09 Sep Mapping the State of Play on the Global Food Landscape

The Special issue of Canadian Food Studies on Mapping the State of Play on the Global Food Landscape is now online and freely available here:  http://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/index
I have published a piece about the need for reflexive governance arrangements for sustainable food security. You can find that here:   http://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/104/135
Please share the link to the issue with your colleagues and networks. The articles are freely available online.
Here is what Raj Patel and Frances Moore Lappé had to say about the special issue

That it is possible to have a journal entitled Canadian Food Studies, and that this journal should produce a special issue populated by so many different, and thoughtful, critiques of the global food system is testament to the work of many of the scholars whose names appear in the table of contents. It is particularly pleasing that today’s food studies A-list has produced a collection that is so directly useful to, and nurturing of, a future generation of scholars. Today’s frontiers of enquiry—from finance to the contours of a twenty-first century right to food—are excitingly different from those a generation ago, and every paper in the collection crackles with good ideas.
Yet much work remains, particularly for students of food in the world’s largest and second largest settler colonies, Canada and the United States. We need more explicitly to be thinking about the relationships of food, race, first nations and colonialism. Many of the dynamics explored at a global level—intellectual property, land, trade, finance, and above all sovereignty—have their antecedents in historical and contemporary food politics within Canada and the United States.
But it is not unreasonable to hope that the passion, concern for the development of younger scholars, and depth of analysis that characterizes the contributions to this outward-looking special issue might in the future be turned inward, to Canada’s ongoing colonial moment.
The promise of tomorrow’s analysis can be seen in the acuity of today’s and, for that, readers like me can look forward to being doubly grateful for this collection.

-Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved and The Value of Nothing

In my 45 years of striving to understand and address the roots of hunger, I found the “Mapping the Global Food Landscape” workshop to be uniquely helpful in several ways. It gathered specialists across a wide range of disciplines, yet never lost focus. It was truly interactive, while allowing presenters opportunity to share the complexity of their work.
The vision and reality of the gathering enabled participants to understand hunger’s causes and solutions from a systems point of view. Participants brought together insights into the impact of finance, trade and genetic technology and wove these into fresh analysis of the movement toward food as a human right and “food sovereignty” as an expression of an earth-based ethic of self-determination arising in diverse cultures.
The volume of work gathered here holds, therefore, especially powerful potential for enabling scholars and advocates alike to evolve a needed systems understanding of the hunger crisis and its solutions.

-Frances Moore Lappé, Small Planet Institute, author of EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want and Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for A Small Diet