On Mon, 1 Sep 2003 19:05:39 -0400, "Dave Gower"
wrote:

You bunch are obviously abysmally ignorant of how corporations work
Apparently there are some enlightened Candians...

http://www.sfu.ca/cag/newsletters/no...wsletter.pdf..

C
restructuring to accommodate the exigencies of 21st century
hyper-capital, are many andcomplex. The general orientation of the
arguments for our research objectives are based ocontention that the
globalizing industrial agricultural model has too many negative
environmental, social, cultural, and political consequences to be
fixed ‘by the mastebelieve that reliance on the dominant scientific
and technical-fix paradigm merely exacerbates contemporary food
problems. We are sceptical of the Monsanto public relations voice in
MichaPollan’s work The Botany of Desire, who asks the world to, “Trust
us”. The increasing consolidation of the global food industry; the
massive environmental subsidies accordedmonocultural and ‘clean soil’
industrial agriculture practices; the trends in seed and other form
patenting processes; the uncertainty inherent to genetic engineering
in food research (let alone the ethos defined by that direction); the
increasing disparities in access to food and controover agricultural
land across the North and the South divide; compel us to work on
alternatives to the global food production system.
life-l 3
Hence, the book emerging out of our SSHRC grant, which we are
tentatively calling Skyscrapers
and Strawbales: The Role of Urban-Rural Linkages in Sustainable
Agriculture. This is a collection of works from diverse parts of the
Americas and Europe exploring ongoing prodeveloping local
food-systems. In some appropriation (or subversion?) of the
business-oriented SWOT analysis (streopportunities, weaknesses, and
tactics), we focus this work centreon food through the lenses of the
barriers, the opportunities, and the strategies for overturning and
displacing the food production trends which run counter to community
food sustainability prescriptions. For example, the contributions to
our book incexperiences that: overcome food access problems via local
governance initiatives in Belo Horizonte Brazil; demonstratrole of
negotiation in building stronger rural-urban food linkages preserve
agricultural production in the peri-urban zones of France the local in
Washington State where consumer markets are hundreds of miles from
prestablish greater clarity regarding the factors that underlie the
consumption of organic agricultural products in Ontario;
comprehensively analyze the benefits and costs circumscribing the
operations of a CSA in Montreal; and examine state-sponsored pilot
projects developing local food sufficiency and ecological agriculture
in Germany. The fifteen or so chapters will sthe basis and experience
for devising a ‘made-in-Niagara’ regional food system meant to build
and strengthen food links between the urban and the rural in this
‘place’. jects in ngths, d lude e the to anoducers; et he geography at
its most overt in this project is about tightening the spatial
feedback loops in r cial f course, as the geographer in the research
group, my aspirations are also replete with the ’
d Argentina; problematize T
between the consumer and the producer. This means literally bringing
the two closer togetherspace and time and overcoming the myriad of
environmental impacts associated with an increasingly long-distance
global food system [consider that the average food item on yousupper
plate has travelled 1800 kms], while simultaneously trying to deal
with the related sodislocation and cohesion issues facing both rural
and urban communities in a globalizing environment – sustainable
community aspirations.
O
geographic questions implicit to work on food and society. For
example, how do theories ofplace and space intersect with regional
food alliance desires? How is the community or ‘localdefined by those
advocating for community food security and sustainability? How do we
rework our conceptions of region through these sorts of cultural
processes? What do local food system hopes mean for working towards
social justice, recognizing uneven development dynamics, and for
managing global food disparities? Or how does the geographic concept
ofthe foodshed and its delineation differ across space – i.e., from
thnorthern reaches of British Columbia? No, I don’t have answers to
these here, but they arepalatable themes for the geographer’s
gristmill, and we hope to work towards some greater conceptual
understanding of these geographies through our work as it progresses.
e Niagara region, to