The Battlefields: History and Challenges of Organic Agriculture in Quebec

Despite its critical acclaim, organic farming remains marginal in Quebec. Its share of our food basket barely exceeds 2% and has not increased significantly over the past 10 years. How can this phenomenon be explained? In Les champs de bataille, Roméo Bouchard takes up his pilgrim's staff again to castigate agricultural policies, the union monopoly, and the industry's stranglehold on the agri-food sector, which he believes are at the root of this stagnation.

Paying tribute to the work of the pioneers of ecological and local agriculture, the author traces the evolution of the organic sector in Quebec and exposes the challenges facing today's alternative farmers. Lack of political will and adequate financial means to support their activities, unaffordable land prices and rigid constraints of the Act respecting the preservation of agricultural land and activities, imposition of industrial health standards and harassment by government inspectors, absence of corporate organization to defend their interests, questioning of the usefulness and credibility of organic certification: artisanal farmers, abandoned to their fate, can definitely count only on themselves.

In the wake of the Pronovost report, the former president of the Union Paysanne insists on the urgency of making a political choice in favor of organic farming, the only agriculture of the future for our environment and our health. It is time to give farmers back the place they should never have lost.

This book is the work not only of one of the most ardent defenders of small-scale agriculture, but also of one of the greatest thinkers of our agriculture "tout court".
— Jean-Martin Fortier, extract from the preface