Abstract
This chapter challenges the economism of contemporary macroeconomic policy through an environmental and gendered lens. It uses a feminist political economy framework to analyze newly released statistical data on international trade flows from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), as well as statistics on Canadian agricultural production. The analysis moves through three levels of inquiry – macro, meso, and micro – to examine the interaction of neoliberal policy, gender, and environment. At the macro level, it questions the neoliberal discourse of “efficiency” by using trade data to illustrate the environmental inefficiencies of the current trade regime, especially the phenomenon of “trade for trade’s sake”. It links the neoliberal policy regime to its environmental consequences at the meso level of Canadian agricultural production. Finally, the gendered effects of neoliberalism are illustrated by examining the situation of Canadian farm women. Although macro-level policies are often portrayed as “gender neutral”, their unique effects on farm women’s lives are elucidated using the concept of social reproduction.
This chapter is based on a paper presented at the “Gender and Climate Change: Women, Research, and Action” conference, 16 September 2011, at Monash University in Prato, Italy. The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Regina Public Interest Research Group (RPIRG).
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Notes
- 1.
Stirling (2001) has defined the “family farm” as “a type of farming in which families own all or most of their productive capital – land, buildings, machinery, and livestock – and do all or most of the productive work themselves. Typically they live in the communities where they farm, their farms are not large, and there are many of them” (p. 248). In a similar vein, Furtan has defined “commercial farms” in opposition to the family farm, because in a commercial farm “the operator is engaged in less of the ownership, management, risk and/or reward of the farming operation even though farm operators and their families continue to provide the labour to the agricultural production operation” (Furtan 2006, p. 10).
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Fletcher, A.J. (2013). From “Free” Trade to Farm Women: Gender and the Neoliberal Environment. In: Alston, M., Whittenbury, K. (eds) Research, Action and Policy: Addressing the Gendered Impacts of Climate Change. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5518-5_8
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