AUGUST 2010
CELEBRATING 130 YEARS AS CANADA’S PREMIER HORTICULTURAL PUBLICATION
VOLUME 60 NUMBER 08
Food and the city A national food strategy could bridge the urban-rural divide By Karen Davidson A national food strategy sounds as commonsense as apple pie. After all, doesn’t it speak to the very essence of a nation’s security, the ability to feed itself? It’s already attracted Michael Ignatieff and the federal Liberals who announced their policy in the Holland Marsh. The NDP’s Jack Layton was not far behind with a “Food for Thought” report in June, emphasizing food sovereignty for Canada. Since winter, the concept of a national food strategy has retreated to air-conditioned boardrooms, far away from the blaze of a harvest sun. Yet a handful of farm leaders are putting flesh on a plan whose timing may intersect upcoming federal and provincial elections. “A national food strategy is going to be the next biggest thing since Medicare,” says Neil Currie, Executive Director, Ontario Federation of Agriculture and Co-Chair, National Food Strategy Working Group which met June 23. “It’s a social policy whose time has come due to the implications for health, energy and the environment.” One of the members of that working group is Peter Dorfman, Manager Food Strategy for Toronto Public Health. He says that urbanites are rethinking their relationships with food and realizing that food is about more than common table. It’s about community. The Toronto Food Policy Council is emulating other international cities -- London,
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www.thegrower.org P.M. 40012319
Amsterdam and Seoul, for example – in crafting a local plan. For a glimpse into their thinking, look to the Toronto Food Policy Council which released a
report in May called “Cultivating Food Connections: Toward a Healthy and Sustainable Food System for Toronto.” (www.toronto.ca/foodconnections)
The premise is that social policy has destroyed all the natural connectivity between food, environment, health and community. What our ancestors knew is coming true
again: local food production can drive an economy. “Food is cheap,” says Dorfman, stealing the farmer’s line. Continued on page 3
So much hangs in the balance as Greg Dries surveys his potato crop near Leamington, Ontario. Will weather cooperate? Is there enough water in the irrigation pond to combat hot conditions for proper set of tubers? And most importantly, will prices hold for his early-dug crop? A national food strategy could help diminish his worries as Dries ponders these perennial questions for the annual crop. Photo by Korinne Robertson.
$450 million helps bail out water-logged prairie farmers By Karen Davidson Agriculture minister Gerry Ritz dusted financial aid on prairie farmers in early July to ease the pain of eight million unseeded acres and another two million damaged due to excessive rain. About 15 per cent of prairie acres won’t produce this year. The rescue package will make $30 per acre available to farmers with cheques expected in the mail in early August. That payment will top up any crop insurance individual farmers might have. The announcement of emergency funds under AgriRecovery coincided with the federal-provincial agriculture ministers’ meeting in Saskatoon
and a personal tour of field damage by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It’s not just grains and oilseed producers receiving the cash. Horticultural producers are also eligible to receive emergency funds for asparagus, strawberries and other crops under water. “It’s important to distinguish that this emergency ad hoc payment is not a safety net payment,” says Mark Wales, Chair Safety Nets, OFVGA. “Business risk management is an unrelated issue. It’s designed to deal with farmers who are having a difficult time getting their cost-of-production from the marketplace.”
Business risk management was on the agenda at the federalprovincial agriculture ministers’ meeting where, for the first time, federal leaders agreed that AgriStability is not working and needs to be fixed. “That’s a big leap forward,” says Wales. “We need to shift them further and get the changes we need retroactive to 2008.” Nationally, horticulture has suffered a slow drip of many negative impacts on sustainability. To name a few, they include rising wage rates, increased government legislation and more recently, hiked electricity rates. Ontario commodity groups are alarmed that Hydro One is installing smart
meters to bill for higher rates during daytime hours. The concept is to encourage consumers to conserve electricity by shifting their usage to non-peak hours of 9 pm to 7 am, but that means higher electricity bills for agricultural businesses that run around the clock. “Potato growers use lots of hydro to ventilate their crop in the first month or so after harvest,” says Don Brubacher, General Manager, Ontario Potato Producers Board. “Our growers can’t run ventilation at night only. It’s a huge impact.” These are the spiraling costs that continue to make business risk management so important.