[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Eat Locally, Survive Globally

[Bill Totten]

National food policy should give priority to local agriculture over
globalized agribusiness

by Thomas Axworthy

The Toronto Star (April 27 2008)


Our mothers always told us to eat our greens. Today, the injunction
should be to eat green.

Eating is many things - a necessity, a pleasure, part of our culture -
but it is also an environmental act.

Industrial agriculture, the current structure of the North American food
system, is based on low prices to farmers, high usage of chemicals and
copious amounts of oil. These factors must be altered if Canada is to
have plentiful, safe and nutritious food in the future.

With oil now costing $120 (US) a barrel, we are entering an era of peak
oil prices. Gas is approaching the record of $1.26 (Canadian) a litre in
Ontario and many forecast it will reach $1.40 by the summer. This surge
in the cost of fossil fuels will have profound impacts in a host of
areas, not least in the way we organize our food supply.

Strawberries in December will soon become a luxury few can afford. It
takes 35 gallons of oil, or the equivalent of a barrel, to raise a steer
to go to market. Twenty per cent of American petroleum is consumed in
the producing and moving of food.

Michael Pollan, an award-winning journalist for The New York Times,
writes that America's "food chain is powered by fossil fuel".

Ingeborg Boyens' book, Another Season's Promise (2001), makes a similar
point about Canadian farming: "The amount of energy required to produce
a calorie of food is constantly increasing. At issue is not just the
food [sic: fuel?] required to do all the mechanical work on the farm:
energy is also needed to manufacture fertilizer and chemicals at the
front end of the process and to transport and refrigerate food in the
final stages of its delivery to the consumer".

Peak oil is already turning Canadians away from giant SUVs and towards
compact cars. We need a similar turn away from factory farms and towards
local food producers.

Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer who has authored more than forty
books imploring North America to re-establish a balance between ecology
and agriculture.

He begins with the sober reflection that the "qualities that make humans
the most astonishing of all the families of creatures - our
intelligence, our ambition, and our power - have made us also by far the
destructive of all creatures ..." Agriculture's mission is to "maintain
its people in health, and this applies equally to the people who eat and
to the people who produce the food".

Canada's current system of agriculture is far from healthy. But not so
long ago farming was at least in harmony with nature. Farms used to
waste nothing. My grandfather and uncle farmed grain in Saskatchewan but
their farm, like their neighbours', was mixed with lots of animals to
graze, provide manure and ultimately food. The sun provided energy to
the crops, the animals fed on the grass (what we now call free range)
and their waste, in turn, provided nutrients to plow back into the soil.

In contrast we now have mega-mechanical farms requiring huge amounts of
capital, chemicals and fossil fuel.

We have not had a national policy to help the family farm since Eugene
Whelan was minister of agriculture in the 1970s. Ever since, we have had
a policy of industrial farming, consolidation, agribusiness and
globalization. But this policy rests on the fatal flaw of cheap energy.
That era is over. We must return to a policy of local food through the
family farm.

The recent 2006 Statistics Canada Census on Agriculture paints an
unhappy picture of the stress that affects farm families. Canadians pay
twelve per cent of their national income on food, only half the
percentage their parents paid in the 1950s. As food prices have gone up,
farmers have not benefited. The census reveals that inflation has gone
up 8.6 per cent for farming inputs (machinery, chemicals, et cetera)
compared to only 1.7 per cent for products sold. In 2006, 37 per cent of
the farmers in the census had receipts under $25,000. Not surprisingly,
71 per cent of these farmers did not make enough to cover expenses.

With farmers squeezed by low prices and high costs, half of the farm
families had one or both partners working off the farm to make ends
meet, though farming is more than a full-time job. As a result, farmers
are leaving their profession in droves: in 1991 there were 390,000
Canadians in farming but by 2006 there were only 327,000. In 1991, there
were 78,000 young farmers taking over from their parents, in 2006 only
30,000. If the trend continues, who will be left to grow the food?

We need a national food policy that relies on the family farm to produce
local supplies.

School boards should purchase food for their lunch programs from local
farmers, just as Saint Lawrence College in Kingston is doing. Queen's
University should follow this example.

Agriculture Canada should encourage farmers' markets. Where possible,
individual consumers should buy direct from the farmer. Regulations
should be eased to accommodate the 100-mile diet.

Most of all we need an alliance between the city and the farm. Earth Day
was celebrated last week with marches and park cleanups. A month
earlier, Earth Hour saw hundreds of thousands of Torontonians turning
off the lights. These are welcome symbols but we need daily action.

One way is to follow Wendell Berry's advice and "eat responsibly". When
we purchase food we should ask: "Where does it come from? How was it
made? What chemicals were used? Methods of slaughter?"

Denmark is experimenting with a barcode that can tell consumers about
the history of the produce as well as the price. We need the same here.

Industrial agriculture has brought us mad-cow disease, soil erosion,
pollution by toxic chemicals, depletion of aquifers, animal abuse, and
long-distance transportation of food stuffs. This model must be
transformed into sustainable agriculture.

The local food movement is a start. Every day could be Earth Day if we
started to eat responsibly.
_____

Thomas S Axworthy is chair for the Study of Democracy at Queen's University.

Copyright (c) Toronto Star 1996-2008

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/27/8551/


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/