Content area
Full text
Feminist and environmentalist in spirit, Women Working the NAFTA Food Chain is an example of a collaborative project between academics, activists and popular educators. It examines the links between women in the food industry in Canada, the US and Mexico and articulates the commitment of its contributors to bring together and share experiences of women workers across national boundaries. At the same time as it offers an alternative framework for resisting NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, it also provides an accessible exploration of the connections between women, food, work and globalization.
Women Working the NAFTA Food Chain contains 14 chapters that have been divided into three parts. The 15 contributors examine the impact of colonialism, trade agreements, government policies (especially the US government's), and corporate strategies on the movement of food as well as production and consumption of food. The contributors include: Canadian feminists Lauren Baker, Ann Eyerman, Debbie Field, Harriet Friedmann, Jan Kainer, Egla Martinez-Salazar, Deborah Moffett, Mary Lou Morgan, and Ester Reiter; Mexican feminists Kirstin Appendini, Antonieta Barron, Ofelia Perez Pena, and Maria Dolores Villagomez; and US feminist Fran Ansley.
These women's voices are supplemented by Canadian editor Deborah Barndt's comprehensive and lucid introductory essay that binds the chapters tightly into a solid and coherent whole. In this essay, Barndt outlines the complex interplay of economic inequalities between North and South as well as between men and women, especially along the lines of class and racial divisions. Using anecdotes to describe the research process involved in compiling the book's articles, Barndt cogently demonstrates that the links between the book's contributors transcend national boundaries. As the book's title suggests, globalization cuts across age, class, gender, and race barriers, and many women...