Researcher urges cautious approach to local food policy development

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

by SUSAN MANN

Local food policies must coexist with broader national and provincial government policy objectives and shouldn’t become the main focus, says a researcher with the George Morris Centre.

Senior research associate Al Mussell says the other agricultural objectives governments must pay attention to include environmental stewardship and more open, liberalized trade. Mussell discussed local food policy in an article called: “Has the Market Failed Local Food? Some Balance for Perspective” released in the centre’s subscription publication Agri-Food Policy Matters Quarterly.

Mussell says Canada is a large country and “a lot of our industries are export oriented. We do have this problem as Canadians that we have this massive agricultural productivity base and a relatively small population to feed.”

One of the impacts of that fact on agricultural policy is Canadian businesses need to be able to export. On the flip side, Canada’s northern climate means farmers here can’t grow certain foods Canadians like to eat and those products must be imported.

“We can’t let local food and our interest in that arena crowd out the realities of trade that face us,” he says.

But that is happening now as some provincial governments, including Ontario’s, aren’t talking a lot about competitiveness in export, food processing or the agricultural industry. “I don’t think you hear a lot about product quality and ensuring that we are the best of the best.”

Instead, Mussell says, he hears the government talk a lot about the need for getting more local food into hospitals or having more roof top gardens.

Local food and marketing local food has been around for a very long time; long before “we started hearing about this as government policy. We need to give credit to farmers and other business people that have been able to set up really nice marketing programs around local out of their own initiative,” he says.

Once governments start introducing policies to take people in that direction there are problems, including how much local food is needed. “The implication right now is it’s never going to be enough,” Mussell notes. BF