Moreover, because the previous referendum regarding mandatory fees charged by the University failed to make quorum, those questions will be asked again. Read our endorsements for those questions here.

Restructuring of the SSMU Board of Directors – YES

The Board of Directors, which oversees SSMU’s legal and financial affairs, is currently composed of 15 executives and councillors. The proposed restructuring would reduce the size of the Board to 12 directors, four of whom would be members at large. Further, because legal constraints prevent international students from sitting on the Board as full members, the proposed changes would create an an advisory seat reserved for an international student. Finally, whereas the Board currently has to ratify all decisions of the SSMU Legislative Council, the restructuring would give Council autonomy in decisions that do not concern legal and financial matters.

The Daily endorses a “yes” vote on these changes, which will make the management of the SSMU’s affairs both more efficient and more democratic.

—The McGill Daily editorial board

The post SSMU Board of Directors referendum endorsement appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The story has its origins in one of Aesop’s fables, “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.” Its moral advises that it is better to live in self-sufficient poverty than to be tormented by the worries of wealth. City life, while it promises instant gratification and worldly pleasures, does not give us independence and safety.

The tale was hugely popular with the ancient Greeks. Then, the polis reigned: city-states in which the majority of labour was done by slaves. Consequently, being from either the city or the country meant a whole lot. However, as the time of the polis came to an end, so did the interest in this story.

Centuries later and to the west, Europe was chaotically emerging from feudalism. City-states once again defined politics. As land was bought up by the wealthy, an itinerant and unemployed peasant class flooded the cities. Now, being from the country or from the city was more important than ever, and Aesop’s fable became common once again, with several new translations and interpretations. Yet despite their differences, all versions had one thing in common: a characterization of the country mouse as simple and boorish, and the city mouse as well-bred and well-mannered, perhaps a bit stuck up.

Both [Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina] bear a strong idealization of on the one hand the city, with its semblance of progress and riches; and on the other the country, with the fantasy of self-sufficiency.

Fast forward to 19th century France at the height of the industrial revolution. Most peasants had been kicked off their land, going on to crowd factories and mines at low pay. The nobility inhabited an increasingly precarious position, and the bourgeoisie was growing. In 1856, Gustave Flaubert published Madame Bovary, often considered the first modern novel.

In the novel, a doctor, Charles Bovary, marries the daughter of an impoverished farmer, Emma Rouault. They move to a small town. Now ‘Madame Bovary,’ Emma becomes bored and depressed, and she begins two different affairs. From this point onward, she becomes obsessed with city life, making trips to Rouen, the nearby town, frequently. Emma – spoiler alert – ends up in debt from living beyond her means, and finally commits suicide by eating arsenic.

Flaubert deftly depicted the struggle of a country woman to become a city woman, set during a time of unprecedented social transformation in France. As Stephen Heath put it, “The main impression [in the novel] is one of mobility, money on the move, an economic and social transformation in which a truly middle class is finding itself.”

The history of literature maps neatly onto the history of the changing dynamics between the city and the country.

Another famous novel, Anna Karenina, was written 20 years afterward. In the novel, Anna has an affair with Vronsky, a dapper military man. The affair goes sour, and Anna becomes ostracized by the rest of society. Tolstoy splices the story with imagery of progress – the train thunders throughout the novel, carrying the characters to the city and back again. Finally, Anna throws herself in front of it.

Another character in Anna Karenina, Levin, raises similar questions to Anna’s, struggling to balance his ideals with those of his society. His story ends in a way similar to Tolstoy’s own life: his hatred of the city and the idea of progress that accompanied it caused him to spend his final days running a farm, caring for his family, and writing in peace about art, religion, and anarchism.

Both novels bear a strong idealization of on the one hand the city, with its semblance of progress and riches; and on the other the country, with the fantasy of self-sufficiency. Both female characters are crushed by social forces: Emma is overburdened by debt; Anna is no longer accepted in high society. And modernity kills them: Emma swallows poison from her husband’s medicine room and Anna is crushed by a train. Meanwhile, trains, carriages, and money bring all the characters to their destinations, promising pleasure and privilege.

* * *

In a short story by Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, “Lessons from the country,” published in 1987, a boy from Hanoi escapes to the country to stay with his friend’s family, intending to work for his keep. There, he meets the village teacher, who asks him, “Do you feel superior to country people because you live in the city?”

The boy says he doesn’t. “Don’t despise them,” he remarks, himself a former urbanite. “All city people and the educated elite carry a heavy burden of guilt when it comes to the villages. We crush them with our material demands. With our pork stew of science and education, we have a conception of civilization and an administrative superstructure that is designed to squeeze the villages.”

Vietnam, at the time of writing, had recently decolonized. This required reforming the European property rights that had been stamped all across the country by the French. Thiệp’s story was also written in the context of globalization, when the country opened itself up to foreign investment, eventually resulting in widespread uprooting of the rural class.

This passage from Thiệp’s story crystallized a jumble of ideas in my mind. First, literature is literally shaped by the divide between country and city. Everywhere you look, it defines characters and plot. The history of literature maps neatly onto the history of the changing dynamics between the city and the country, from Aesop to Thiệp.

There is something inherently oppressive in a society that prioritizes cosmopolitanism: the success of one class is dependent on the expropriation and labour of another, more marginalized class.

One historian, Immanuel Wallerstein, sees all politics in these terms: the richest societies – what he calls the “core” – extract a net positive of materials from the poorest – the “periphery.” In his view, development of one part of the world requires the extraction of resources, labour, and land from another. This, of course, requires transportation, and it’s no surprise that as cities grew, so did the reference to trains, roads, and vehicles in literature.

Additionally, the relationship between country and city is one of debt. Cityfolk owe all their material wealth to the country, while at the same time, countryfolk are seen as less civilized or boorish. There is something inherently oppressive in a society that prioritizes cosmopolitanism: the success of one class is dependent on the expropriation and labour of another, more marginalized class. This material oppression is then justified by social oppression: like the country mouse, countryfolk are ‘common,’ ‘peasants,’ ‘uneducated,’ or ‘uncivilized.’ Yet the life of the oppressed becomes idealized – Levin, of rich noble stock, dreams of self-sufficiency in the country.

This dynamic can also be seen between Indigenous people in America and European colonizers. While Indigenous land, necessary for the colonizer’s wealth, is taken at gunpoint, they are deemed uncivilized and simultaneously idealized for their peaceful, ‘more natural’ livelihood.

Finally, it drives home the realization that we should always remember what makes living in the city possible. Nowadays, visionary ideas of endless cities and utopian images of pristine cosmopolitan worlds abound. It becomes easy to forget – and therefore erase – how we are indebted to life beyond the edge of the city.

Currently, the world’s most materially impoverished people are farmers, peasants, and rural refugees. The most disenfranchised in North America are people who moved into cities to survive after their land was privatized or sold: migrants, Indigenous people or people whose ancestors were ripped from their rural livelihoods and themselves sold into slavery. The current economic system continues to most impact those uprooted from the country, causing shockwaves that ripple across the world, into literature and our cultural imagination.

A Bite of Food Justice is a column discussing inequity in the food system while critiquing contemporary ideals of sustainability. Aaron Vansintjan can be reached at foodjustice@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Country mouse, city mouse appeared first on The McGill Daily.

A month ago, I was staying in Tay Ho, a neighbourhood of Hanoi known for its growing expat population. Here I found chain supermarkets, unfinished luxury apartment complexes, brand-new chic boutiques, and dog spas. In between all of this, there remain some thin strips of orchards, garden plots, and vegetable markets hidden in the alleyways. A wealthy and mostly foreign social class seems to be increasingly encroaching on agricultural land. These, I thought right away, are the telltale signs of gentrification.

I wanted to find out more. Unable to interview in Vietnamese, hire a translator, or glean accurate information from the English media, I found the next best thing: Roman Szlam. Roman is a volunteer guide for Friends of Vietnam Heritage, an English teacher, a blogger, and also happens to be a walking Wikipedia on the history of Hanoi.

“I’ve noticed everything you’ve noticed,” he noted, recognizing my discomfort. “I see all the farms disappearing, all the high-rises coming in here. All the luxury development.” But Roman didn’t seem too troubled by the changes in Tay Ho.

Apparently, everyone who originally owned land in Tay Ho has been able to sub-lease it at high prices. “Even the farmers,” noted Roman, “who are losing their farms here directly around West lake, tend to be happy. There are no protests from anyone.” What’s more, agriculture in the neighbourhood was primarily for decorative plants – in no way would the sale of this land affect the need for food access in the city.

I wondered whether it was really all that rosy in Tay Ho: were there some people that weren’t as happy as others? Nevertheless, to Roman, the real gentrification problems were occurring in the outskirts of the city and in the city centre.

What’s really happening in Hanoi?

In the early 2000s, Hanoi was facing mounting traffic problems, while the Old Quarter, the prime tourist attraction, was being slowly destroyed by untrammeled development. In 2008, the Vietnamese government allowed Hanoi to expand its borders significantly. To do this, they re-zoned huge swathes of land for commercial and high-income residential uses.

The re-drawing of Hanoi’s borders coincided with a spate of farm acquisitions by the land management department. Officials offered farmers a small payment in return for the land and then leased it to developers – often acquaintances – at inflated prices. In other words, outright corruption. These developers thought it was the perfect time to build houses for Hanoi’s new upper-middle-class. But this didn’t go so well.

“Nobody bought any of these developments,” Roman explained. “As they began to go bankrupt, these people who had borrowed 90 per cent of the money could no longer repay the banks.”

The criminalization of the informal sector, which grew in large part due to land dispossession, in turn sets the conditions for the creation of a cheap new labour market.

At the time, many government-owned corporations had started investing in the stock market. Come the crash of 2008, Vietnam’s banks had no more money, and foreign investors started pulling out, causing a banking crisis that still hasn’t been resolved. What’s more, a group of farmers started making a stink, holding in-your-face protests in front of the government buildings.

“This huge land grab,” remarked Roman, “became a national scandal. It couldn’t be hidden anymore. There was no money to be had anywhere. Consequently, a lot of the food production around Hanoi has been lost.” In a city where 62 per cent of the vegetables consumed are locally produced, you can imagine the effect on food prices.

Around the same time, the city cleaned up its downtown core by, on the one hand, criminalizing street vendors, and on the other, promoting supermarkets and shutting down two of the city’s open markets, replacing them with high-end – but mostly empty – malls.

Noelani Eidse, a PhD candidate at McGill, has been researching the case of Hanoi’s street vendors and how their livelihood has been affected by land grabs on the urban fringe. “It’s all part of this larger push for Hanoi to become a global city,” Eidse said. “The rationale behind banning vending is that vendors are adding to traffic congestion. A less explicit reason is that vendors are seen as uncivilized and their livelihoods are considered to be anti-modern, and a hindrance to development.”

There is no doubt that gentrification is an international phenomenon, and what links each case is the opening up of markets, privatization of public goods, and collusion between the market and state.

Eidse has found that it’s often the same people who were pushed off their land who are also forced to make a living in other ways. “For a lot of these people,” she explained, “it’s either working in factories or working informally.”

Those who choose informal work, like street vending and trading trash, are now being targeted by these new laws. Arrests and fines are more and more common, making it difficult for these people, mostly women, to practice their livelihood.

In sum, the unfair leasing of farmland to developers, shuttered and empty markets, lack of space for food vendors, and the inaccessibility of supermarkets for most Hanoians, has meant that many people in the city centre are now facing increased food insecurity and precarity. And so, the cycle of dispossession, precarity, and criminalization continues.

The all-too-real effects of gentrification

In Hanoi, top-down decisions to make the city more appealing to foreign investors helped trigger a nationwide banking crisis, followed by a shortage in food production and access locally. This is gentrification at its worst – far more devastating than a fancy boutique in the expat neighbourhood.

The changing of land rights, the corruption that came with privatization of land, and the increase in high-end development projects – all of these happened at about the same time that Vietnam opened its markets to foreign investment and encouraged foreign factories to set up shop. The criminalization of the informal sector, which grew in large part due to land dispossession, in turn sets the conditions for the creation of a cheap new labour market. People have no choice but to start working in the new factories run by foreign corporations.

Before I go on, I have to stress that Hanoi is unique. Vietnam, as a socialist state, also has an unusual land rights system and one-party-closed-door-politics. Pair this with increased liberalization, and a system of state-owned corporations, and you have a one-of-a-kind situation. It is also important to reiterate how sometimes it isn’t all that bad, like in the case of Tay Ho and its wealthy expats.

But it’s striking how these patterns repeat in other cities, like Lagos, Nigeria. Eidse noted that Singapore’s model of development and regulation has been a reference point for Hanoi’s own city planners. Gentrification in London and New York is well-documented. There, social housing and tenant rights were increasingly eroded through active government policies encouraging outsider investment. There is no doubt that gentrification is an international phenomenon, and what links each case is the opening up of markets, privatization of public goods, and collusion between the market and state.

In all cases, gentrification should be understood as the concerted effort, by a coterie of businesspeople and government officials, to profit from communal wealth.

It’s easy to vilify the upper-middle class – those taking the Google bus or the expats moving into the new high-rises – but if you really want to address the problem, you need to follow the money.

In all cases, gentrification should be understood as the concerted effort, by a coterie of businesspeople and government officials, to profit from communal wealth. In Hanoi, this came in the form of land grabs and policies targeting the informal economy, but elsewhere it can happen through the privatization of social housing, or the branding of a city as a haven for the creative class.

It all seems a bit hopeless. Yet, there are plenty of avenues for resistance. In Hanoi, a group of villagers who had been pushed off their land started protesting in ways that made it hard for the media to ignore them, or for the police to beat them up. As a result, they were able to bring national attention to endemic corruption and initiate a series of laws to protect against land seizures.

While gentrification hurts those who have little to start with, those who have lost the most often have the loudest voice. If we want inspiration for future actions, it’s these voices we should listen to. These villagers have it right – they followed the money, smelled something fishy, and created a stink.

A Bite of Food Justice is a column discussing inequity in the food system while critiquing contemporary ideals of sustainability. Aaron Vansintjan can be reached at foodjustice@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Just what is gentrification anyway? appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In 1998, Janet Poppendieck wrote along the same lines, arguing that food banks came about as a symptom of a failing welfare state and that they take the responsibility of ending hunger away from the government. To Poppendieck, food banks are like a doctor with only a first aid kit: sometimes band-aids just aren’t enough for an ailing society.

Even this argument isn’t new. In Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay The Soul of Man under Socialism, he famously argued that “the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.” In other words, charity does not help the poor, it merely preserves the status quo, making sure that the root of society’s problems are not addressed. Wilde was likely thinking of the Dickensian soup kitchens that proliferated throughout London’s East End at the time, where thousands lined up to receive a bowl of soup every day.

Food banks have the potential to be revolutionary places where those most affected by society’s problems gather and find ways to fight against them.

To Wilde, the alternative to these band-aid remedies is socialism: going to the root of the problem and restructuring society so that poverty and hunger are no longer possible. To Poppendieck, the alternative is to reinstitute welfare, strengthening the social safety nets of a society that has become more and more unequal. These sentiments of moving from private property to collectivism, from charity to solidarity, are central to leftist ideology. Along with this line of thinking comes automatic disdain for hand-outs, particularly in the form of food aid.

It’s clear that food banks are problematic. Not only do they help keep a system of inequality alive without challenging it, but they also rely on the very system that is killing many people slowly: industrialized and highly processed food. But – and there’s always a but – food banks also carry promise.

In Canada, those showing up to food banks are often migrants, Indigenous people, single mothers, and seniors. It’s no accident, as they are also the people who are most affected by institutionalized racism, sexism, and broken healthcare and welfare systems.

One of the ways by which the Black Panther party is most remembered is their free breakfast program: there, they provided food to underprivileged children every morning, while also handing out pamphlets, offering reading groups, and hosting workshops. Those most affected by racism in the U.S. were also the ones who most needed a free meal. The Black Panthers saw this and created the program as its primary mode of recruitment. This strategy was so effective that, not only did the U.S. government copy it soon after with its own free breakfast program at public schools, they were also called “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” by J. Edgar Hoover, then-director of the FBI. The threat of revolution was quickly neutralized by the FBI through widespread persecution, arrest, and assassination of their leaders.

Like the free breakfast program, food banks have the potential to be revolutionary places where those most affected by society’s problems gather and find ways to fight against them. Food is the universal social glue, and the most impoverished, who are often the most isolated, need as much social glue as they can get.

“We’ve always strived to provide a festive ambiance. A more cooperative base as opposed to a more paternalistic, Dickensian atmosphere that makes people hesitate to come in.”

These places aren’t just theory, they exist. The Stop is a food bank turned community centre in Toronto. While they do hand out food, they also host community kitchens – many directed at migrants – programs for single mothers, a ‘good food’ market, a greenhouse, and many other activities. In doing so, they bring together those most affected by racism, ageism, and sexism, as well as those interested in farmers’ markets or urban agriculture.

“In eating with others,” said Nick Saul, the director of The Stop Community Food Centre, in a recent article in the Montreal Gazette, “You can build community and you can express your background and culture. It’s a good way to do community organizing, a good way to get at big issues.”

My own Masters research centres around a food bank in south-west Montreal, the Réseau d’Entraide de Verdun. There, food distribution is partnered with workshops, community kitchen programs, and an at-cost grocery store. The Réseau also tries to provide all their services in a dignified and inclusive manner. As one staff member told me, “We’ve always strived to provide a festive ambiance. A more cooperative base as opposed to a more paternalistic, Dickensian atmosphere that makes people hesitate to come in.”

What interests me about the Réseau is not just that they provide food to the needy and have diverse activities. Despite being a charity, which by law must refrain from being political, they show that politics can be done differently. They work with local political groups, providing them material support in the form of food. If any organization, such as the local Inuit centre, the women’s centre, and the organization Solidarity Across Borders, needs a meal cooked for an event, the Réseau can help them out. Likewise, they’ve partnered with local groups, establishing what they call a ‘broad front’ of neighbourhood solidarity, which, combined, has more power to challenge state policies than just one group acting by itself. They also work with regional networks, such as the Table de la Faim, to pressure the government to do something about rising hunger and inequality.

Activism should be inclusive and address people’s actual material needs. If we really want to change things, we need to go to the spaces where people already are, and work with them on their terms.

The Réseau, while being a charity and handing out food, challenges the state, advocates for better welfare, and helps support local community and activist groups with material resources. In short, they’re living proof that something like the free breakfast program is still possible, and still radical – not radical as in fanatical, but radical as in basic, essential, and far-reaching.

Why am I interested in food banks? In the long run, we need to shift from an economy predated on violence, dispossession, and over-extraction. To get there, some advocate degrowth or the solidarity economy, yet others prefer anarchism. Such economies wouldn’t be possible without places that provide essential resources to those most in need. I think some food banks – by offering those resources, helping to break isolation, and providing collective solutions to individualized problems – give a glimpse of the kinds of institutions we’d want in this new economy.

In the short run, it’s imperative that activism is accountable to the people who are most directly affected, and that we start working toward new ways of managing material resources; either locally, non-hierarchically, and toward access for all. Specifically, activism should be inclusive and address people’s actual material needs. If we really want to change things, we need to go to the spaces where people already are, and work with them on their terms.

As another staff member at the Réseau, who prefered to remain anonymous, recently told me, “In the last political demonstrations, we made food for other groups. Our people are not young and they might not see the point in demonstrating. However, they prefer making food for other people and that makes sense for them.” Protesting on the streets is not for everyone, but most people can cook together. Sharing meals doesn’t require knowing anyone beforehand. It also saves money and time.

It’s understandable that people who want a radical change in society would simply dismiss food banks as charities. But work has been done at some food banks that has challenged the status quo more strongly than food co-ops, infoshops, lobby groups, or even many NGOs. This is because they provide something that everyone needs – food – and do so in ways that are dignified, inclusive, and political.

That’s what food justice is: working with those most affected by an unjust food system, rather than creating spaces outside of it only accessible to the privileged.

A Bite of Food Justice is a column discussing inequity in the food system while critiquing contemporary ideals of sustainability. Aaron Vansintjan can be reached at foodjustice@mcgilldaily.com.

The post The potential of food banks appeared first on The McGill Daily.

By 2050, world population is expected to hit 10 billion. How are we going to feed all those people? And how can we do so without further impacting the environment?

In a 2011 paper published in Nature, “Solutions for a cultivated planet,” a host of scientists – including McGill professors Elena Bennett and Navin Ramankutty – attempt to provide the answer. The authors suggest stopping harmful agricultural expansion, while at the same time increasing agricultural productivity where possible, changing diets, and reducing waste.

On first read, this sounds great. But what doesn’t sit well with me is the idea that we must improve ‘underperforming’ land. It’s a way of continuing colonization, justifying the forced privatization and acquisition of people’s land.

The first great land grab

Wahéhshon Shiann Whitebean is a member of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation, and practices Longhouse traditions. Whitebean has lived in Kahnawake, a First Nations reserve just southwest of Montreal, for most of her life. She is a mother of three, community organizer, gardener, and student at Concordia University.

During our discussion, I explain how corporations are currently buying up land, artificially raising its prices for profit, and evicting people who use the land to survive, in the name of food security and sustainability. Whitebean seems unsurprised. To her, this is exactly what happened on first contact in Canada, and demonstrates why colonization is still ongoing. “Any time you talk about land grabbing, it’s Native people’s land. […] There are other Indigenous people in the world who literally die to protect their land.”

“That’s the thing people don’t realize about colonialism. All the things that happened to us, happened to them first. The truth is that this was done already to non-native people.”
Wahéhshon Shiann Whitebean

Whitebean tells me how before European contact, her people had systems to manage land collectively. They lived in extended families in Longhouses, and “women managed food production and distribution. Those two things are key in societies where the women had high status. […] There was no burden on one woman or one man to raise a family. There was no hunger. Everyone took care of each other.”

“All of that was changed by colonization,” says Whitebean. In the 1800s, Europeans enforced conversion to Christianity, which stressed a husband’s control over his wife. In addition, only men were allowed to hold land titles. “Now, women were subject to male dominance, and land rights were no longer the women’s role.” To Whitebean, it was precisely the moment when land rights changed that her people could no longer continue their traditional way of life.

Whitebean also argues that they weren’t the first to have this happen to them. “That’s the thing people don’t realize about colonialism. All the things that happened to us, happened to them first. The truth is that this was done already to non-native people.”

I bring up Silvia Federici, a researcher and activist. Federici argues that the same type of land theft in America and Africa happened to Europeans first. During the enclosure movement in England and Wales starting in the 17th century, land that was used – mostly by women – for subsistence farming was bought up and fenced off by wealthy nobles and merchants. Peasants were pushed off their land, with no option but to seek low wage labour in the cities. According to Federici, this set in motion the witch hunts and later colonialism. As Whitebean says, what happened to her people happened to Europeans earlier.

Academics like Bennett and Ramankutty need to stop taking an apolitical perspective and recognize the role of violence on women, changes in land rights, and colonization in bringing about hunger globally.

Justifying dispossession

From the enclosures to colonization, land grabs were justified as ‘civilizing’ the locals. In the English enclosure movement, merchants and nobility argued that the commons were mismanaged ‘wastes’ – if wealthy merchants could show peasants how to farm, they could help them improve their lot. In America, Indigenous peoples’ lands were ‘wastelands’ and they needed to be taught to properly manage it.

The justifications for land grabbing today are very similar. ‘Under-performing’ land – in other words, subsistence farming, or self-sustaining farming – is not productive enough. Locals need to be taught better farming practices so they can enter the global food market. But what’s wrong with this? In the end, doesn’t privatization increase productivity?

In a 2009 interview, Federici points out how land grabbing harms primary caregivers the most. “Subsistence agriculture in particular, mostly done by women, enables millions to live who would otherwise have no means to purchase food on the market. […] In some parts of the world (Africa above all), 80 per cent of the food consumed is produced by them. […] Their ability to grow food is increasingly threatened by increasing land scarcity, the privatization of land and water, the commercialization of agriculture, and the shift in most Third World countries to export-oriented agricultural production.”

The new land grabs

Is the current spate of land grabbing – where companies buy up massive tracts of land for agricultural development or speculation on its future worth – really just colonialism? Claire Lagier, from her experience working for GRAIN (an activist group that tackles issues like land grabbing), claims otherwise.

“It’s not colonialism in the sense that we mean when we talk about, for example, colonization of Africa or the Americas.” She remarks that, in this case, it’s not just Europeans buying up land. “You have a lot of companies that are based in Malaysia, or in India, or in Singapore, or in Brazil, grabbing land. So it’s not so simple to say it’s a ‘North-South’ type of colonialism.”

However, new and old colonialisms seem to be compounded: “In Africa, [modern land grabbing] relies very heavily on structural oppression that already exists.” This structural oppression comes in the form of patriarchy, inequality, and violence rooted in a history of colonization at the hands of Europeans.

Land grabbing today is also driven by unique situations. Lagier adds, “The food crisis and the financial crisis made land and agricultural production a very strategic asset. If you invest money in farmland right now, you’re going to make more money than if you invest on the stock market, gold, or in real estate.”

“I’d like to focus more on effecting changes for the future, to improve the quality of our life. In my own life, I’ve learned that you can’t do everything all at once. You have to start with the small things.”
Wahéhshon Shiann Whitebean

Alternative solutions

So what are some viable solutions for a cultivated planet, where land is being speculated on, local farmers can no longer grow what they want, and people are being pushed off their land?

For one, there needs to be a land rights revolution, ending a legal system that drives ownership of land by the rich, for the rich. Food production needs to be taken out of the hands of those who seek profit, and be put in the hands of local people, specifically women. Indigenous peoples’ ways of life should be defended, not attacked. Finally, academics like Bennett and Ramankutty need to stop taking an apolitical perspective and recognize the role of violence on women, changes in land rights, and colonization in bringing about hunger globally.

The people I talked to all had their own solutions as well. Ella Haley, who is researching and engaging in activism around the land grab in Ontario, recommends that farmers establish land trusts and community bonds to protect their farmland. This is a legal framework where people can have control over what happens with the land, barring it from being sold to speculators and investors.

Lagier is now working on a campaign for Quebec pension funds to divest from land grabbing projects. She wants to highlight that Quebec labour unions are actually funding the dispossession of people from their land, through investment in the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec.

Whitebean is focusing on trying to build relationships in her own community, healing the wounds inflicted by ongoing colonialism. “I’d like to focus more on effecting changes for the future, to improve the quality of our life. In my own life, I’ve learned that you can’t do everything all at once. You have to start with the small things.”

Her hope in the long run, however, is to fundamentally change land rights for First Nations. “Women were traditionally seen as owners of the land. I’m trying to find a way to revert privatized land to collective women’s ownership. That’s why I’m studying now.”

A Bite of Food Justice is a column discussing inequity in the food system while critiquing contemporary ideals of sustainability. Aaron Vansintjan can be reached at foodjustice@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Who’s hungry? appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The first of a two-part series – read part two here.

“This area is known as a bread basket,” says Ella Haley, a resident, activist, and professor at Athabasca University. She’s referring to Brant County, which lies southwest of Toronto, just a 30-minute drive from Hamilton. “It has very fertile farming communities.”

That is, until recently.

In 2005, Ontario delineated one of the world’s largest greenbelts around Toronto, restricting development on prime farmland in the hopes of preserving farmland and conserving nature. Brant County, and other nearby counties like Simcoe, Niagara, and Wellington, happen to be just outside of it. Since then, many local farmers have sold their land and become millionaires.

Now, one community in the county, Langford, is dotted with what Haley calls ‘agri-slums’:  whole acres of farmland where heritage barns are bulldozed and prime farmland is deteriorated. A development corporation by the name of Walton International, Inc. has various development plans to transform the county for good.

When farm-land, especially one of Canada’s breadbaskets, is taken over for housing, [it] can have serious ramifications for an already precarious food system.

When word of the land sales reached community members, many were concerned about the lack of consultation. A petition was signed by a coalition of Mohawk activists, a United Church minister, and environmentalists. Walton’s plans went on, largely unhindered. Presentations to council didn’t do much either. One particularly meticulous resident, David Langer, started digging up the fine print.

Over the phone, Haley guides me through one of the documents Langer had posted online. It’s from the Ontario Land Registry, listing the shareholders of a Walton-affiliated purchase.

“This is very strange,” observes Haley. “Usually, when you sell a farm you sell to an individual, or you sell to a couple. But in this case, this farm is broken up into 663 shares,” Haley says. This is no usual development project; people from all over the world – Singapore, Malaysia, and Germany – are buying in to these shares, even though they won’t be planning on living there.

But what’s the issue? The land banking company, with the help of its investors, buys up property, proposes development on the land to the municipality, and then as the development is approved, land value increases. That doesn’t seem so bad.

The problem, Haley thinks, is that this kind of speculation and development ends up being worse for local communities. “What you’ll see is that land bankers and speculators are coming to Brant County because land is cheaper, because they’re outside the green belt. When they buy it, they keep it as farms until they want it. This leads to ‘agri-slums.’”

Sometimes it’s large corporations and foreign shareholders that buy up land. Sometimes it’s whole governments like China or South Korea that invest in land to secure food access in the future.

From fertile to fallow land. The development of massive tracts of land has another side effect, says Haley. Given the current economy, it’s easy to import fresh foods from abroad. But with recent oil price spikes and global food crises, that kind of cheap food may not always be available. “Food security means ‘do we have enough food?’ But food sovereignty is: ‘can we grow what we want, where we want? Can we grow it locally?’” When farm-land, especially one of Canada’s breadbaskets, is taken over for housing, this can have serious ramifications for an already precarious food system.

Brant County, it turns out, isn’t alone. People all over the world are experiencing similar enormous land acquisitions. In some cases, the land they live on is sold from under their feet overnight by international investors. “The plunder of Brant County’s foodland,” says Haley, can be linked to a global trend: land grabbing.

* * *

It’s hard to talk about land grabs without talking about GRAIN, a small non-profit organization working to support small farms worldwide. GRAIN’s mission is to support people’s control of their own food production – food sovereignty – and to maintain biodiversity throughout the world. By supporting and connecting small farmers, social movements, researchers, and grassroots movements, they strive to develop a network all over the world to fight against large agri-businesses.

In 2008, GRAIN started to notice reports of governments and companies travelling across the world to acquire huge swaths of land. As they say in one 2013 article, “The sheer number of such reports signalled something new; we had not seen this intensity of investor interest in farmland before, and in our view it was a reaction to the food crisis and the financial crisis of that same year.”

GRAIN quickly published a report, Seized! The 2008 land grab for food and financial security, and in so doing, initiated a global wave of activism, protest, and research to fight the phenomenon.

Land grabbing, explains Claire Lagier, who works for GRAIN and is completing a masters in Environmental Science at UQAM, is a complex process. Each case is different. Like in Brant County, sometimes it’s large corporations and foreign shareholders that buy up land. Sometimes it’s whole governments like China or South Korea that invest in land to secure food access in the future. “There’s a lot of very fertile land that’s being bought,” says Lagier, “especially in Africa, in countries where land rights are very poorly defined.”

It’s not just foreign nations and investors that are buying up land. Canadians are doing it too.

But again, what’s the issue? Why should we be worried?

Lagier explains that land grabbing often ends up harming local communities more than it might be intended to help them.

“[For example] there’s a lot of countries where women are traditionally, culturally, in charge of producing palm oil, processing it, and selling it on markets. Then these companies come and negotiate with the chiefdom to either buy the land or lease the land for 100 years. They install palm monoculture. Within five years you have no traditional small production sector, because it’s been replaced by large-scale production. All these women who had their income derived from this, suddenly don’t have anything any more. When women lose their financial independence they receive all kinds of abuse, entering prostitution systems, derived of poverty, violence, gendered violence.”

When lands are seen as common, women tend to support their families through subsistence farming. Take away that common land, privatize it, and the wages received from working on these plantations will not be nearly enough. Whole communities are affected, and sometimes they put up resistance.

“You have some cases of grabbings where [there is] a private security or local police force that comes, and if they meet any resistance to the grab that they’re doing, they will intimidate people, and they will kill peasant leaders and social movement leaders to intimidate resistance and to get people to stop organizing,” explains Lagier.

It’s not just foreign nations and investors that are buying up land. Canadians are doing it too, even though they might not know it. “Pension funds and investment funds are some of the biggest players of the financial industry, and in the past five to ten years they’ve been investing about $15 billion in land, which is expected to double by 2015. It’s something that’s growing really fast right now.”

What’s confusing about land grabbing is whether it’s a recent phenomenon, unique to the past decade, or actually a continuation of older processes.

“La Caisse de dépot et placement, which is the biggest pension fund in Quebec, just announced last year that they will be investing some money that they’re managing for unions into a company created in Brazil to acquire land. That means it’s a first instance of a Canadian pension fund investing [in land grabs]. We also learned very recently that the Canada Pension Plan has also just made its first investment in farmland. It’s a very new trend of Canadian pension funds to do this.”

These funds are being used to buy up largely forested or ‘unused’ land, in the hopes that they will produce some profit in the future. And it’s only increasing, says Lagier. “This is a gold rush that is happening with farmland all over the world, but especially in Africa and some parts of South America and Southeast Asia.” GRAIN says that 60 countries have been targeted, and Oxfam estimates that 33 million hectares (about eight times the size of the Netherlands) have been leased or sold since 2001, and about 60 per cent of the projects are in Africa. It’s clear that land grabbing is a global trend that is on the rise, with little to stop it.

This all sounds very familiar. Foreign investors buying up huge swaths of land? People claiming that locals aren’t ‘efficient’ or ‘productive’ enough and are mismanaging the land? Taking advantage of local legal structures for the sake of profit? Violently taking people’s land and then forcing them to work on it? It bears a really strong resemblance to the history books, particularly the chapters on early colonialism.

What’s confusing about land grabbing is whether it’s a recent phenomenon, unique to the past decade, or actually a continuation of older processes, like the large-scale privatization of land that happened when Europeans colonized other continents. The next part of this series will delve into that question by considering how the two are linked, why they’re different, and how colonialism continues to this day. I will also show what people all over the world, but especially in Canada, are doing to fight it.

A Bite of Food Justice is a column discussing inequity in the food system while critiquing contemporary ideals of sustainability. Aaron Vansintjan can be reached at foodjustice@mcgilldaily.com.

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That’s a pretty common line of logic. It’s also the basic argument of North America’s number one food guru, Michael Pollan. In a 2009 New York Times article, “Big food vs. big insurance,” Pollan links cheap bad food to the obesity ‘epidemic.’ The problem? That ‘bad’ food (like corn, potatoes, and wheat) is subsidized, making it cheaper, and people are eating too much of it, which has led to a rise in obesity. The solution? Stop subsidizing, and educate people to “vote with their fork” by buying locally and organically.

It turns out that this line of reasoning is totally false. It is also elitist, classist, racist, and fat-phobic. But before debunking Pollan, I want to put the discussion of food and health in a different context.

*  *  *

Anna Pringle is a student and food activist in Montreal. “Right now,” says Pringle, “one of the things I’ve been working on with other people is accessibility. How can we work on the idea of having healthy food for all, rather than healthy food being defined by very expensive organic food not for everyone? I don’t really know how much good moralizing is going to do for people when they just can’t afford to go to health food stores.”

Pringle is involved with the Food For All campaign, which works to improve access to food in Montreal, particularly undocumented migrants. In this work, she directly sees how food activism and racism can intersect. “If you want to start changing people’s health,” says Pringle, “you might want to be aware how that might be a racist act.”

Food racism happens when certain foods are excluded in favour of the dominant (white) culture’s idea of good food.

Why is it racist to say what food is healthy and what food isn’t? For one, this presupposes that the food from one culture is more ‘nutritious’ than that of another. Two clear examples: Canada’s Food Guide and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Pyramid. In both, dairy is seen as cornerstone food group, despite findings that in the U.S., 70 per cent of African Americans, 74 per cent of Indigenous Americans, 90 per cent of Asian Americans, and 53 per cent of Mexican Americans are lactose intolerant. On the flip side, high-calcium foods traditional to some of these cultures (for example, collard greens) are not included.  Food racism happens when certain foods are excluded in favour of the dominant (white) culture’s idea of good food.

Secondly, health itself is racialized. As Pringle says, it involves “saying that a certain type of body is better than other types of bodies.”

Ideas of health often presume a certain type of body. This doesn’t take into account how other cultures see health, nor does it acknowledge that the dominant idea of a ‘healthy body’ in North American media is most often thin and white. Healthy bodies shouldn’t be defined by what they look like.

*  *  *

Julie Guthman, writer and professor at UC Santa Cruz, takes aim at Pollan’s simplistic argument in her 2011 book, Weighing in: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Guthman completely destroys the idea that the obesity epidemic is caused by eating too much bad food.

First of all, she shows that it’s not just governmental subsidies that make for cheap food. Cheap food is driven by cheap labour. In the U.S., food was able to be cheap firstly by stealing ‘cheap’ land from natives, then, by importing ‘cheap’ slave labour, and later still, by importing Europeans to do ‘cheap’ labour in return for the promise of their own land (also stolen), and now by making use of ‘cheap’ migrant labour from south of the highly-securitized U.S. border. Fast food is cheap because it went to great lengths to destroy unions, taking away employees’ bargaining power, pushing wages as low as possible. What makes for cheaper food? The exploitation of people already in precarious situations. Then it’s fed back to those of us who can’t afford otherwise, further exacerbating reliance on a destructive food system.

It seems that people are more interested in proving why fat people are eating too much than actually examining what environmental factors affect people negatively.

Second, an obesity ‘epidemic’ simply isn’t caused by too many people eating too much. As Guthman says, “The evidence is just not there that people eat more calories than they did a generation ago or that different socioeconomic groups eat different amounts of calories.” Guthman points to research that instead implicates epigenetics, toxins in food packaging, and environmental toxins as factors that may have caused a rise in the average body-mass index. The energy balance model, where more high-energy food has a direct, causal link to more obese people, just doesn’t hold up.

Third, there’s a big problem when we link size to health. The problem is what Guthman calls co-production: when scientific assumptions actually become the variables. For example, most studies evaluating causes of obesity only measure variables that are assumed to cause obesity: the number of gyms in an area, the number of ‘healthy’ grocery stores, the number of fast food stores. In other words, people think fatness is the problem, and then try to prove it by seeking factors they assume cause fatness. This is not just a chicken-or-egg problem, it’s fat-phobia. It seems that people are more interested in proving why fat people are eating too much than actually examining what environmental factors affect people negatively.

Guthman argues that we need to go beyond shaming fat bodies. She turns to fat activists to show how this can be done. “Health at every size” is the most well-known slogan of the fat acceptance movement. This movement aims to battle the stigma against fat bodies. The slogan strikes at the heart of the mistaken assumption that weight and health are intrinsically linked. One issue with the slogan, however, is that it still prioritizes health over weight. Everyone should be respected, regardless of how healthy or unhealthy they seem to be.

*  *  *

What should the food movement’s slogan be? It shouldn’t be Pollan’s “vote with your fork,” that’s for sure. This excludes those who can’t vote, from lack of time, money, or privilege. It also shouldn’t be “good food for all,” as this takes for granted that it’s even possible to define what good food is, requires someone to judge what food is good, and what food everyone should be eating.

I can’t really think of an appropriate slogan for a food movement. Maybe this whole sloganeering thing is not for me. I ask my friends, Grace and Micah, sitting by me as I type late into the night, what they think.

“Eat to live!” Grace shouts, punching their fist in the air, mouth full of salad.

“I like it. It keeps it real. That’s why we eat,” says Micah.

I like it too. It’s about affirming people’s choices and people’s struggles, while emphasizing how the food we eat can be harmful, not because it makes us bigger, but because some can choose and some cannot.

A Bite of Food Justice is a column discussing inequity in the food system while critiquing contemporary ideals of sustainability. Aaron Vansintjan can be reached at foodjustice@mcgilldaily.com.

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But what struck me about their piece was the way it focused on how St. Henri’s working class past was making way for “vibrant” younger residents and “grand” expensive lofts. The Daily’s article is a very clear example of something I see all the time: writers trying to be neutral in their stories. As it turns out, this neutrality is really just silence on essential parts of a story.

* * *

Walk through Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG) now and you’ll see some old derelict theatres and warehouses, but many more new condos rising up. There’s a new sports centre and a stadium. The super-hospital – a spanking-new conglomeration of several English-language hospitals – looms over the same Turcot highway that has a reputation of shedding cubic metres of concrete onto passers-by.

It’s easy to mistake the new as progress. After all, younger and richer people are moving in, there are fewer ugly buildings, and new stores and restaurants are popping up. NDG, which also shares a working-class history, seems to be in the process of a new and exciting “revolution,” in Chinnick’s words. This assumption overlooks how this “revolution” affects people who are struggling the most. It can push them out of their homes and take their food away.

* * *

The NDG Food Depot is a food bank-turned-community centre that got kicked out of its space last April. Most news articles covering the incident glossed over the reasons, staying clear from laying blame or politicizing the event. “NDG Food Depot forced to move by week’s end,” read one headline in the Montreal Gazette, but it went no further than mentioning disagreements with the landlord.

A friend, Adrian Turcato, and I, decided to investigate. A series of clues – condo developers making an offer the landlord couldn’t refuse, a new super-hospital moving in down the road, another community space getting kicked out two years ago – led us to one culprit: gentrification.

Like in St. Henri, gentrification happens when neighbourhoods become appealing to developers and new residents. Institutions that work hard to bring people together and serve to make neighbourhoods safer – such as the Food Depot, cheap grocery stores, Head & Hands and Action Communiterre down the street, cheap restaurants – help to make neighbourhoods more attractive. The sneaky thing about gentrification is that it’s precisely such places that are most affected when new, richer residents move in or mega-projects get built in neighbourhoods. Another effect is that long-time residents are pushed out of their homes and unable to access the things they need.

Cynthia Angrave, who works at the NDG Food Depot, already feels the effects. “It’s going to be a neighbourhood that will be pushing people like me out,” she said. “I definitely live in full knowledge that I will receive a letter from my landlord at some point that he’s sold the building […] for condos. Condos were built right next to me in what was an empty lot, and I can just see it encroaching. This is a real concern for me.”

The fact that the Depot was pushed out of its space to make way for a condo is proof that gentrification negatively affects those who are already most vulnerable. In this case, it literally takes the food out of their mouths. But that’s not the end of the story.

As the new super-hospital was being built, efforts were made to ‘consult’ the community. An open discussion was held, and Bonnie Soutar, director of development at the Depot, was in attendance. She told everyone there about the neighbourhood’s issues: new development was pushing people out, and many community groups were feeling the negative effects. “They nodded their heads but I never heard any follow-up of it,” Soutar said about the consultation. “Everyone said, ‘yes, yes, we have to help the Food Depot find a space,’ [but] we didn’t really get a result from that.”

The effect of the super-hospital, then, isn’t just that it pushes people out. By moving into a neighbourhood, bringing in new residents, and at the same time not cooperating with the essential services that already exist, the super-hospital actually helps to destroy the lives of old residents and the organizations they rely on.

Similarly, when journalists write about a new development or increased gentrification without reporting on how communities are affected, they help force people like Angrave out of their homes through not making the public aware of the flip side of the gentrification coin.

So when talking about St. Henri, why not talk about other community groups than the historical society? Why not talk about St. Henri’s vibrant churches, resident-initiated food markets in the midst of food deserts, people uniting to resist being pushed out of their homes, the plans to destroy Village des Tanneries by expanding the Turcot highway and the local movement to stop it, and cheap grocery stores that help tie the community together? These are part of culture too, and ought to be included in a newspaper Culture section.

Not including these aspects of what makes a neighbourhood thrive means, first of all, erasing the lives of many still-struggling low-income people in favour of the mostly affluent, and second, actually exacerbating the negative effects that expensive new lofts and condos can have.

“The canal below the hill,” and the coverage of the NDG Food Depot are two very clear examples of something I see quite often: in trying not to be too political, in attempting to be ‘objective,’ journalists miss a huge part of the story. In so doing, they can actually make matters worse.

The NDG Food Depot now runs out of the basement of a church. If you’re interested, you can help them out by stopping at their new address, 2146 Marlowe, or find out more at depotndg.org.

A Bite of Food Justice is a bi-weekly column discussing inequity in the food system while critiquing contemporary ideals of sustainability. Aaron Vansintjan can be reached at foodjustice@mcgilldaily.com.

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