Talk summaries:

Agriculture is at the centre of society’s most pressing challenges, including food insecurity, climate change, and labour inequity. Organic agriculture, when practiced according to an ethic grounded in ecology, health, fairness, and care, has been proposed as a remedy to these challenges. However, there remain significant gaps in knowledge about how organic agriculture is practiced relative to the principles on which it was founded, especially the principle of fairness. Drawing from interviews, census data, surveys, and organic policy documents, I investigate how organic agriculture is shaped and enacted by organic community members at multiple scales to assess its contributions to fairness with a focus on labour. I found little evidence that organic certification translates to improved conditions for farmworkers in practice. At the same time, governance and social movement efforts show potential to advance a more just and sustainable agriculture.

Bios:

Susanna is a PhD candidate at IRES and is co-supervised by Hannah Wittman and Navin Ramankutty. She is an interdisciplinary social scientist, and her doctoral dissertation looks at the contributions of organic agriculture to socio-ecological sustainability and fairness, with a focus on food policy, agroecological diversification, labour and justice. Susanna holds a BSc from McGill University and a MSc from UBC’s Faculty of Land and Food Systems. She lives on the traditional territory of the Tla’amin Nation on the lower Sunshine Coast of BC.

In city planning documents, the City of Vancouver’s eastern neighbourhoods are often mapped as “equity zones” and as “areas in need of resources.” With higher climate hazard risk (e.g., sea level rise) and higher socioeconomic vulnerability (e.g., low-income), these equity zones have become high-priority areas for improvements, such as green infrastructure (GI) solutions like street trees and rain gardens. In this research, I turn to Vancouver’s equity zones and ask: what are residents’ self-identified GI priorities, challenges, and aspirations? Two participatory workshops were hosted with residents who live in equity zones. Participants shared how GI projects can be adapted to meet their needs as renters, immigrants, low-income individuals, and families. Second, participants stressed that improved liveability (namely through public transit and affordable housing) can improve their experience with GI.

Taya Triffo is a Master of Arts student with IRES (supervised by Dr. Leila Harris). She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the University of Regina, convocating with great distinction and the President’s Medal. Taya is interested in how communities work together to articulate and envision resource transformations. She has participated in advocacy for the 100% Renewable Regina project — both as a community facilitator and as a policy researcher. She has also worked with the Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region, University of Regina’s Community Engagement and Research Centre, and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture.

Talk summary:

In Sept 2020, the Government of India hustled three Bills through the Parliament, in what many observers describe as a subversion of basic democratic and parliamentary procedures. These three laws were touted as a paradigm changer for the agriculture sector in the country. On the face of it, the laws appeared to steer the agriculture value chain toward a free market, implicitly acknowledging that the sector is heavily subsidized. opponents argued that the laws weakened the price guarantees that staple food crops enjoyed, removed existing regulations to prevent hoarding and price rigging and pitted powerful corporations against unorganized farmers. A majority of the critics agree that the new laws were designed to fast-track investment from large corporations. What they disagree on is whether the entry of corporations will come at the cost of farmers.

This discussion will look at the controversy from an additional angle — from a viewpoint that policy debates on agriculture and allied sectors in India (and much of the Global South) are about much more than productivity and food security. It is also about poverty reduction goals, equity, property rights and disempowerment. We will discuss how a vast majority of farmers are under-represented in the policy-making process. And how they will remain excluded despite all the hype and attention that the recent agitation garnered.

Bio:

Shashi Enarth is a development activist from India, struggling to strike a balance between academia and praxis. Starting his career as a community organizer, he has worked with low income segments of the population, particularly with farming communities in India, Nigeria and Tanzania. His area of interest is: building community-based self-governing people’s institutions that can safeguard the interests of its members through sustainable and equitable use of all forms of capital, especially natural and human resources. A good part of his 25 year development career saw him struggle with implementation of development policies that mandated decentralization of fiscal, administrative and political powers against a backdrop of a political economy that is shaped by traditional institutions and forces of centralization. In the process, he got involved in policy research and advocacy initiatives through NGOs in India and as a consultant to The World Bank in Africa. His current research interests, therefore, focusses on understanding barriers to equity and sustainability in the geo-political context of developing economies. Before taking the current sabbatical, he was a senior member of BASIX Social Enterprise Group, an Indian conglomeration of 15 organizations working on a mission to promote large scale sustainable livelihoods.

Shashi is a trained social worker who returned to school to do a PhD that explored the relationship between the processes of decentralization and democratization and its impact on good governance. He is an IRES/UBC Alumni, during the days of RMES!