Madelaine Shoemaker, Dalhousie University

Investor Strategies and Ultra-Processed Foods in the Net-Zero Transition: Transition finance has emerged as a central mechanism for steering high‑emitting sectors toward net‑zero pathways, yet the global food system, responsible for up to one‑quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, remains comparatively underexamined within this agenda. This chapter investigates how governance actors, corporations, and investors are beginning to position ultra‑processed foods (UPFs) within emerging transition‑finance frameworks. UPFs constitute over half of caloric intake in many high‑income countries and are associated not only with significant negative health outcomes, but also with disproportionate environmental impacts, including elevated energy use, land‑use pressures, and biodiversity loss. As recent research demonstrates that UPFs contribute materially to dietary emissions and energy demand, their reduction represents a critical but largely unexplored transition lever within sustainable diet pathways. Drawing on literature at the intersection of financialization, nutrition, and food‑system transitions, the chapter identifies a critical gap: while scholars have examined the financialization of commodity markets, farmland, and food manufacturing, little work has explored how transition finance could reshape capital allocation decisions in the food sector—particularly regarding companies heavily invested in UPF production. In response to growing governance signals, including the 2025 Paris Declaration on Business and Nutrition 2030, this chapter conducts a qualitative document analysis of two actor groups central to financing food‑system transitions: (1) annual and sustainability reports from the ten largest global food and beverage manufacturers, and (2) ESG and stewardship reports from major global asset managers, supplemented with ownership data in key UPF‑producing firms. The analysis asks: How, and to what extent, do companies and investors discuss UPFs, their climate impacts, and their role in sustainable diet transitions? By comparing corporate and investor discourse, the chapter assesses whether UPFs are recognized as material to transition pathways, whether capital allocation strategies reflect emerging nutrition‑and‑climate metrics, and where substantial gaps persist. The findings offer actionable insights for investors, policymakers, and industry actors seeking to align financing decisions with credible net‑zero and healthy‑diet objectives.

Kartik Mann, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University

Sustainable Agriculture through the Generations: Organic Agriculture, Agroecology, and the Politics of Regulatory Codification in Canada, France, and Japan: The organic agriculture movement’s founding generation embedded an ambitious normative vision: health, ecology, fairness, and care as inseparable foundations of sustainable food production. But what formal law actually inherited was an input-substitution logic: shaped by consumer demand and corporate lobbying, and resistant to the transformative socio-ecological integration which the founding generation envisioned.

The proposed presentation (based on my master’s thesis) argues that the selective and inadequate legal codification of ‘organic’ and ‘agroecological’ principles – as the two most representative movements for ‘sustainable agriculture’ (across Canada, France, and Japan) – is an outcome shaped by the political economy factors working behind the scenes in each jurisdiction. Further, the “generations” frame reveals something which comparative analysis alone may leave obscured – that each successive layer of regulatory codification has transmitted less of the normative vision of the founding generation, than the last.

I will draw on a comparative analysis of, inter alia, the Canadian General Standards Board’s organic standards, France’s 2014 Law for the Future of Agriculture, and Japan’s MIDORI Strategy for Sustainable Food Systems. This will primarily be read through a political-economy framework in the agricultural context (van der Ploeg, 2021), structural barriers to agroecological integration in Canada (Laforge et al., 2021), and a comparative analysis of organic regulatory regimes worldwide (Seufert et al., 2017).

The generational attrition in sustainable agriculture principles includes neoliberal delegation to corporate-dominated standard-setting in Canada; lobbying-induced legislative dilution in France; and technocratic productivism displacing domestic agroecological movements in Japan. Across all three jurisdictions the pattern is consistent: sustainable agriculture frameworks have been formulated to essentially accommodate existing commodity structures. The attrition also carries a labour dimension which the existing literature has not adequately addressed. Organic certification law’s systematic silence on worker conditions enables value extraction across generations of racialised migrant agricultural workers, whose labour sustains certified organic agriculture, while they remain legally invisible (Klassen 2024).

Against this pattern, I will contrast traditional knowledge frameworks – including the Mi’kmaq principle of Msit No’kmaq and Masanobu Fukuoka’s philosophy of shizen nōhō – as normative resources which formal agricultural law has yet to recognise, but which articulate precisely the relational, long-horizon vision which organic agriculture’s founding generation sought to institutionalise, and which regulatory codification has steadily narrowed.