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While rates of food insecurity among various sectors of the Canadian population are well documented, food insecurity among post-secondary students, as a particularly vulnerable population, has emerged in recent years as an area of research. Based on a survey of 548 students in the 2015/16 school year, this exploratory study examines the extent of food insecurity among undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Manitoba. Our study revealed that 35.3 percent of survey respondents faced food insecurity according to a 6-item survey. Of these students, 23.5 percent experienced moderate food insecurity, while 11.8 percent were deemed to be severely food insecure. Using chi-square tests and regression analysis, we compare these rates with various demographic indicators to assess which students appear to be at greater risk of food insecurity, factors contributing to food insecurity, and its effect on their student experience, their health, and their lives in general. In contemplating funding for post-secondary institutions and increases in tuition fees, provincial governments need to consider how this will affect student food insecurity.

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reviewed by John RiddellThe neoliberal assault that has driven labour into retreat over the last two decades has also sparked the emergence of a peasants' international, La Vía Campesina. Rooted in 56 countries across five continents, this alliance has mounted a sustained and spirited defense of peasant cultivation, community, and control of food production. Annette Desmarais's book La Vía Campesina has given us a probing and perceptive account of the world peasant movement's origins, outlook, and activities. ("La Vía Campesina" means "Peasant Path" or "Peasant Way," but see "Peasant or Farmer?" on page 6.)The movement began as a response to globalization, which Mexican peasant leader Alberto Gomez has defined as "a global offensive against the countryside … against small producers and family farmers" whose existence poses a barrier to "an industrialized countryside."Such coercive industrialization involves "delinking" food production from consumption through the intrusion of agribusiness corporations that usurp different stages of production: provision of inputs, food processing, transportation, and marketing, Desmarais says. Industrial products replace farmer inputs: chemicals in place of manure, hybrid seeds in place of farmers' seed stocks. Many peasants are shackled to corporate production contracts, which, Desmarais notes, now control about 90% of U.S. poultry farms."Farmers are no longer considered producers of knowledge," Desmarais says, but rather as consumers of the marketed wisdom of agribusiness, mere cogs in the gears of corporate industry.