The Rural Voice, 2003-07, Page 12Guest Column
In Europe theg produce food, we produce raw materials
Jim Fitzgerald is a Stratford -based
govern-ment policy consultant for
the dairy industry and a former
editor of The Rural Voice.
By Jim Fitzgerald
The current devastating crisis
facing the red meat industry over one
mad cow has brought to the surface a
number of issues that have been
festering for years about the safety,
price, and quality of our agriculture
and food supply in North America
and particularly Canada. (12 years
ago, The Rural Voice was one of the
first non-scientific magazines to
detail the startling connection
between sheep scrapies, mad cow
disease and the devastating JCD
disease in humans. And we were
highly criticized at the time for
advocating the banning of feeding
animal parts back to animals.)
One of the important issues that
needs to be addressed is: is
agriculture an industry like car
manufacturing, or are we food
producers? Over my nearly five
decades of involvement in the
agricultural sector, I've watched as
the introduction of technology and
chemistry on the farm has led to huge
gains in productivity at the farm
giving cheaper and cheaper raw
product prices to processors and
retailers. But at the same time this
pursuit of "efficiency" has decimated
the rural areas, stripping them of
people and closing century old
institutions, farmers continue on the
treadmill of spending more and more
on inputs while getting less and less
for their products.
But is that what the consumer
wants? Canadians now, not only have
the least expensive food not only in
the world, but probably the cheapest
in centuries. The average Canadian
family of four now spends more in a
month on their cable TV and internes
service than they do on their monthly
dairy and meat food basket!
This and other events in the past
several years is slowly bringing a
realization that North American
agriculture, and in particular
Canada's, may have reached a
8 THE RURAL VOICE
crossroads in how we feed our
people. We've lost our trust of
science.
I didn't realize how far we have
drifted from food production into
industrial agriculture until our family
finally had the opportunity to travel a
few years ago. We discovered from
Ireland, to England, to France and
Italy, that many Europeans have a
totally different outlook on food, so
it's not hard to understand why they
have fought hard to keep out GMO
foods, as one example.
On one trip. we had the good luck
to be in Dieppe, France on a Saturday
in late March for their weekly
farmers' market (Canadians are still
well loved there because of the huge
sacrifice our troops made in WW II.)
It's a city about the size of Stratford,
so imagine a market so huge it would
extend from the courthouse almost a
mile up Highway 8 towards
Kitchener. There was everything
under the sun available from fresh
fish caught that morning to sides of
pork cooking on upright barbecues
with the drippings falling on beds of
golden potatoes underneath. One
booth featured 59 different varieties
of cheese, while another had over 20
different flavours of honey. Another
vendor had so many kinds of
sausages, which he happily let us
sample, that we hardly needed to eat
foi the rest of the day. Another
Normandy farmer had huge loaves of
fresh bread made in a wood -fired
brick oven, as well as fabulous
pastries she could hardly see over the
top of.
There were huge bins of locally
grown carrots, apples and potatoes,
sometimes with up to 10 varieties of
each. Didn't see what you wanted?
They would gladly custom grow it or
bake it for you.
We happened to be in England and
Ireland shortly after both the Mad
Cow and Foot and Mouth crises had
decimated the English countryside,
and from talking to both farmers and
consumers, it's going to be a long
time before those producers get their
market back.
Increasingly Canadians are
becoming more and more like
Europeans. We are willing to pay for
great tasting, safe, locally grown
food.
If you don't believe it, drop into
the local Zehrs store. In the new
Stratford store they now have an
organic section that's almost as large
as their old store. And it's growing by
leaps and bounds. In dairy for
instance, we can't find farmers fast
enough to produce certified organic
milk.
Our farmers have to go back to
being food producers but we need
help. The public wants safe, high
quality, nutritious, locally grown
food. Just ask them. To do that, we
need a substantial change in the way
we think about how a lot of things
operate from our farm organizations
right up to the processing and
retailing cartel.
We don't need more "APF"
programs that put farmers on the dole
and tell them it would be best to get
bigger or get out. Why should a local
farmer have to tear out his orchard
because the big supermarkets won't
buy his apples while their shelves are
filled with produce shipped thousands
of miles after being sprayed with who
knows what?
Farmers need a fair price for the
time and investment they put into
what they produce. We need a return
to the days of the local cheese house
with its unique cultures, the local
slaughter house giving us locally
raised meat fed locally grown grain
and drug and hormone free. But it's
not going to be easy. With the 80 per
cent of grocery business now
controlled by two players, it's going
to be a tough slogging. But we must
start, and soon.0
Robert Mercer is travelling and his
column is unavailable this month. It
will return next month.
You can now reach us
by email at:
norhuron@scsinernet.com