Session Title: Agricultural Labour and the Food Movement: Perspectives and Politics
Organizers: Charles Levkoe and Michael Ekers
Session Description:
Attention to food systems issues has increased awareness and resistance to the dominant corporate-led industrial food system. Increasingly, people are searching for alternatives and expressing support for food that is produced locally and uses sustainable practices. Further, the amount of academic, policy and political work examining the provisioning of socially and ecologically sustainable food has emerged in response to, and indeed has contributed to, growing transnational food movements. Research has focused on the establishment of ‘alternative food systems’ that follow agro-ecological and/or organic production methods that try to link consumers more directly (cognitively and physically) with farmers and agrarian landscapes, both urban and rural. In the academic literature and within the food movement itself, emphasis is placed on the vitality of small-scale farms and equitable access to quality food. Despite the attention on food, there is peculiar silence on the question of labour within the food system, whether on farms, in commercial kitchens or in non-profits. Despite some notable (and somewhat recent) exceptions, little attention has focused on the labour and workers that underpin the growing food movements. Several questions follow: what new perspectives on food system change might emerge from a more substantive engagement with questions of labour; how are actors and institutions in the food movement negotiating the labour question; and, how might a focus on labour justice change these movements?
The thin engagement with the theme of labour within the food literature is somewhat surprising given how much attention has been placed on labour within studies of agrarian capitalism and in debates on peasantries and family farms. Numerous studies have focused on the contingent and precarious forms of labour found on industrialized and family farms. Studies such as Miriam Wells’ Strawberry Fields has signaled how agricultural labour is always defined by relations of race, gender, class and migration and, much more often than not, is exploitative and precarious. Other research, has examined the gender divisions of labour on family farms and the non-waged reproductive and off-farm work that many women assume and perform. Additionally, debates on agrarian transformation and the endurance of the various peasantries have dwelled at length on the shifting identities associated with agricultural labour and have continually focused on the productive base of food production. What lessons might these bodies of literature provide for our understandings of labour and the identities of workers within the food movement? This session seeks to explore this question while also interrogating why the labour question, so thoroughly examined in the debates outlined above, has not featured prominently in the recent and growing literature on food.
This session seeks to develop a dialogue between the two sets of literature outlined above, which are topically connected yet strangely and commonly treated in isolation from one another. In doing so, these sessions leverage research on food and agricultural labour to explore the various permutations of what might be termed ‘food labour’ across the food system (from production to consumption and waste management). In particular, the session explores the various experiences and politics of labour in the food movement and the significance of the labour question for food system change and transformation.
Please send your 250 word abstract to Charles Levkoe (clevkoe@wlu.ca) and Michael Ekers (mekers@utsc.utoronto.ca) by October 26, 2014.
