This article explores how precarious legal status circumscribes differential inclusion in the agricultural labor market and affects workers' lives through a comparative study of workplace health and safety among temporary migrant guest workers and immigrants in Canada. Original, multimethod research with South Asian immigrant and Mexican migrant farmworkers examines employment practices, working conditions, and health‐care access. We find that both groups engage in precarious work, with consequences for their health and safety, including immigrant workers with citizenship. Nevertheless, migrant guest workers are subject to more coercive forms of labor discipline and a narrower range of social protection than immigrants. We argue that while formal citizenship can mitigate some dimensions of precariousness for farmworkers racialized as non‐white, achieving a more just, safer food system will require broader policies to improve employer compliance and address legislative shortcomings that only weakly protect agricultural labor.
We undertake a comparative investigation of how neoliberal restructuring characterizes the third food regime in the three North American countries. By contrasting the experience of the two developed countries of the United States and Canada with that of the developing country of Mexico, we shine some empirical light on the differential impact of neoliberal regulatory restructuring on the division of labor in agriculture within the North American Free Trade Agreement region. In particular, we investigate these countries' agricultural production markets, trade, and food vulnerability-with an emphasis on Mexico-as analytical points for comparing and contrasting their experience with this neoliberal restructuring. We start with a synthesis of food-regime theory and outline the key features of what we call the "neoliberal food regime." We then discuss our case-study countries in terms of food vulnerability and resistance in Mexico, their differential relationships to trade liberalization, and what these trends might mean for the evolution of the neoliberal food regime. We conclude that, while dominant trends are ominous, there is room for an alternative trajectory and consequent reshaping of the emerging regime: sufficient bottom-up social resistance, primarily at the level of the nation-state, may yet produce an alternative trajectory.
The agricultural sector is currently being shaped by two powerful dynamics as many nations reorganise their national agriculture according to free trade and other supranational agreements while new agricultural biotechnologies are increasingly adopted. This interrelationship between regulatory change and genetic engineering appears set to form the basis of a new food regime. In this article, we compare the role of national and international regulations relating to the technology, and the impact of local resistance to it, in the advanced capitalist countries of Canada and the USA and the developing country of Mexico. Similar to food regime perspectives, our study concludes that neoliberal regulatory reorganisation is an important component of the evolving food regime. Further, Mexico bore the brunt of the technology's negative social impacts, demonstrating how it exacerbates existing inequalities between developed and developing nations. Resistance movements in the country have been sufficient to call into question the inevitability of a homogenous reorganisation of agriculture, however. Evidence suggests that such resistance could modify, or even derail, this technology's role in individual nations, and consequently, in the unfolding food regime as a whole.O ne of the chief features of post World War II agriculture was its nationcentredness. Yet agriculture has a strong history in global trade, despite the counter appearances raised by its contentiousness in WTO negotiations at the turn of the twenty-first century. A more novel aspect of agriculture's position in international trade, however, is its thorough incorporation under supranational trade agreements and national neo-regulation initiatives, spurred by the ideology of neoliberal globalism. The resulting regulatory dynamic is accompanied by the implementation of new agricultural biotechnologies, which are being adopted at a dramatic rate. While it is still too early to be assured of the stability of the technology's growth, particularly given the setbacks that have already occurred, biotechnology has nonetheless provided significant empirical indications that it could be transformative for capitalised agriculture (Otero and Pechlaner 2005;Otero 2008). Facilitated by the evolving regulatory structures, agricultural biotechnology could, in fact, form the basis of a new food regime.As conceptualised by Harriet Friedmann and Phillip McMichael (Friedmann and McMichael 1989;Friedmann 1992Friedmann , 1993), a 'food regime' is a temporally specific
This article critiques the notion of food security through trade promoted by suprastate organizations like the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. We use and refine the food‐regime perspective to contest this unwritten rule of the neoliberal food regime. Rather than “mutual dependency” in food between “North” and “South,” as argued by Philip McMichael, however, we show that food dependency has been stronger on basic foods in developing countries, while advanced capitalist countries' dependency has been mostly on luxury foods. Also, the more that developing countries become dependent on food imports and exports, the more they will be importing the “world food price” for the relevant commodities. Food‐price inflation will more adversely affect their working classes, which spend larger shares of their household budgets on food. Our empirical focus is on food dependency in emerging nations—Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and Turkey—in comparison with long‐standing agricultural exporting powerhouses, the United States and Canada. Using longitudinal data from FAOSTAT, we show that food security in the neoliberal food regime can best be characterized as “uneven and combined dependency.”
Alternative food networks face both challenges and opportunities in rethinking the role of precarious employment in food system transformation. We explore how alternative food networks in British Columbia, Canada have engaged with flexible and precarious work regimes for farmworkers, including both temporary migrant workers and un(der)paid agricultural interns. Based on in‐depth interviews, participant observation and document analysis, we find that alternative food actors often normalize a precarious work regime using a moral economy frame. This framing describes precarious farm employment as either a necessary challenge in the transition to sustainability, or merely involving a few individual “bad apple” farmers. Further, this framing involves an aversion to “one‐size‐fits‐all” regulation by the state in favor of consumer‐driven regulation of labor standards. Our analysis suggests that a moral economy framing can obscure systemic inequities in precarious farm employment and dampen the impetus for structural change through collective food movement organizing.
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