internet and communication technologies can be used in Canada’s sustainable food movement to optimize traditional agricultural practices, enable effective networks and facilitate policy change.

Smaller scaled organic and ecological producers are trying to build community around their farms and squeeze out a living in a landscape where farms keep getting bigger, products are more distant, retail is more consolidated and marketing is laden with ‘green washing’. These producers are being supported by ethically-minded consumers, academics and policy-makers. A diverse ecosystem of sustainable food hubs and networks, oriented toward building food systems that are more local, fair and green is coalescing in Canada.

To date, Internet and communication technologies have not figured prominently in forging food system solutions, and the intersection of technology and sustainable food is an under-developed area. One reason for this is that ecological and organic producers have historically favoured low technological, traditional, hands-on and artisanal practices. But Theresa Schumilas, who recently joined the Laurier Centre for Sustainable Food Systems as a Research Associate and Postdoctoral Fellow, thinks that these ‘low tech’ and ‘high tech’ worlds have much in common. An organic farmer herself, Schumilas wonders if there are ways emerging technologies might open up new spaces for us to imagine and realize radically different practices and make shifts to more sustainable food systems.

Theresa is friend-raising and fund-raising to establish a sustainable food and technology ‘hackerspace’ or ‘lab’ that enables connections and collaboration between Canada’s emerging food hubs/networks and designers, programmers and technologists. She calls the project ‘Farm 2.0’ to signal an extension of ‘Web 2.0’, which generally refers to how the world wide web has transitioned from being a collection of individual web sites with static information, to the web as a network of interactive computer platforms and applications. Farm 2.0 and Web 2.0 alike signal ethics such as democratization, empowerment, citizenship, sovereignty and protection of both the cyber and terrestrial commons.

In the last few years there has been an explosion of primarily proprietary software packages and web-based applications that are designed to help smaller scaled farmers with marketing. Theresa has been interviewing ecological farmers about their use of these various programs and notes that their experiences are mixed. “On one hand, farmers appreciate having help with sales logistics like inventory management and invoicing, but at the same time, they are looking for something more. This first generation of on-line marketplaces doesn’t seem to reflect the value placed on the commons that motivates many ecological farmers.” When you think about it, what has been happening in sustainable food software, mirrors what has been happening in the seed industry. Technological ‘solutions’ have mined the knowledge built in the sustainable food movement over the past 30 years, encoded that experience into a variety of internet-based applications, and sold it back to the farmers and food hubs who originated it. While the sustainable food movement has been focusing on seed sovereignty and building the ecological commons, its cyber commons is being privatized.

The foundation for a Farm 2.0 hackerspace that ‘saves code’ just like seeds, already exists. Two years ago, in Australia, The Open Food Foundation (OFF) established itself as a registered charity in order to develop, accumulate and protect open source knowledge, code, applications and platforms for fair and sustainable food systems. The Foundation focuses on bringing together farmers, food hubs and developers in a global network that facilitates open-source, non-proprietary technological innovation toward building more sustainable food systems. Their first project was the development and global launch of a technology platform called Open Food Network (OFN), that offers a way for sustainable food hubs, networks, producers and related food enterprises to link and build connections across local, regional, provincial, national and global scales. One of Theresa’s projects is to put this platform to the service of Canada’s growing sustainable food movement.

Open Food Network (OFN) is a non-proprietary, open-source, online platform. Using a set of intuitive and flexible tools, this multi-purpose software serves as a directory, communication hub and logistics platform that enables relationships among farmers, consumers, food hubs and other food enterprises. On one hand, it is an on-line marketplace. At local scales, it helps eaters find, buy, and learn about sustainable food, and helps producers and food hubs with supply chain logistics. However, the platform is more than a set of marketing tools and differs from other proprietary e-commerce platforms in important ways. OFN is a space that helps isolated sustainable food projects link, learn, and build peer-to-peer networks across scales in order to grow and strengthen a global resilient food movement. Under the oversight of the global foundation (Open Food Network), a community of coders, developers, producers, food hubs and others work to continually improve the platform and proliferate its use using charitable funding as well as reinvestment of revenues.

Since the launch of OFN two years ago, food communities around the world have been licensed and mentored by OFF to use this platform. There are now 25 networks using the platform in Australia, 20 in the UK, 2 in Norway, and teams are currently launching in South Africa, France, the US and (with this project) Canada.

Theresa will be updating the Nourishing Communities site regularly, but if you want to be involved in her research, or if you have some ideas to share, please email her.

Social economy in a Globalized World

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Guest blog from Irena Knezevic, Assistant Professor, Communication, Carleton University

CIRIEC international research conference on social economy

July 2015, Lisbon, Portugal

International Center of Research and Information on the Public, Social and Cooperative Economy (CIRIEC) organizes a bi-annual research conference focusing on social economy, which by their definition includes cooperatives, mutual societies, foundations, and cultural and philanthropic organizations. This was its fifth conference and over 300 people from around the world were in attendance. Portugal was an appropriate setting for this gathering as the country boasts a vibrant social economy sector and in 2013 it adopted its General Law on Social Economy, following the example of Spain that similarly cemented social economy into its legislative framework in 2011.

This year’s theme was “Social economy in a Globalized World” and consequently many of the sessions focused on issues of globalization, financialization, governance, territories, and the social economy’s relationship to the state. In many ways it was a celebration of the contributions that the sector makes (and can potentially make) to social well-being in a world where economic inequalities are on the rise and the neoliberal economic model is failing.

A number of presentations relied on traditional economic theory to provide very abstract assessments and projections related to social economy. Others reported on very regionally specific trends. Nevertheless, several presentations offered some interesting intersections to our own work. Nathalie Verceles from the Philippines used her fieldwork with indigenous women’s cooperatives to illustrate how the social and informal sectors have been historically undervalued precisely because they typically employ those who are already socially marginalized. Alex Murdock from the United Kingdom described his work with social enterprises to develop measurements of social return on investment, something our community partners have already identified as a pressing need here in Canada. Jutta Gutberlet from the University of Victoria, BC, shared her research on participatory sustainable waste management in Brazil where informal recyclers’ networks formalized into cooperatives to develop enterprises focused on social inclusion, empowerment and collective action.

While generally an enthusiastic gathering, the conference was not without its critics. The purpose of the conference was to “[encourage] interdisciplinary dialogue, exchange and collaboration in order to enhance the contributions and applications of scientific inquiry for understanding and improving the life conditions and experiences of the less favoured people.”

While the diversity of the participants was notable, the organizational leadership and keynote speakers were much more monolithic. The opening night and the second day’s plenary session included a total of twenty speakers. Only two of them were women (and one of them was not even on the original schedule but spoke in place of a participant who was unable to attend). The rhetoric of inclusion was thus not very well reflected in the voices that were featured. This, however, did allow for very lively coffee-break discussions among participants, suggesting that this imbalance was far from unnoticed.

Despite this shortcoming, the general tone of the conference was that of certainty that social economy can bring about prosperity and equity much more effectively than the neoliberal model ever could. That potential, many of the participants suggested, is what will make social economy blossom in the coming years. You can find more information about CIRIEC here. Or visit the conference website where you can find the complete conference program.