Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) as part of the existing care economy in Canada

Abstract

This review paper discusses the program called Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF), in North America, as an example of a subset of the care economy in which volunteers contribute to farm care. Human care is partly direct (some childcare, kitchen duties and other housework), but mostly indirect, in that farm families get time off. This review expands on previous work that considered farms in Ontario, Canada as spaces of care and farmwomen as the carers. It critiques other research that claims WWOOFers do not replace local labor and that WWOOF represents an idealistic and ethical space potentially corrupted by tourists.

Tourism and ‘dirt’: A case study of WWOOF farms in New Zealand

“…However, some researchers, for example, Mowforth and Munt (2009), critique volunteer tourism for its inability to achieve "equal relationships" (Sin, 2010, p. 991) between hosts and guests. However, in their study on organic farm volunteering, Miller and Mair (2015a) Despite many of the benefits of host-guest relations in WWOOFing mentioned in previous studies (Hallmann & Zehrer, 2016;Kosnik, 2014;Lans, 2016;McIntosh, 2009;Mostafanezhad et al, 2014;Mostafanezhad et al, 2015;Ord, 2010;Terry, 2014), a certain degree of imbalance in the WWOOFing experience is evident. For example, evidence was found to show that WWOOF farmers bear the noneconomic costs of WWOOFing such as lack of privacy and 'emotional labour' involved in hosting WWOOFers (Mostafanezhad et al, 2014).…”

“…Interestingly, the increased scholarly interest in the WWOOFing phenomenon has coincided with the growth of the network, the popularity of the organic movement, as well as the growing concern around environmental issues and food trends on the global scale (Choo & Jamal, 2009;Deville & Wearing, 2013;Deville et al, 2016a;Kosnik, 2014;Lans, 2016;McIntosh & Bonnemann, 2006;Yamamoto & Engelsted, 2014).…”

WWOOFers in Norway – who are they?

“…The peer-reviewed scholarly research on WWOOFing can roughly be placed within four partially overlapping and interlinked perspectives. They are: (a) WWOOFing as a new or alternative social movement (Burns & Kondo, 2015;Lans, 2016;Mostafanezhad, 2016); (b) as de-commodification of tourism (Deville, 2011;Deville et al, 2016aDeville et al, , 2016bMiller & Mair, 2014;Singh, 2001); (c) WWOOFers as significant and multiple contributions to the maintenance of small-scale and organic farming (Ekers et al, 2016;Mostafanezhad et al, 2015;Terry, 2014); and (d) mapping of profiles, motivations and outcomes of WWOOF hosts and/or WWOOFers (Deville et al, 2016b;McIntosh & Bonnemann, 2006;McIntosh & Campbell, 2001;Yamamoto & Engelsted, 2014). Both (a) and (b) deal with aspects of commodification, but while (b) focuses on WWOOFing as a de-commodification of mass tourism, (a) sees WWOOFing as part of a countermovement that opposes the structures and consequences of the free market forces and neoliberalism.…”

“…It is a bottom-up approach to development created by the people for the people and is free of government dependency. Lans (2016) argued that in Canada, WWOOFing is part of the caring economy, defined as an economy at the service of human beings, and not human beings at the service of the economy. The WWOOF programme provides farmers with inexpensive labour, formerly provided by the large farm families.…”

“…Most of the volunteer tourism occurs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Knollenberg et al, 2014;Mintel, 2014) while WWOOFing stands out by occurring in developed countries and across the northern hemisphere. Extant research on WWOOFing have been conducted in New Zealand (Kosnik, 2014;McIntosh & Bonnemann, 2006;McIntosh & Campbell, 2001), Australia (Deville et al, 2016a(Deville et al, , 2016b, Argentina (Miller & Mair, 2014;, Hawaii (Mostafanezhad, 2016), South Korea (Choo & Jamal, 2009), U.S.A. (Maycock, 2008;Terry, 2014;Yamamoto & Engelsted, 2014), Canada (Lans, 2016), and Japan (Burns & Kondo, 2015). However, to the best of our knowledge, there is only one peer-reviewed research article published on WWOOFers in a European context (Kosnik, 2014); it deals with Austria and relies on qualitative approaches.…”