From Farm Crisis to Food Crisis: Neoliberal Reform in Canadian Agriculture and the Future of Agri-Food Policy

• Author / Creator

  Wipf, Kevin G

• This dissertation begins by providing an overview of Canadian agriculture policy during
  the first half of the twentieth century. It examines the origins of railway transportation
  subsidies, farm income subsidies, and the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB), policy
  instruments that became structural features of the agricultural industry on the prairies. It
  then analyzes the structural pressures that led governments to rethink these features
  beginning in the 1970s, and the demographic and political context in which farmer
  support for collective institutions was eroded and neoliberal farm groups came to
  influence public policy over the decades that followed. Subsequent chapters examine the
  way that the federal government attempted to reform farm income subsidies in the 1990s
  and 2000s, in order to adhere to newly established international trade rules, and the
  relative success of those efforts. Two chapters are then devoted to the political struggle
  between the neoliberal and collectivist coalitions (farm groups, opposition parties, and
  governments) over the future of the CWB’s single desk. The second of these chapters
  focuses on the final political struggle that occurred once the Harper Conservatives won a
  majority government in 2011, and how the single desk was finally brought to an end.
  Two concluding chapters then examine the new politics that has emerged around issues
  pertaining to food security, food safety, and environmental sustainability in Canada, how
  these issues affect, but often fail to intersect with, the continuing debates about the future
  of Canadian farming. The dissertation ends by exploring ways that prairie farmers might
  make connections to these issues, and with the groups working on them, in order to
  ensure their involvement in the future of agri-food policy in Canada.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Canadian Wheat Board
  • Agri-Food
  • Policy
  • Farm
  • Neoliberal
  • Subsidies
  • Agriculture
  • Crisis

• Graduation date

  Fall 2013

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3998S

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.