The People’s Food Policy Project recommends a fix for Canada’s broken food system
Published in Alternatives Journal, Spring 2011
by Margaret Webb
It’s a face that I will remember for a long time. The farmer, utterly frustrated by Canada’s food system, could no longer muster the will to tell his story. He and his wife were taking part in a community “kitchen-table talk,” coordinated by the People’s Food Policy Project (PFPP). He gazed off at nothing as his wife explained how they had taken over his parents’ farm in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley and built it into a thriving business to pass on to their children. They once had 20 to 30 wholesalers and retailers vying for their produce; now, thanks to corporate concentration in the food business, they have two. That leaves them little choice but to accept the lower prices offered. They must also transport their produce some 500 kilometres to a supermarket distribution centre in Moncton where it is repacked and shipped back to supermarkets just kilometers from their farm. But what really hurt was etched all over that farmer’s face: the vegetables they had taken such pride in growing were, by then, a week old, and their neighbours didn’t see the value in buying that local produce.
Their story – of how Canada’s food system serves corporate interests to the detriment of food producers and food quality – emerged as a major theme at “kitchen table talks” held in communities across the country, coordinated by the PFPP. Launched in November 2008, this citizen’s coalition has a two-fold mission of initiating a national conversation on food and engaging citizens, rather than politicians, in developing Canada’s first national food policy, which it will present to the federal government this spring. The chances of the federal government implementing the PFPP’s policy are about as likely as Wal-Mart declaring itself a nonprofit, but the process of developing that policy has educated, enraged and engaged thousands of Canadians, and kick started a national food movement. Both the movement and its take on food policy are already becoming difficult for federal politicians to ignore.
There has not been a national conversation on this topic since the People’s Food Commission held hearings in 75 communities across Canada between 1977 and 1980. The resulting report, The Land of Milk and Money, criticized how Canada’s food system was failing producers, eaters, health and the environment. Unfortunately, not much has changed since its release as subsequent governments mostly ignored its findings.
Some 30 years later, the PFPP is pushing the issue one step further, by coming up with a specific policy. It is working on a shoe-string budget of $250,000 from, principally, Heifer International Canada, but also Inter Pares and USC Canada, and enjoys coordinating support from Food Secure Canada. It has a volunteer management committee, a team of policy writers, some 40 volunteer animators and just one employee. Yet, by October 2010, they had gathered input from more than a 1000 Canadians, produced 10 discussion papers packed with policy recommendations, secured David Suzuki’s endorsement and launched another round of cross-country talks to seek additional feedback to fine tune the final policy, to be released this spring.
I sensed the process of developing that policy would prove more politically potent than the policy itself when I attended my second kitchen-table talk in Toronto. That day, more than 100 participants packed the room for an all-day discussion. Animators invited attendees to share their stories and suggest ways the food system could work better. The exchanges – often personal, uncensored and emotional – provided a stark lesson on how the current food system impoverishes producers and sickens eaters. The ideas for a fix flowed fast and furious as stakeholders, ranging from food justice workers to food-bank users, educators, health-care workers, urban and rural farmers, activists and eaters, voiced their concerns about access to good clean food.
Challenged to describe a food system that would serve all of their needs, participants radically expanded their understanding of how a food system works and pushed beyond the prevailing narrow business definition of food – as a commodity that is traded to maximize private profits. They suggested that food should serve multiple functions – to improve health, sustain the environment, strengthen communities, and return fair wages to food producers, among others. Many suggested that food should be a public good, that a just food system should make healthy food accessible, affordable and universal, by bringing more food into the public sphere, for example, through universal baby-bonus-style healthy-food dollars, school food programs, community gardening and non-profit community food markets.
Over the course of a day, the kitchen table talk fired up a fierce sense of ownership over food, that citizens should not only control the food system but it should serve the needs of eaters first and protect the food producers who serve us, rather than protecting the interests of giant businesses primarily focused on filling their coffers. I could imagine this meeting multiplied by 10, by 100, by 1000 and, suddenly, there would be enough citizens who care sufficiently about regaining control of food to staff the democratic food councils at federal, provincial and community levels that the PFPP is calling for.
The energy was intense, optimistic and constructively angry. It focused on demanding and getting change. I went away feeling that I had witnessed something monumental – the birth of a national food movement that would make food a political issue and force it, finally, onto the plates of federal policymakers. As Debbie Field, executive director of Toronto’s FoodShare and a food activist, told me later, “We will get a national food policy and we will get a national food nutrition policy. It’s just a matter of when.”
This nascent food movement’s momentum has caught the attention of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA), which represents 200,000 Canadian farmers as well as big agribusiness. The CFA is developing its own, though radically different, national food strategy. It will emphasize long-term development of food business and food markets, nationally and internationally. The PFPP’s food sovereignty focus – that the food system should be re-localized and democratically controlled by citizen councils – will likely elicit great guffaws in industrial farming circles who want things both ways, access to foreign markets yet for Canadians to buy Canadian first. Yet the co-strategist on the CFA’s national food strategy, Neil Currie, says he is “very excited” about the project’s work. “We’ve been struggling to engage the consuming public in these issues. But they’re getting social media, they’re getting mainstream coverage, they’re getting people talking about food issues and strategies. We look forward to engaging with them.”
Continuing to involve Canadians in food issues is necessary if the PFPP is to achieve its goal of a national food policy because the federal government is unlikely to embrace it. Based on its 10 discussion papers, the PFPP will call for sweeping changes intended to overhaul the current food system. To cherry pick a few of the more radical recommendations, governments would take food out of trade agreements; shift agricultural support to small-scale, organic and environmentally sustainable farms; and return the corporate-dominated, export-oriented fishing industry to small owner-operated fleets that would supply local food markets.
As sound as those recommendations are for human and ecosystem health, and long-term prosperity, the PFPP failed to take into account the present reality of the food system in its plans for sweeping change – that factory farms, imported food and industrial fishing now supply most of our food, and that small farms and local fishers, gutted by the system, cannot easily be replaced. Cutting the apron strings to Big Food cannot happen overnight, but the discussion papers, at least, present no transition plan and too little detail for government bureaucrats to readily adopt the policy. And many food experts believe that federal and provincial agricultural departments lack the expertise to transition to a more sustainable and democratic food system.
Instead of hammering out a specific food policy, the PFPP may have achieved more by developing broad policy objectives in an accessible and readable document that would educate additional Canadians about the need for food action. Still, the PFPP created a movement that is changing the way Canadians view food and that new perspective will shape any future food policy.
The federal Liberals, NDP and Greens are responding by developing food policies that bolster their platforms for the next election. Former Health Minister Carolyn Bennett, who co-leads the Liberal strategy, gets the PFPP’s message that food should serve multiple functions. She has called for a “joined up” food policy that would cut across government jurisdictions (because food affects them all) as well as a high-level cabinet committee to coordinate action on food.
NDP agricultural critic Alex Atamanenko writes that “trade agreements have taken a heavy toll on our family farms. They have also made us more and more dependent on imported food and, as a result, we have basically lost control of our domestic food supply.”
The federal Green Party’s food strategy, in place for the last election, echoes many of the PFPP’s ideas, calling for regional food self-sufficiency, fair trade, and a shift in agricultural support to environmentally sustainable, organic and small-scale farming and fishing.
The Conservative government has repeatedly presented its Growing Forward agricultural policy as a food policy. But it only pays lip service to health and environmental objectives, and is little more than a repackaging of agricultural support programs that have long frustrated farmers and contributed to the current sorry state of food in Canada. It focuses on increasing exports of food rather than improving sustainability, self sufficiency or accessibility of healthy foods, which is central to the PFPP’s expected policy.
In the face of that policy gulf, the PFPP’s success will depend on continuing the process of energizing and mobilizing Canada’s emerging national food movement so that it will continue the process of pressuring government to introduce a people-focused multi-functional national food policy.
The likely home for that work will be Food Secure Canada, which provides the institutional support for the PFPP, and has itself been energized by the effort. As Cathleen Kneen, the PFPP’s lead strategist and chair of Food Secure Canada, says, “The main contribution of the People’s Food Policy is that ordinary people are starting to realize that policy is something they can make. It’s not just something governments do. It has gotten people to think about the structure of the food system and what role government plays in that system. It really is an exercise in developing a more informed and robust citizenship.”
Emphasis on the active verb “is,” as in, to be continued.
Margaret Webb is the author of Apples to Oysters: A Food Lover’s Tour of Canadian Farms, which won a silver at the 2009 National Culinary Book Awards and wrote the 2009 Toronto Star feature series, “Crisis on the Farm.”