Tony Weis

Western University Canada, Geography, Faculty Member

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My research focuses on the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of agro-food systems. It is broadly located at the nexus of political ecology and critical agrarian studies, and increasingly stretches into the realm of animal geographies due to my focus on industrial livestock production.

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Richie Nimmo

The University of Manchester

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Yannis Hamilakis

Brown University

Manuel Tironi

Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

Simon Springer

The University of Newcastle

Sergey Sokolovskiy

Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology Russian Academy of Science

Timothy Morton

Rice University

Derek H Alderman

University of Tennessee Knoxville

Ian G Baird

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Francisca Noguerol

University of Salamanca

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Papers by Tony Weis

Confronting Meatification

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Apr 16, 2020

A bitter pill: smallholder responses to the new green revolution prescriptions in northern Ghana

International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology, Mar 10, 2020

Through a qualitative case study from the Northern Region of Ghana, this paper examines smallhold... more Through a qualitative case study from the Northern Region of Ghana, this paper examines smallholders' perceptions of environmental change and contemporary Green Revolution prescriptions promoted by foreign donors, NGOs and the state. These prescriptions seek to commercialise and intensify production in Ghana through increasing use of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and faster-growing seed varieties. We argue that many smallholders are reluctantly adopting the inputs and techniques of the Green Revolution in response to erratic rainfall, shortened growing seasons, and drier soils with diminished fertility, as well as other structural constraints such as increasing competition for land. Farmers' responses are also influenced by social inequalities, as gender and wealth differences affect access to agro-inputs and participation in farm contracts. Female farmers are especially disadvantaged in adoption, which is serving to widen disparities. However, even those farmers who are following the Green Revolution prescriptions are not uncritical of its impacts, as they commonly described their decision to adhere to this technical package as a short-term trade-off to meet subsistence needs at the expense of worsening soil health and increasing debt.

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Food Consumption and its Impact on Cardiovascular Disease: Importance of Solutions Focused on the Globalized Food System

Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), 2015

No funding and conflicts of interest exist among the authors related to this paper. DUALITY OF IN... more No funding and conflicts of interest exist among the authors related to this paper. DUALITY OF INTEREST STATEMENT Dr. Ronald Krauss reports holding grants from the US National Dairy Council and the Almond Board of California. Dr. Miguel Martinez reports a research contract with Danone to support research on yogurt in the SUN cohort, and a departmental grant from the International Nut Council Dr. Russell de Souza reports serving as an external resource person on trans and saturated fats to the World Health Organization's Nutrition Guidelines Advisory Group.

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It's All for Sale: The Control of Global Resources

... A study by the United Nations in 2002 revealed networks of rogue army officers and so-calledw... more

La Via Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants

Three-quarters of the world's poor are subsistence farmers. A significant minority have forged on... more Three-quarters of the world's poor are subsistence farmers. A significant minority have forged one of the largest transnational activist networks of our time in order to ensure that peasants, indigenous, and other rural people are not erased from the global equation and instead to demand that their voices be taken into account. They have also articulated an alternative path to development centered on "land, food, dignity, and life." Annette Desmarais's La Via Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants is at once an authoritative and authentic treatment of this remarkable surge in peasant activism at the dawn of the 21 st century. La Via Campesina means the "peasant road" or "peasant way." It is a global network of small and medium farmers, agricultural workers, fisherpeople, and rural organizations encompassing women's and indigenous agricultural groups, claiming to represent tens of millions across the planet. Thus, it is probably the largest single organization resisting neoliberal globalization today, and particularly those targeting the free trade regime. Desmarais demonstrates, however, that the Via Campesina is much more than just a reactionary or defensive protest movement. These activists have collectively articulated a rural, socially-embedded, counter-hegemonic alternative to growth-obsessed liberalism. This program aims to preserve and revalorize peasant ways of life and identities while simultaneously proposing alternative peasant roads to sustainable development wherein the peasantry would be a vital socioeconomic class. The book begins by situating the Via Campesina within the current globalization debate and juxtaposes their brand of grassroots, democratic, and direct activism to the more staid, NGO-led "civil society" organizations. The author credits this global peasant network with putting the concept of food sovereignty on the international and many domestic agendas. She then analyzes the enclosure of agriculture under the most recent round of capitalist expansion, and asks "which way forward" for development praxis in this anti-peasant terrain where, until very recently, globalization's losers have been largely ignored or, when they question the subsumption of all societal values to that of market efficiency, were chastised with Thatcher's mantra "there is no alternative" (TINA). The rest of the book answers the question of which way forward by descriptively analyzing the Via Campesina and their challenge to the TINA's hegemony. It shows how diverse strands of rural activists and organizations forged common ground and solidarity as "People of the Land", and how they have carved out an autonomous space independent of those who had

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Agrarian Decline and Breadbasket Dependence in the Caribbean: Confronting Illusions of Inevitability

Labour, capital and society, 2003

Cet article situe le déclin agraire de la région dans le contexte d'une transformation plus large... more Cet article situe le déclin agraire de la région dans le contexte d'une transformation plus large de la production et de l'intégration du marché mondial. Le but de l'article est de démystifier les forces du marché omniprésentes et écrasantes que confrontent les petits producteurs agricoles des Caraïbes, en attirant l'attention sur les intérêts puissants qui sous-tendent les changements actuels. L'analyse est fondée sur la conviction que la petite agriculture constitue une activité productive et une source de dignité dans la région et, par conséquent, devrait être réorganisée et revalorisée au lieu d'être abandonnée à un fatalisme injustifié.

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Hazards ahead? Potential pitfalls in the surge of plant-based alternatives to animal foods

Routledge eBooks, Nov 18, 2022

Re-meatification

Routledge eBooks, Nov 18, 2022

Agrarian Decline and Breadbasket Dependence in the Caribbean: Confronting Illusions of Inevitability

Labour, capital and society, 2003

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Sustainabable Development in Canada and the USA: The Implications, Actors and Responses

The book is not available online here. If you are affiliated with The University of Western Ontar... more

To Raze or Renovate?: Developing Countries and the Struggle with the WTO

Ontario's Living Legacy

Envisioning Post-Plantation Agriculture

Meatification

Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies

Animal functionality and interspecies relations in regenerative agriculture

Routledge Handbook of Sustainable and Regenerative Food Systems, 2020

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Agriculture from Imperialism to Neoliberalism

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2019

World agriculture is marked by extreme imbalances that are among the most durable economic legaci... more World agriculture is marked by extreme imbalances that are among the most durable economic legacies of European imperialism. Many of the world’s poorest countries in the tropics are net food importers despite having large shares of their labor force engaged in agriculture and large amounts of their best arable land devoted to agro-export commodities. This commodity dependence has deep roots in waves of dispossession, the establishment of plantations, and the subjugation of peasantries to increasing competitive pressures at the same time as they were progressively marginalized in landscapes. On the other hand, many of the world’s wealthiest countries, including Europe and other temperate regions with heavy European settlement, supply a large share of all agricultural exports despite having extremely small shares of their labor force engaged in agriculture. The rise of the world’s temperate breadbaskets is also steeped in the violence of imperialism, and the sweeping enclosure of vast and rich agricultural frontiers by European settler farmers at the expense of indigenous peoples, which brought immense productivity gains that were later amplified by input-intensive industrialization. Appreciating the roots of these imbalances helps cut through the myths of comparative advantage that shroud global market integration and center agriculture and food in struggles to build more equitable and sustainable societies.

The Meatification of Diets

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The Ecological Hoofprint

Perspectives critiques sur la souveraineté alimentaire – Centre tricontinental

Perspectives critiques sur la souveraineté alimentaire

Les visions de la souverainete alimentaire ont joue un role tres important dans le renouvellement... more Les visions de la souverainete alimentaire ont joue un role tres important dans le renouvellement des mouvements sociaux, larges et divers, autour de la necessite de changements radicaux dans les systemes agroalimentaires. Le manque d’interet temoigne a de nombreuses questions essentielles – origines du concept, articulation avec les approches basees sur les droits, etc. – laisse, depuis peu, la place a l’autocritique.

Confronting Meatification

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Apr 16, 2020

A bitter pill: smallholder responses to the new green revolution prescriptions in northern Ghana

International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology, Mar 10, 2020

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Food Consumption and its Impact on Cardiovascular Disease: Importance of Solutions Focused on the Globalized Food System

Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), 2015

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It's All for Sale: The Control of Global Resources

... A study by the United Nations in 2002 revealed networks of rogue army officers and so-calledw... more

La Via Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants

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