Hannah Wittman

In Canada, technological innovation in the agri-food sector is outpacing research and policy to anticipate and manage impacts. Proponents claim that novel technologies will improve efficiency, environmental sustainability, and profits for farmers, while also promoting food security. Yet, critics argue that benefits will mainly accrue for corporate actors, at the expense of farmer livelihoods and the environment. This dissertation investigates the politics of novel agri-food technologies in Canada. Across four studies, I examine the conditions under which big data, digital technologies, and gene-editing can—or cannot—support transitions to more sustainable, just, and secure food systems in Canada.The first study characterizes the agricultural data governance landscape in Canada through analysis of government and corporate data policies. I find that data policies for farm management platforms go beyond their explicit purpose, asserting control over data, enforcing limits to data rights, and manufacturing legitimacy, all constitutive elements of surveillance capitalism.A second study explores how farmers and agri-food movements are responding to digitalization and data in agriculture. Based on qualitative data from workshops and conferences, I critically examine agricultural data governance challenges, principles, and ‘best practices’, and make a case for applying a data justice lens to improve agricultural data governance. A third study reports on a survey of Canadian farmers (n=1,000) designed to assess perceptions of what role digital technologies play in their ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ of agricultural futures. Survey results indicate a critical view that digital technologies in agriculture will exacerbate existing power imbalances, as well as mild optimism for the potential for environmental benefits and opportunities to mitigate labour shortages. The final study considers the use of gene editing in agriculture. Using semi-structured interviews with genomics experts in Canada, I study the risks, benefits, and governance challenges for gene-edited crops, engaging with Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). Genomics experts’ resistance to RRI principles and exercises of discursive closure are challenges for responsible governance of gene-edited crops.Collectively, these four studies advance theoretical frameworks from Science and Technology Studies and Critical Data Studies in agri-food contexts and offer empirical evidence to inform the governance of agri-food technologies in Canada.

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Since the late 1980s, national and sub-national levels of government in North America have increasingly devolved responsibilities for agricultural planning to local governments. Local government control of farmland and farming through planning and policy tools, unequally distribute benefits and harms among impacted parties (e.g., farmers, Indigenous peoples, farmworkers). Additionally, municipal agricultural planning has the potential to contribute to food justice outcomes. This dissertation examines the role of municipal agricultural governance in achieving food justice through an interdisciplinary qualitative case study conducted in Southwestern British Columbia (BC), Canada.Three substantive dissertation chapters examine this role in food justice. Chapter 2 explores the capacity of municipal governments in Metro Vancouver to govern diverse agricultural systems, characterizing practices that constitute agricultural planning. This chapter shows that the municipal governing system simplifies the agricultural system resulting in disconnected from multiple scales of planning action. Chapter 3 examines representation and engagement of impacted agricultural stakeholders in local planning processes. Applying a justice framework, I show how municipal agricultural planning processes exacerbate injustices in participation, representation, and engagement. In Chapter 4, I analyse land use conflicts in Richmond, Canada showing the politics of land use planning results in debates around farmland uses, place-based identities, and which agricultural stakeholders should be privileged. This chapter describes how political mobilization, by agricultural stakeholders, can shift decision-makers’ stances on who to support with planning policies and legislation. Chapter 5 describes a collaborative research project with the Province of BC addressing a gap in agricultural planning education by developing an introductory agricultural planning course.The overall dissertation findings suggest that in this region, the municipal governing system is at odds with an agricultural system oriented towards justice. Local government approaches to agricultural planning are involved in the creation of privileged agricultural subjects which are, in turn, influenced by the politics of planning and participation in formal planning processes. The findings challenge normative conceptions of municipal governance and agricultural planning as technical and value-neutral exercises. Rather, agricultural planning, in contexts of complexity, requires the development of planning tools that contribute to equitable food systems.

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Agriculture is at the centre of society’s most pressing sustainability challenges, including food insecurity, climate change, ecological degradation, and social 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. Building on a movement for an alternative to socially and ecologically exploitative food production, organic agriculture is now a multi-billion-dollar industry with established legal and regulatory frameworks around the world. While this growth could be seen as a success, empirical research has called into question the extent to which organic agriculture and market-oriented third-party certifications can foster sustainability transitions and has found that performance is often context dependent (e.g. depending on which practices are adopted). There remain significant gaps in knowledge about how organic agriculture is practiced in jurisdictions around the world relative to the sustainability-related principles on which it was founded, especially the principle of fairness. To address these gaps, I developed a mixed-method assessment grounded in a critical realist methodological approach to evaluate the contributions of organic agriculture to socio-ecological sustainability in Canada. I utilized both qualitative and quantitative methods—drawing from interviews with farmers, inspectors and organic policymakers, analysis of census data for farms across Canada, surveys of vegetable farmers in British Columbia and organic policy documents—to investigate how organic agriculture is shaped and enacted by organic community members at multiple scales. My analysis of organic standards in North America, along with census and survey data in Canada, provide strong evidence for higher levels of adoption of ecologically sustainable management in organic agriculture relative to all other farms. Yet, despite explicit attention to the principle of fairness in organic standards and among organic community actors, I found little evidence that organic agriculture in Canada is correlated with improved working conditions for farmworkers in practice. Across Mexico, the US and Canada, no organic standards contain any requirements related to social sustainability. At the same time, standards governance and community-led efforts toward integrating the principle of fairness into certification show potential to advance a more just and sustainable agriculture.

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The dominant industrial agri-food system is a key contributor to global socioecological crises, including climate, biodiversity, and public health crises. In response, social movements, researchers, and decision-makers have increasingly called for transforming food systems through agroecology. Commonly defined as a science, practice, and social movement, agroecology provides a holistic alternative paradigm for (re)designing agri-food systems that are based on ecological principles and social justice. Given its status as an agricultural powerhouse and its reputation for advancing agroecological innovations through state and civil society institutions, this thesis uses Brazil as a case study to assess agroecological approaches to food systems transformation at multiple scales. First, through a literature and policy review, I take a historical-relational-interactive approach to describe how the interplay between social movements, the state, and the agribusiness sector has shaped agroecological policy in Brazil, assessing the degree to which its institutionalization was successful. I then use municipal-level agricultural census data to identify how agroecological indicators are spatially distributed across Brazil in order to identify municipalities with relatively high and low agroecological performance. I suggest that stronger agroecological performance is influenced by grassroots organizations, local cultures and traditions, and access to public policies and markets. Third, I analyze farm management plans and interview data to assess the relationship between farm size and agroecological practice use among farmers in an agroecology network in southern Brazil, and suggest that the lack of a relationship may be explained by the role of social movements in promoting a shared vision for territorial autonomy. Finally, given the central role of social movements and networks in advancing agroecology, I take an ethnographic approach to investigate how actors involved in Brazil’s agroecology movement describe and define agroecology from their own perspectives, and find that they explain agroecology as a philosophy for living well.Collectively, these findings provide additional evidence for the crucial role that social movements play in scaling out agroecological policies, practices, and principles. Therefore, increased support and investment should be directed to territorially embedded networks and organizations that are already successfully implementing agroecological approaches on the ground.

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Given the confluence of accelerating urbanization and social and ecological crises that pose profound global sustainability challenges, the “urban” has attracted attention from food systems scholars and social movement actors, including those engaged with the global food sovereignty movement. This dissertation examines the role of urban agriculture and urban agroecology in the food sovereignty movement through fieldwork in Canada and Brazil. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature on food systems sustainability, relational sociology, and urban political ecology, and using community-based and visual ethnography methodologies, the dissertation contributes three substantive chapters to food sovereignty studies. First, I develop a “sites, stakes, and scales” framework for analyzing urban food sovereignty social movement politics. Using a radical relational approach, this framing moves beyond locating the urban as a geographic “site” where food sovereignty struggles happen by also asking: What is “at stake” for both urban and rural people? And, how does connecting stakes and sites expand or constrain the possibilities for rescaling social mobilization, networks and collective action frames to pursue change at other socio-spatial “scales”? Next, I introduce the concept of urban agrarianism, defined as an urban ethic of care for foodlands and, by extension, a relational responsibility to exercise solidarity with those who cultivate and harvest food. Urban agrarians in Metro Vancouver mobilize at different scales: Within the city, on the periphery of the city, beyond the city, and against the very concept of property upon which the city is founded. Finally, through a community-based visual ethnography in southern Brazil, I explore how mobilization strategies and collective action frames in the urban agroecology movement span the urban/rural divide. The overall dissertation findings suggest that urban people involved in urban agriculture and urban agroecology can contribute to realizing goals advanced by the food sovereignty movement, such as defending food lands and provider livelihoods through social movement relations across different scales. The findings challenge common understandings of urban people as passive food consumers, depicting them instead as potential agrarian citizens, and present a path forward for research that situates urban agriculture and urban agroecology in the context of wider social and political relations.

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In 2007, a prolonged period of high and volatile prices in international agricultural commodity markets began what came to be known as the global food price crisis. The effects of the crisis were material and immediate; they included widespread riots and a sharp rise in hunger. The multilateral system responded swiftly, provoking a transformation of the global food security agenda and its institutions. Yet one organization whose rules were central to the crisis—the World Trade Organization (WTO)—hardly responded at all. The WTO was widely seen as an effective institution, enjoying strong support from its membership, who were the same governments initiating transformative change in other governance institutions. Why, then, did the WTO fail to respond? Could it have done better? This thesis looks for answers in the strained history of international trade and global food security and the role of the WTO in governing their relationship in the period 1995-2015. The WTO’s role has been controversial since the organization was founded. This thesis argues that both sides of the controversy make important points: although global food security depends on trade, trade is poorly served by the WTO Agreement on Agriculture. Using evidence drawn from documentary analysis, history, ethnographic observations and 59 in-depth expert interviews, the thesis is an interdisciplinary study that introduces and applies a novel analytical framework called resilient global food security. The framework builds on existing definitions of food security with the addition of three new dimensions: consonance of policy across scales; democratic accountability beyond borders; and capacity for adaptive governance and reflexive learning. The thesis finds that the WTO has failed to support resilient global food security, but argues the failure is neither inevitable nor definitive. To change, WTO members will need to redefine the role of trade agreements in the global governance of food security.

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Climate change poses serious threats to agriculture. The Philippines is one of the foremost countries impacted by climate change, with extensive coastlines, high population density and heavy dependence on agriculture. Many smallholders are struggling to cope with intensified typhoons, changing rain patterns, floods, droughts, as well as temperature and sea-level rise. As a primary staple crop embedded in the socioecological fabric of the Philippines, rice systems are of particular significance to resilience building efforts. This dissertation engages in a socioecological analysis of smallholder farming systems within the Philippine rice sector, with the broader aim to identify multi-scalar pathways and barriers to building climate resilience. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between August-December 2016, this dissertation shares the results of a comparative assessment of organic and conventional rice systems located in Negros Occidental Province, an institutional analysis of the organic transition currently underway in the Philippines, and an exploration of a grassroots farmer-led network and their polycentric food sovereignty development approach. Primary data was collected via surveys, key informant interviews, focus group discussions, farmer interviews, and participant observation. My findings suggest that participating organic rice systems are more climate resilient than their conventional counterparts. Despite increased institutional support for organic agriculture, institutional arrangements remain largely oriented toward promoting Green Revolution technologies; obstructing the speed and scale of organic transition and limiting smallholder capacities for building resilience. To overcome adverse socioecological conditions, smallholders have organized into a polycentric network to implement food sovereignty initiatives that increase farmer control over agricultural resources. This bottom-up and multi-scalar development approach has helped smallholders across the Philippines transition to diversified organic systems, as well as enhanced local capacities for resilience building.The evidence presented here suggests that enhancing smallholder resilience in the Philippines requires improving the socioecological conditions for farmers to engage in adaptation and mitigation strategies, as well as community development efforts to reduce their vulnerabilities. To this end, agricultural policy, development agencies, and researchers must work towards capacity building alongside farmers to regenerate agrobiodiversity and locally available resources, facilitate social learning and collective action, as well as address the root causes of their political economic marginalization.

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This dissertation explores social processes related to implementation of British Columbia’s (BC) school food and beverage sales policy as a food environment intervention. Using a realist approach to evaluation, the first phase of the research focused on development of a retrospective program theory. This was used to create the framework for an implementation evaluation conducted in the second phase. I used a multiple case study approach with three urban and two rural BC school districts to explore what about this intervention is working, in what contexts, and for whom. Data collection included semi-structured interviews and questionnaires with relevant heath, education, and private industry stakeholders, observations, document analysis and website scans. Data analysis focused on identifying (i) mechanisms influencing if and how stakeholders engage in implementation activities and (ii) specific dimensions of context influencing these mechanisms. I identified four mechanisms. The mandatory mechanism refers to the ways that the mandatory nature of the policy is effective for triggering implementation efforts, influenced by a normative acceptance of the education system hierarchy. The scofflaw mechanism refers to an opposite response to the mandate whereby expected implementers may ignore and/or ‘skirt’ around the policy, influenced by beliefs about the role of government, school food, and food in general. The money mechanism refers to the way in which vendors respond to school and district demand for compliant options, influenced by beliefs about food preferences of children, health and food, and the existence of competition. The resource constraint mechanism refers to how a lack of capacity triggers otherwise motivated stakeholders to not implement. These findings helped refine the initial program theory to include an articulation of specific dimensions of context influencing implementation, an emphasis on the mandatory nature of school food environment policy, and the role of private industry. Interventions to support implementation could include: monitoring systems and incentive schemes, targeted resources to motivated school communities, initiatives to increase availability of compliant options, and to improve the private food vending environment in the vicinity of schools. There is a need to reconsider the implications of using nutrient-based standards that enable reformulation and/or finding loopholes.

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This dissertation explores the possibilities and limitations of food sovereign agricultural value chains and the role that alternative trading arrangements, including export-oriented fair trade, can play in their development. The dissertation first develops value chain evaluation criteria from the conceptual congruence between the principles of food sovereignty and fair trade. This framework identifies six criteria that contribute to a ‘practical merger’, which is defined as an export-oriented value chain that aligns closely with food sovereignty principles. Utilizing a comparative case study methodology with a small-scale fair trade mango grower association in Haiti and a small-scale fair trade banana producer association in Ecuador, this dissertation analyzes the diverse processes and mechanisms that smallholders and their associations use to take advantage of the benefits, and mitigate the risks, of participation in fair trade export markets. It examines the following questions: What core principles of food sovereignty can be practically merged with market-based development agendas to create more equitable export-oriented value chains for small-scale producers? How can the practical merger framework contribute to understanding the relationships between participation in fair trade supply chains and food sovereignty principles?My case studies show that small-scale producers desire and rely on participation in international markets, but experience challenges related to farm size and economies of scale, the lack of participation in value chain governance, and value distribution asymmetries throughout the supply chains. Results also highlight additional limitations to small-scale producers’ abilities to shape export-oriented value chains in their favor. In Haiti, technical and structural challenges (such as access to transportation infrastructure, credit, and processing facilities) and relational challenges (reliance on a single buyer/exporter, and market competition from international value chain interventions) present obstacles to the realization of a practical merger. In Ecuador, barriers to this realization include producer/associations’ inability to influence the locus of value creation, as well as challenges around influencing policy and value chain governance beyond the local/regional level. This dissertation concludes by elaborating on the conditions necessary for export-oriented value chains to achieve a practical merger and the types of food system transformations that practical mergers in export oriented value chains can stimulate.

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