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To the extent that social science scholarship engages real-world developments it remains grounded and better able to resist elite agendas. With this in mind this article argues for the critical encounter with what I argue is the most significant struggle around food and agriculture today--the amorphous and broad-based movement that strives to resist the further degradation of food environments and ensure healthy eating in society. This struggle is inevitably engaged with contemporary neoliberal agendas that have transformed and degraded food environments as they have privileged profit making over healthy diets. The article considers different sites where the struggle over healthy eating is taking place, both at the level of the state and more extensively in civil society. It considers the debate over bovine growth hormone in Canada and the wider efforts to turn around school food environments as examples of state-centered and civil-society struggles, respectively, that illustrate different dimensions of the healthy-eating movement today. In each case the agendas of transnational food corporations are seen to be directly contradicting efforts to ensure healthy diets. The article considers some notable successes among advocates of healthy eating, in the United States and Canada and most notably in Britain, and examines some of the factors that may account for this success. Overall, I argue that this struggle has the potential to challenge the hegemony of neoliberal discourse in fundamental ways. The article concludes with a call for academics, and rural sociologists in particular, to give a much greater priority to healthy-eating struggles, and considers a number of areas where academic practitioners can aid activists' efforts to resist the further degradation of diets and establish healthier food environments.

This paper examines qualitative data on class consciousness derived from a study of corporate restructuring and the impacts of layoffs in rural Ontario communities. In particular, the study examines how the rural environment might impinge on the development of class consciousness among the workers there in the context of severe economic stress brought on by plant shutdowns. It is argued that an ideology specific to a farm and small town environment plays a significant role in shaping their response to crisis. The more standard predictors of class consciousness such as age, gender, past union membership, and employment status are also considered. The paper aims to deepen our understanding of the seemingly contradictory belief structures of working class people.

This paper examines the contention that capitalist agriculture is coming to predominate in the industrialized West. An empirical study of central Canadian farms integrated into agribusiness operations indicates the structural complexity of agriculture and the importance of commodity features in defining the social organization of farms. Particularly notable findings concern the long duration and relatively high volumes of seasonal wage labour, some of it migratory offshore labour, used on certain categories of farms, and the importance of this labour usage in defining these farms in structural terms. These findings challenge the sweeping generalizations found in the rural sociological literature concerning farm structure, and in particular previous analyses of the impact of agribusiness on petty-commodity production., The major sociological writers on agrarian change who continue to influence rural sociology were concerned with specifying the essential features of the agricultural enterprise as a guide to predicting the [...]

Kordick rightly confronts the myth of Costa Rica as a country historically characterised by a class of smallholder coffee farmers unencumbered by an exploitive oligarchy so characteristic of other Latin American countries, a myth that has been also perpetuated by foreign, largely US, scholars. Perhaps the most significant contribution of this study is the insight it provides into the more recent role that out-migration and remittances migrants send back home play in changing social relationships in Costa Rican society. Another subject she introduces, and one that is a significant contribution, I would argue, is the more recent reality of population out-migration to the United States, particularly from rural areas, and the significant socio-economic impacts this is having on Costa Rican society, at least in certain regions. [Extracted from the article]

A case study of laid-off workers in a rural Ontario county is placed within the polarized debate over the implications for workers and for society more broadly of trade liberalization and economic restructuring. Examining experiences of layoff, including length of time unemployed, comparisons between old and new jobs, and the degree of income loss, we present empirical data on the transformation taking place in a rural community context. We argue that, for such communities at least, the long-term effects of restructuring are negative for workers and their communities overall, and are particularly disadvantageous for women and older workers., THE FORCES OF CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM are radically altering the structure of business enterprise, the organization of labour, the quality of life on and off the job and the role of [...]

This paper is concerned with the restructuring of petty commodity producers in agriculture and, more specifically, the role of food processing firms in this process. Two mechanisms by which processors secure their agricultural supplies--corporate farming and contract farming--are examined in central Canada. Although fairly widespread, corporate farming by processors is slowly declining and is unlikely to have a major impact on petty producers. By comparison, this study indicates that, in the context of corporate consolidation, the behavior of food processors in granting production contracts to formally independent farm operators is furthering the social differentiation of the latter.

This chapter explores the relationships between organisational type, rationales and the barriers that prevent community food projects from increasing the scale of their operations. From a broad survey of community food projects, organisations were divided according to their primary rationale (e.g. rural economic development and distribution), and then subdivided - by form - as a non-profit, private business, governmental agency or cooperative. Data from the interviews and surveys were coded using a qualitative grounded theory approach, to reveal the barriers experienced by each. Overall, access to long-term stable income is a recurrent theme across all types of projects. However, income sources dramatically change how these organisations prioritise barriers. Similarly, the organisation's primary rationale and experiences influence the interpretation and approach to collaboration and education. Despite these differences, our results suggest a large degree of convergence that cuts across organisational forms and rationales, and offer a base for broader regional food system conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents results from a survey of community food projects, and explores the relationships between organisational type, rationales and the barriers that prevent each from increasing the scale of their operations. Organisations were divided according to their primary rationale (e.g. rural economic development and distribution), and then subdivided – by form – as a non-profit, private business, governmental agency or cooperative. Data from the interviews and surveys were coded using a qualitative grounded theory approach, to reveal the barriers experienced by each. Overall, access to long-term stable income is a recurrent theme across all types of projects, but income sources dramatically change how these organisations prioritise barriers. Similarly, the organisation's primary rationale and experiences influence the interpretation and approach to collaboration and education. Despite these differences, our results suggest a large degree of convergence that cuts across organisational forms and rationales, and offers a base for broader regional food system conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers an empirical case study of ecotourism in the island state of Cuba. The paper attempts to gauge the success Cuba has had in establishing eco-tourist practices that could be considered sustainable, and provides analysis of the various political factors that condition this success. Using some well-known benchmarks of sustainable eco-tourist practices, the paper presents the results of numerous interviews with key informants involved with ecological tourism in Cuba, archival research and observations from on-site visits to key ecotourism projects to examine the relative success of ecotourism on the island. Concluding that Cuba has had mixed success in moving to sustainable ecotourism, the paper examines the various political constraints that will likely determine the trajectory of Cuba's ecotourism in the near and medium term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Third World agrarian studies have recently been concerned with a more rigorous conceptualization of certain unitary features that characterize the development of capitalism in the agricultures of these countries. Where this has entailed the retention and modernization of large units of production, as in much of Latin America, numerous attempts have been made to view this process within the framework provided by Lenin's discussion of the main paths of transition to capitalist agriculture, and the so-called landlord or Prussian path in particular. This paper begins with an appraisal of a few recent studies that have begun to reassess the historical experience of estate agriculture in Prussia as a model for conceptualizing agrarian development elsewhere. Concluding that a more detailed examination of certain fundamental questions is needed, the paper proceeds to argue that the system of estate agriculture in Prussia can be of analytical value for the study of forms of backward agrarian development, particularly when viewed in the context of Marx's distinction between the formal and real subscription of the labor process by capital. It is necessary to view the internal organization of estate production historically, however, and to bring into focus the structural connections between the large capitalist farms and the underdevelopment of the wider economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]