Contemporary agriculture is not neutral, but rather rooted in a deeply colonial history---the AFF naturalizes the exact racial logic that perpetuates ongoing possession of Indigenous land, ultimately ignoring the root cause of their impacts.

Settler colonialism and agricultural industrialization in Canada

Racial domination is reproduced differently based on relations of inequality over time (Wolfe, 2013). For instance, the logic of labour exploitation of African American slaves2 is profoundly different from the Indigenous context in Canada wherein logics of assimilation and extermination were coded through institutional structures, like the Indian Act (e.g. through blood quantum discourse, any non-native ancestry compromises ones indigeneity (Lawrence, 2008)). Without such distinctions, their reproduction often gets lumped into general analyses of racism (Lawrence and Dua, 2005)—thus continually neglecting how these logics (of elimination on one hand, and exploitation on the other) shape the variegated racial formations we see today. In the Canadian case, land, resources, and people were seized by force to accrue capital and construct a society of settler colonial patriarchal domination specifically. In turn, settler colonial relations are distinct from but interrelated to (with different core logics than) other racial formations, and ought to be analyzed as such. The idea of the ‘frontier’—carried out by (largely male) ‘unlicensed mavericks’ and ‘explorers’ (fur traders, bounty hunters, gold-seekers, ranchers and farmers) rather than formal state procedures—was foundational for settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2013). Farmers have played a specific role: the land and freedom their communities gained in the ‘new world’ resulted directly from the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Maintaining that freedom and all its entitlements involves ongoing possession of native land as well as retaining a landless, dislocated labour population—queue racialized migrant farm workers. These processes don’t look or feel like they did during initial seizure: they are bureaucratic, culturally and politically insidious, and not necessarily physically violent. Of course, many current farm families were not affiliated with initial seizure. In fact, many were fleeing their own hardships in Europe. However, they, like many of us, have privileged from this founding culture, which derives from land specifically. The political-economic implications of settler colonialism are expressed in Canadian landholding. Historical accounts of dispossession reveal how English common law and private property rights buttressed land seizure. ‘When a settler preempted land and met the terms of preemption, he (almost invariably, he) acquired title to the land in fee simple’ (Harris, 2004, 177). This system of estate production ‘embodied a perpetual and indestructible right to the land potentially for ever, and gradually became normative’ (Harris, 2004). Only through these conditions, wherein land rights were unilaterally seized from Indigenous peoples and distributed to incoming white European families, was the patriarchally structured ‘family farm’ able to emerge (Friedmann, 1978, 2005). Alternatives to wage labour were made available to large numbers of settlers in Ontario through the ‘gift’ of large plots of land, tools, and seeds, through which the household unit would supply labour so as to recreate its productive and personal consumption—demonstrating the centrality of patriarchy for settler colonial agriculture (Government of Ontario, 2006). In fact, household (kinship) labour was central to the emergence and success of simple commodity production during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Friedmann, 1978). The household simple commodity structure was competitively superior to capitalist agriculture due to the interacting forces of kinship labour production, the availability of land, and technological adoption. Indeed, ‘the importance of the machinery lay not in its absolute reduction of costs of production, but in its reduction in the amount of labour required per acre harvested’ (Friedmann, 1978, 566). While acreage expansion needed the other two factors in order to be viable in North America, such expansion was nearly impossible for the average farmer in Europe at that time. The magnitude of land expansion in Canada was made possible through the settler colonial relation specifically, and was central to the success of the agricultural production system over the twentieth century. Moreover, much of the early success of commodity production in North America was due to ‘soil mining,' ‘in which colonists brought forth crops from the fertile virgin soil without replenishing it, and then moved on to new homesteads’ (Friedmann, 1978, 568). This was possible because of both (a) the breadth of settler colonial land seizure, and (b) the ways in which Indigenous peoples lived on and cared for the land prior to contact. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples were largely restricted from practicing agriculture (particularly communal reserve production) and participating freely and autonomously in the colonial economy (Daschuk, 2013; Carter, 1990). As settlement proceeded, industry and commerce advanced, which was backed by extensive government support and credit extension to the settler farm base (Nelson, 2014; Friedmann, 2005). Effectively, European settlement on Indigenous land was tethered to colonial (and patriarchal) economic investment—a relationship that has only evolved and strengthened over time. Today’s agricultural production system has been shaped by these conditions. Over the century that followed, industrialization took hold, marked by aggressive mechanization and capitalization across the food system. As production increased and corporate intervention rose, farmgate prices declined alongside rising farm debt (Qualman, 2001). This ‘cost-price squeeze’ has occurred cyclically, only emboldened by government support for land consolidation, capitalization and corporate integration (Troughton, 1989; Holtslander, 2015). Over this time, family farms have been driven to expand, where today the average farm in Canada is 778 acres, about 500 acres larger than in 1930 (Statistics Canada, 2011). At its root, this trajectory of agricultural production is built on and advanced by features specific to settler colonial domination. Colonial land settlement conditioned capitalization, and specifically, the collaborative deployment of public and private capital in agrifood industrialization. The colonial state had a vested interest in supporting distinctly colonial capital backed by colonial companies who developed the infrastructure and equipment—both on and off farm—that necessitated the prosperity of the settler economy (which hinged on the success of agriculture specifically). For instance, governments and universities across Canada have played a central role in extension research since the nineteenth century, supporting research and development for crop breeding and pesticide innovation to facilitate moncrop production (Reaman, 1970). Since settlement, government has worked alongside private colonial capital to facilitate crossborder trade and encourage increases in efficiency. Notably, these colonial dynamics are further tethered to the emergence of racist labour policies in agriculture, most notably, the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), deployed to address labour shortages within the context of a growing economic squeeze on farmers (Perry, 2012; Preibisch, 2007; Walia, 2010; Binford, 2009).

<<Figure 1 omitted>>

While these relationships have been bolstered by more recent modes of neoliberalization, they are not new. Since the nineteenth century, farmers have been concerned over, and organizing around, corporate concentration and ‘excessive profits captured by middlemen’ (Winson, 1993, 16). Neoliberalization is, however, adding fuel to a long-standing set of concerns for farmers: now more than ever before, private capital is siphoning off larger portions of profit and control along the production chain (National Farmers Union, 2013; Akram-Lodhi, 2007; McMichael, 2009; Guthman, 2008). To survive, then, farmers are managing greater and greater areas of land, far larger than their ancestors were ‘granted’ seven or eight generations ago (see Fig. 1).