The Role of Landscape Understandings, Transformations and the Political Economy of Agriculture in Attracting and Averting Young Adults from Farming in British Columbia

Recent critical studies in food geographies have attempted to make “powerful, important [and] disturbing connections between Western consumers and the distant strangers whose contributions to their lives [are] invisible, unnoticed, and largely unappreciated” (Cook et al., 2004, p. 642). These studies are based on the assumption that there is merely a disconnection between ‘Western’ consumption of ‘Non-Western’ production of food products. This thesis reports findings that display far more insidious disconnections at smaller geographic scales of production and consumption that have consequences for both local and global food systems. In British Columbia these disconnections take the form of pro-local food initiative discourses in spaces of consumption occurring at a time where declining numbers of young farmers are able to get access to the land, financial and other resources necessary to continue farming. This thesis builds on concepts within political ecology and land-use planning that suggests that several regions, primarily in the global north, are transitioning away from productive landscapes to either post-productive or multifunctional spaces. Using a qualitative research framework including ethnographic interviews, surveys and archival materials, the research supports the conclusion that farming is becoming increasingly inaccessible and unaffordable to young adults. This is partially based on agricultural production being pushed out of the landscape by other land-uses, but also because landscape and food products have become valued, supported and fetishized in separate ways in BC that create challenges for farms to stay viable.