Food Sovereignty in Canada: Creating Just and Sustainable Food Systems. Edited by Hanna Wittman, Annette Aurelie Desmarais, & Nettie Wiebe. Halifax, NS, and Winnipeg, MB: Fernwood, 2011. 219 pp. ISBN 9781552664438What kind of food system does Canada have? Is it just and sustainable? Is an alternative food system possible? The answers drawn from reading this collection are sobering and distressing on the first two counts, but hopeful on the last. This volume, along with an earlier collection by the same editors (Wittman, Desmarais, & Wiebe, 2010), grew out of a conference on "Food Sovereignty" held at the University of Saskatchewan in 2008. Many of the contributors are members of the National Farmers Union (NFU), a founding member of a transnational peasant and farmers' movement called La Via Campesina. This movement embraces a vision of food sovereignty in conscious opposition to the prevailing "neoliberal industrialized food system." Its ultimate aim is to "put the control of productive resources... in the hands of those who produce food" (p. 5)."Food sovereignty" embodies an alternative moral idea of what our food systems ought to be for: sustaining livelihoods, ecosystems, and lives. These social ends-which are economic ends-ought to be given precedence over profit-maximization. Achieving food sovereignty requires shifting our food systems away from linear profit-driven "food chains" towards multi-dimensional just and sustainable "food webs" (pp. 16-17). While there is little sustained theoretical analysis of the nature of capitalist profit-oriented agriculture, the readers of this journal will find that the idea of "food sovereignty" offers fertile ground for studying and mapping out the size and structure of the social economy and non-profit sectors in Canadian agriculture.The opening chapter by Weibe and Wipf outlines the recent history of the food sovereignty movement and the challenges, obstacles, and promise this holds for Canada. This movement emerged as a response to the impact of neoliberal globalization on agriculture and trade across the world in the 1980s. While its practical meaning might vary, the concept of food sovereignty can be broadly understood "as the right of nations and peoples to control their own food systems, including their own markets, production modes, food cultures and environment" (p. 4). Food security is rooted in power relations, and is thus fundamentally political. A paradigm shifttowards a food system based on food sovereignty depends on seeing how "sustainable food production and genuine food security are a function of community-based control over the food system" (p. 5).In chapter two, Qualman examines Canada's neoliberal food system and argues that any objective consideration of its effects makes the "strongest possible case for food sovereignty-based policies" (p. 21).Farmers increasingly rely on off-farm income, agricultural support programs, and debt-financed industrial expansion. One of the more alarming observations he makes is that while our agricultural system has generated three-quarters of a trillion dollars worth of agricultural goods since 1985, the net market income of farmers (excluding state transfers) was zero over the same period (p. 20). The state of our agricultural system is symptomatic of a classic staples trap that is ultimately turning farmers into sharecroppers and serfs who are increasingly vulnerable to being dispossessed of their land (p. 35).In chapter three, Beingessner's interview of Terry Boehm and Hilary Moore (former NFU president and current president of NFU Local 310 - Lanark County) provides insight into the practical meaning of the statistical realities that Qualman identifies for small- and medium-sized farmers and rural communities. Much of the discussion here (and throughout the book) revolves around the hard choices farmers face between adapting to the requirements of "capitalist agriculture" and using food sovereignty as the basis of constructing an alternative "mode of production. …