203 research outputs found
Strengthening agriculture responsiveness to nutrition and health
No full textContents: PowerPoint presentation, IFPRI Conference, day 2, September 27, 2011Contents: Video, Presentation by Rachel Bezner-Kerr, Assistant Professor, University of Western Ontario, at plenary session 3 “Strengthening the Linkages: Policy Frameworks and Programme”, Conference "Unleashing Agriculture's Potential for Improved Nutrition and Health in Malawi," held September 26-27, 2011The presentation illustrates techniques of intercropping with legumes as a solution to problems of malnutrition, using a participatory farmer-to-farmer approach. Findings show that legume residue also helps to increase maize yields, and that the process of interacting with a specific community is critical. Approaches which bring farming communities’ perspectives into the forefront, while also addressing inequalities within communities, can be successful on many levels
Book review. Moseley, William G., Matthew A. Schnurr and Rachel Bezner Kerr (Eds). (2016). Africa's Green Revolution: Critical Perspectives on New Agricultural Technologies and Systems. New York: Routledge.
No full textThis is a book review. The book was edited by Moseley, William G, Matthew A. Schnurr and Rachel Bezner Kerr in 2016. The book presents the critical perspectives on the new agricultural technologies and systems as part of the Africa's Green Revolution. The book is published by Routledge, New Yor
Supplemental Material, Tanzania_EBF_TIPs_Sup_Files_B_Counseling_Guides_12Nov2018_(1) - Barriers and Opportunities for Improved Exclusive Breast-Feeding Practices in Tanzania: Household Trials With Mothers and Fathers
No full textSupplemental Material, Tanzania_EBF_TIPs_Sup_Files_B_Counseling_Guides_12Nov2018_(1) for Barriers and Opportunities for Improved Exclusive Breast-Feeding Practices in Tanzania: Household Trials With Mothers and Fathers by Cynthia R. Matare, Hope C. Craig, Stephanie L. Martin, Rosemary A. Kayanda, Gina M. Chapleau, Rachel Bezner Kerr, Kirk A. Dearden, Luitfrid P. Nnally and Katherine L. Dickin in Food and Nutrition Bulletin</p
Supplemental Material, Tanzania_EBF_TIPs_Sup_Files_A_Interview_Guides_12Nov2018_(1) - Barriers and Opportunities for Improved Exclusive Breast-Feeding Practices in Tanzania: Household Trials With Mothers and Fathers
No full textSupplemental Material, Tanzania_EBF_TIPs_Sup_Files_A_Interview_Guides_12Nov2018_(1) for Barriers and Opportunities for Improved Exclusive Breast-Feeding Practices in Tanzania: Household Trials With Mothers and Fathers by Cynthia R. Matare, Hope C. Craig, Stephanie L. Martin, Rosemary A. Kayanda, Gina M. Chapleau, Rachel Bezner Kerr, Kirk A. Dearden, Luitfrid P. Nnally and Katherine L. Dickin in Food and Nutrition Bulletin</p
RELATIONSHIP-BASED LENDING FOR DIVERSIFIED AGRICULTURE SYSTEMS IN CANADA: HOW TRUST AND COMMUNITY MAY TRANSFORM FINANCIALIZED AND GENDERED FOOD SYSTEMS
No full textOur food systems, once controlled by community and built for regions, are now global in scale and serve the interests of international financial organizations and multinational agribusiness corporations. Financialization, the term referring to the increased presence of financial actors, markets, institutions and incentives have gained importance in the organization and functioning of the economy, including agriculture & land, is an issue of increasing attention in academic and policy circles. This new trend, an increasing role of these actors in financing agriculture, means agricultural production’s primary goal has shifted from food production to cash production. Current agricultural finance habitually chooses projects based on potential for asset development rather than community benefit. Those who are most likely to opt into diversified and sustainable production such as women, people of colour, of those new to the industry struggle to fund their projects. Current unsustainability is underpinned by work dynamics and social relationships that only further perpetuates gender inequity. In this paper I argue offering trust- based loans to under-represented farmers transforms power imbalances created by financialization. The research asks: to what extent do farm women in Canada use trust-based lending to grow and sustain their farms; how does informal lending influence how women farm; and in what ways does access to informal lending shape rural communities and their food systems in Canada? I used purposive snowball sampling to identify and interview ten participants, six farmers and four lenders, using semi-structured interviews. Results show farmers using trust-based loans indicates the way they farm includes community benefits and meet personal environmental and social outcomes, including local economic development. The farmers noted a strong sense of trust between lender, borrower, and customer. Many indicated without such trust as collateral loans, they would not be in business. As researchers, community activists, and not-for-profit organizations seek resolutions to our financialized food system, trust-based loans may be of significant import
Discord, Dispossession And Dairy: Water Governance And Social Change In Canterbury, New Zealand
No full textCreating Peaceful Coexistence in a Context of Chronic Violence: Masculinities, Intimate Violence, and Everyday Reconciliations in Post-Conflict Burundi
No full text234 pagesThis dissertation presents an ethnographic, feminist exploration about tackling “everyday” domestic violence, within the extraordinary conditions of mass violence and dehumanizing poverty. It follows the story of the Abatangamuco, a unique development intervention that emerged after Burundi’s civil war, in a brief moment of peace in a history of chronic violence. Drawing on the experiences of grassroots peacebuilding, the Abatangamuco applied a peace and reconciliation approach to the crisis of domestic violence, which was notably unaddressed in the national peace plan. Applying transitional justice concepts of accountability, truth-telling, reconciliation and forgiveness, the Abatangamuco model catalyzed profound personal transformations among men who once practiced extreme domestic violence. Those men who join the Abatangamuco movement publicly commit to model a new masculinity, based on nonviolence and relationships of mutual respect. While its feminist implications are ambiguous, this little-known story from the poorest country in the world has important insights for scholars and non-academic practitioners. It addresses questions of transitional justice, feminist peacebuilding, masculinities, and development intervention in post-conflict settings. What is intellectually interesting about the Abatangamuco is that it did not fail. Even as Burundi has backslid into a repressive, militarized state, the Abatangumco continues to evolve organically, responding meaningfully to the crisis of thwarted masculinity and gender-based violence. As such, it is an unexpected success of transitional justice, in a context of failed peace. It represents a grounded experiment in feminist peacebuilding, showcasing the possibility for centering, rather than deferring the crisis of domestic violence in transitional justice. It also represents a rare experiment in rehabilitating male perpetrators of domestic violence that creates meaningful pathways for men to restore social relations and self-respect, while constructing a new model of nonviolent masculinity. At the same time, it is not a model of feminist transformation, and its evolution as a model raises critical questions about the necessary dynamics for transformation change and social justice for survivors of domestic violence in a context of extreme poverty and chronic violence. Above all, this is a story about studying intermedial moments and the importance of a feminist perspective and everyday lens into the post-conflict dynamics of reconciliation. This story suggests that even in chronic instability and deprivation, there are times and places when this type of hopeful social intervention can take root. In a region ever on the brink of violence, it is as important to examine the legacy of these of intermedial moments of reconciliation from the margins, as it is to analyze the failures of peace at the top
In the Law & On the Land: Finding the Female Farmer in Myanmar's National Land Use Policy
No full textThis paper draws upon twelve months of activist research to examine Myanmar’s female farmer on the land and in the law. For rural women, the female farmer was an anomaly with emancipatory implications, one associated with a particular material conditions, social relations, and attitudes. In contrast, the female farmer in the National Land Use Policy text was a rights-bearing legal subject produced by a set of negotiations in which individuals acting as experts ‘rendered technical’ (Li 2007) distinct ontologies of land, law, and gender. Examining the production of and relationship between these representations helps problematize Myanmar’s contemporary political transition by providing an ethnographic entry point to chart shifting discourses and subjectivities
Automation in a biologically and naturally mediated industry: The envisioned implications of automated strawberry harvesters for the labor process
No full text58 pagesCritical agri-food scholars have argued that previous mechanization efforts in specialty crop industries have led to labor intensification, deskilling, and displacement, while developers of automated strawberry harvesters assert that these machines can relieve farmworkers from physically demanding labor by enabling the reskilling of workers and by improving their working conditions. In order to investigate this tension, this paper draws from labor process theory and critical agri-food studies to better understand how automated harvesters’ envisioned futures will affect workers’ skills and employment if these futures were to materialize. Using critical (multimodal) discourse analysis, I examine interviews with technology developers, agricultural scientists, and experts in strawberry production, and online promotional material published by manufacturers of automated strawberry harvesters. I find that automated strawberry harvesters are envisioned to reduce labor needs and automated harvesting aids have uneven implications for the labor process. This paper also finds that the natural and biological factors of strawberry production complicate the effective automation of harvesting, and therefore, has uneven implications for the labor process. Therefore, I argue that labor process theory, when applied to the study of labor automation in agriculture, needs to account for the natural and biological factors that characterize agriculture
Re-examining pathways to smallholder food security and the transformative potential of agroecology: A case study from Malawi
No full text139 pagesBased on interviews with small farmers in Malawi, I find that the current framing of food security in scientific literature reproduces discursive assumptions, presupposing farmers’ problems and aspirations in a way that privileges production outputs for income generation as the solution to hunger. These assumptions limited the analytic power of theorized pathways to explain the mechanisms behind the way that farmers interviewed were moving towards food security. I argue instead that altering social and ecological relations of production, by which I mean control over land, labor, and farming inputs, are at least as important for smallholders’ access to stable, adequate food as improvements in production outputs. Agroecology does much more to transform these relations than other agricultural paradigms, yet because of the analytical limitations of food security as a discourse, these “social and ecological pathways” to food security are overlooked. This exclusion matters because when core pathways remain invisible, the potential of paradigms like sustainable intensification to jeopardize food security by actively undermining these pathways goes unrecognized. I propose that food sovereignty provides a better narrative for understanding what matters for Malawian smallholders’ food security, and the factors at play behind agricultural transitions to food security in many smallholders’ contexts
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