The Rural Voice, 1994-11, Page 25distribution. It's going to happen in
the food industry and we want to be
there first."
T'n Canada, the organic market
niche has grown from one per
cent of the food dollar to two per
.cent in the past two years. In the
U.S. it has doubled from two per cent
to four per cent. In Japan it has
vaulted from nothing in 1989 to 14
per cent of the food dollar. "The
Japanese market is monstrous,"
Harrington said. "We have to go back
to square one and find more farmers"
if Pristine Meadows is going to
tackle this huge market."
Canadians have a huge advantage
for expansion of organic
products, he said. Canada has an
image of purity that gives
Canadian farmers an edge in
supplying the booming market
which includes huge new health -
food supermarkets in the U.S.
and even mail-order catalogues.
In his own Barrie -area
company, Harrington is moving
into new, barely explored areas
of taste. He's working with a
company to try to refine the taste
of their product. He's working
with a controversial mineralogist
who says that the minerals in the
soil affect the taste of the
delivered in the third week of the
month when money has begun to run
out and there is the possibility they
can't afford nutritious food (boxes
include recipes for how to properly
cook the produce). The project is
now up to 350 boxes a month from
Fort Erie to Hamilton. This is not a
food bank, he stressed. People pay
for the food.
The project tries to support local
farmers but organizers found out that
was a difficult task. In the midst of
the bounty of fruits and vegetables in
the region they found most food was
shipped out of the area directly to the
Food Terminal in Toronto. Few
co-operatives hold the power and
they have pressured local councils to
keep out the huge supermarkets that
have changed the face of food
retailing in Britain and North
America. In France there is much
greater resistance to the kind of
homogenizing of the food system,
with the hundreds of local cheese
factories versus a few major
producers here in Ontario. The
French, Murray noted, spend more
on food than housing and put more
importance on the food they cat.
For rural people who don't like a
food system built on larger and larger
farms and processing plants and
greater and greater
standardization, the alternative is
to find ways to mold people
together to find, develop, and
supply the niches in the market.
Many consumers, for instance,
would be interested in buying
bread without the preservatives
necessary in large-scale
production (such bread has never
caught on in France where
people treasure their local
bakery where they buy bread
daily).
Finding ways to bring people
together to fill the niche markets
is the occupation of keynote
Robin Murray speaks while fellow panelists Bill
Harrington and /an Fripp listen.
product. Someday mineral
supplements may be added to soil to
improve taste, he suggests. "I think
there will come a day when the
products we supply to the market will
be judged not on size and flavour but
on what is in it," Harrington
predicted.
Also taking part in the panel
discussion was Ian Fripp, co-
ordinator of the Good Food Project in
the Niagara Peninsula. The project
provides boxes of wholesome food to
low income residents at reasonable
costs. The Good Food Box is an
outgrowth of Niagara Peninsula
Homes, a non-profit group which has
developed housing for low income
people in the region. It was decided
they needed to diversify to improve
the diet of low income people and
also to promote local economic
development.
The Large boxes sell for $15
delivered to the door. The clients buy
the box at the beginning of the month
when they're old age or welfare
cheques arrive and the food is
individual farmers took him
seriously, selling him lesser quality
produce and saving the best for other
markets. "We want to link the
consumers to the farms but we can
only do that if the farmers come
along," he said. Still, 98 per cent of
the food in the September Good Food
Box came from local farms.
Murray, the third speaker in the
panel, brought an international
perspective to the discussion. A
native of Britain, he has worked with
producer co-operatives in third world
countries to help them capture a
share of intemational markets.
There are two contrasting visions
of farming, he said. The prevailing
vision, with a powerful political
punch, includes farms with 1,500
dairy cows and 9,000 hogs, to supply
larger and larger processing plants
and stores. The alternative vision is
the type of farming practiced in
northern Italy and areas of France
and Germany. Here, small regional.
processing has retained a distinctive
niche for farmers. In Italy producer
speaker June Holley of ACEnet, the
Appalachian Centre for Network
Economics in the poor rural area of
southeastern Ohio. ACEnct has been
working to build flexible
manufacturing networks, first in
general manufacturing, then in food
processing. The goal is to find more
ways for people in her impoverished
area to support themselves.
Dart of the plan has been to
create partnerships between
governments, banks and non-
profit organizations. "More
and more communities arc learning
how to learn," Holley says. "We're
learning how to invent ourselves.
We're learning new ways to work
together." These new networks,
along with emerging technologies,
can be put to work for rural areas.
Using computer networks, for
instance, it costs nothing to link up
with people in areas around the
world, learning, for example, about
the lessons learned in food
production in northern Italy.
Successful business, she says, is
NOVEMBER 1994 21