There are a zillion reasons to support local agriculture – reducing greenhouse gases (shipping apples to BC from New Zealand doesn’t seem to make any sense), supporting our local economy, being sure our children are eating healthy food, taking good care of the land on which it is grown.  And now we have another reason. The E.coli outbreak at the XL slaughter house in Brooks, Alberta, shown a spotlight on the risks of going for the opposite of local — one giant facility slaughtering up to 5,000 cattle a day.

I had a great time at an auction on Salt Spring Island this fall to support the building of a local abattoir. The local abattoir is needed to allow the production of Salt Spring Island lamb. The alternative is to add the huge financial burden of trucking the lambs by ferry to an abattoir up island. Considering I became a vegetarian when I was eight and adopted a pet lamb, I never really saw myself as someone willing to donate for an abattoir. However, with what is going on in the increasingly industrialized, corporate concentrated world of food production, I am ready to chain myself to the next cannery or abattoir I see being shut down. Of course, food contamination can occur in large or small operations. But in small operations, the impact is limited and local and quickly traced. Public health was compromised in the XL case because the key federal agency took nearly two weeks to sort out what products were contaminated and because the scale of the outfit made them hesitate for fear of undermining the image of Canadian beef. We need to fight for local agriculture, for local farmers making a decent living and to assure Canadians that the food we put on the table is safe.   

In This Issue…

• Centre for Plant Health Saved!
• XL Foods – a Few Facts on the Biggest Food Recall in Canadian History
• XL Foods – Moments from the Emergency Debate in the House of Commons – October 3, 2012
• Town Halls Coming in January
• National Food Policy Vision: to Improve Food Safety, Security, and Sovereignty
• Statement on Remembrance Day
• Your opinion matters!
• Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal Awards Ceremony

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Seconded by Elizabeth May on October 23, 2012

Click here for the full document.

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Elizabeth May: Mr. Speaker, we have been speaking a lot today about food safety.

While I support the motion, I do it primarily because I am familiar with the cuts to environmental protection and what that will mean for Canada in the future.

I am curious about the member’s view of the Weatherill report. I found it interesting in the Weatherill report that her initial conclusion and the climate in which she made her decisions about the listeriosis outbreak was that we live in a world in which large-scale manufacturing and single plants are more likely. By their very nature, producing cold cuts in large-scale factories such as Maple Leaf Foods as opposed to lots of small facilities that support local farming communities was inherently more dangerous than the smaller local producers.

Does my hon. friend have any comments on the benefits of local agriculture as opposed to large, concentrated industrial facilities?

Hon. Hedy Fry: Mr. Speaker, we all want to support small farms, small businesses and small manufacturing enterprises. After all, these are the people who produce about 65% of the jobs in our country.

However, it does not really matter whether it is a very small enterprise or a very large enterprise, there must be inspection of the sanitary surroundings, whether people are taking the due precautions in terms of washing their hands, wearing gloves, wearing hairnets, wearing masks, and that the food itself is tested before it is packaged and it leaves the store and goes on to the shelf.

This is the only way that Canadians, especially Canadians who are compromised because of their health and chronic disease, who have Crohn’s disease and who have other problems, know the food they eat is safe.

That is why Canadians pay taxes.

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As we begin this discussion over the next 10 minutes of my portion of the debate, I want to concentrate on what our amendments are actually about and then address the larger issue of why I personally, as the member of Parliament for Saanich—Gulf Islands where we actually do have some wheat farmers, very small levels of crops at this point, but there are people in Saanich—Gulf Islands–

Hon. Vic Toews: How many under the Wheat Board?

Ms. Elizabeth May: I am sorry, I am unable to answer the hon. minister across the way as I explain our amendments.

We have put forward amendments to Bill C-18 that deal very specifically with changes to the sections of the bill that relate to the election of the board of directors.

It has been part of the Wheat Board ever since it was created in 1935 that the members of the Wheat Board’s board of directors were primarily elected by farmers. It has been a 15 member board of directors, 10 board members elected by farmers, who themselves then are represented in a single desk marketing system, which is of course to the benefit of farmers, and that is why they were electing their board of directors.

The amendments we are putting forward at report stage of Bill C-18 are to revert control over the board of directors to the Canadian Wheat Board in whatever new position it is able to exert itself after passage of this legislation in order to ensure that it has representation elected by farmers.

The bill, as currently drafted, would eliminate board members elected by farmers and move to a five person board, all appointed through the governor in council, and of course the governor in council is essentially the cabinet, so it would remove the democratically elected portion of the board of directors, and that is a very serious matter.

I would love to take the temperature down on this matter this morning in the House. It is not an issue which is often debated in the House where it is somehow freedom versus oppression, or that there is this dreadful oppression from the Wheat Board and that all farmers wish to be freed from these shackles, from this terrible yoke.

The wheat and barley farmers in this country are clearly divided on the pros and cons of the Wheat Board in 2011. Clearly, we need to think about modernizing. Initially, the Wheat Board was created before 1935, which is the date we usually choose because that is when it came out in statute federally. Going back to the 1920s, farmers first formed co-operatives. They had every reason to be concerned. When my hon. friend from Winnipeg Centre referred to the robber barons, he was referring to those of the early part of the 20th century. Farmers had every reason to be concerned about whether they could they get a fair price.

When farmers were put in a circumstance of being at the mercy of large corporate buyers, what would that mean? Farmers were competing against other. Each one would lower their price to get the sale with the big conglomerate, and in that situation it was a buyer’s market. It could pick off the farmers. Farmers could go bankrupt if they kept reducing their prices to get the deal. That is why co-operatives were formed. That is why the Wheat Board was formed in 1935 to ensure that, with single desk marketing, the Wheat Board would buy and guarantee the farmers a liveable price for the wheat and barley they grew.

It is not easy being a farmer in this country. Goodness only knows that the average farmer in this country is unable to make a living on the farm. Most of the income, increasingly, has to be made off the farm, and that applies not just to grain farmers, of course, but to farmers of fruit, vegetables and livestock.

Being a farmer in this country is difficult. We need a food strategy. We need to support our farmers. We need to support locally grown food. In this context, eliminating the Wheat Board is highly controversial.

We have large conglomerates today, and my hon. friend referred to one of them, Viterra, and there is Cargill. They are in a good position if farmers do go back to what happened in the early 1900s, competing against each other to get a price from a big buyer. That is why there is so much concern from farmers who want to keep the Wheat Board, that they will be exposed to the vagaries of a marketplace in which competition means undercutting each other.

The heart of the co-operative movement was to support each other so that through collaborative efforts, whether in the fisheries, grain farming or in milk and dairy products, farmers could get a fair and livable wage out of a very competitive marketplace. Therefore, it is not without its controversy.

The one vote that the Wheat Board undertook showed 62% of farmers wanted to keep it. That means a not insubstantial number of farmers want to do away with it. In fact, if the percentages are right, there are more farmers who want to do away with the Wheat Board than citizens who voted for the governing party in the last election. That is not a small group of people, so the farmers are divided on this.

This bill would have been better contemplated with respect to how to modernize the Wheat Board rather than how to destroy the single desk and expose the farmers who are so very concerned, as well as those who think the change would do them well.

No one really knows how this will go.

I did want to express concern because in the category of what we do not know are the costs. In terms of costs, we know that the Canadian Wheat Board has determined that an auditor will be brought in. The auditor winning the contract has been reported to be receiving between half a million and a million dollars to figure out employee severance costs, pension costs and the potential legal costs for breaking long-term contracts.

The analysis was carried out by the reputable accounting firm, KPMG. It concluded that the costs of eliminating the Wheat Board will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This cost of course will be paid by the taxpayers, but in whose interest is this really? Some critics have pointed out that essentially paying hundreds of millions of dollars should be seen as a disguised subsidy to the Cargills and the Viterras because they will be the beneficiaries of this change.

It is clearly not an easy issue. I have talked to many members on the government benches who have told me that some of their farmers are terrified of getting rid of the Wheat Board. It is generally reported that the younger farmers are more prepared to innovate and figure out how to do without it.

There is no question that the Wheat Board could do a much better job helping farmers who are growing organic grain, but doing a better job should have been the goal. Getting rid of single desk marketing is a radical and dramatic change from what farmers in barley and wheat have known for years. The division, and the fact that the majority of the wheat farmers who have expressed themselves on this issue want to keep the Wheat Board, should have injected some caution into how this legislation will move forward. It is the absence of caution that is so deeply concerning to the members on the opposition side of the House. We need to protect the interests of Canadian wheat and barley farmers.

I know that members on the government benches honestly believe that they are acting in the interests of their constituents who farm wheat and barley. We on the opposition benches honestly believe that there are huge risks in moving so dramatically.

It is interesting that the Conservative members use the word “conservative” to describe themselves. They are really very radical. They are making radical changes to our criminal justice system, to prairie farming, and across the board, particularly in immigration. I do not think they like the term that they are the radical party, but that is much more the essence and substance of the changes we are seeing.

Therefore, in putting forward these amendments we are asking for one dose of caution: please allow these amendments to go through. Allow the farmers in the country to continue to elect members of the Canadian Wheat Board to represent their interests. With board members elected democratically by farmers, we could continue to allow all voices in the agriculture community to be heard. We could try to find the mechanisms that protect the farmers, after Bill C-18 passes, from the worst aspects of a competitive cutthroat market dominated by a handful of multinational corporations.

We must find a way to ensure that prairie farmers make a living wage and that they are not exposed to the kinds of practices that gave rise to the need for the Canadian Wheat Board in the first place.

I urge members opposite to consider these few amendments and to allow them to go through.

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The World Bank reports that in this past year, almost 70 million people have been pushed into extreme poverty due to rising food costs.

“In Canada, we can best address food security by continuing to support family farms, local farmers’ markets, and organic agriculture.

Creating communities that are connected to their food is part of creating a healthy, resilient society, especially needed with the climate crisis” said May.

Over the last fifty years, federal policies and subsidies have tended to promote giant agribusinesses. This shift has given multinational corporations control over our food supply. Meanwhile, farmers increasingly rely on off-farm income to survive and young farmers find it difficult to get started.  The Green Party calls for the restructuring of our agricultural markets to sustain farming and provide farm families with a fair share of the consumer food dollar.

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Keynote speaker was Salt Spring Island poet and rebel farmer (or farmer and rebel poet?) Brian Brett. His book Trauma Farm is emerging to be, to sane agricultural policy, what Silent Spring was to raising awareness of pesticides. His observations were echoed by other farmers through the day.

In Trauma Farm, Brian Brett writes about ‘progress traps’. The term, he says, was coined in A Short History of Progress by fellow Salt Spring Islander Ronald Wright. Referring to weapons technology, Wright used the term to describe a narrowness of focus that leads to logical failure.

Brian Brett’s talks of progress traps in relation to the industrialization of agriculture. Brian writes: ‘Progress traps are what happens when scientists and health officials convince themselves that they can control the natural world within whose glow we walk.’

Since reading Trauma Farm, I have been spotting modern agriculture examples of ‘progress traps’ at an alarming rate. From local organic growers on the Saanich Peninsula, I heard about the latest rules for organic growers in California. To control that pesky natural world, organic farming is being converted into something alien to the earth. The FDA wants the food grown in ‘safe’ conditions. The threat that field mice or other critters that might bring disease or feces within the rows of lettuce has resulted in a requirement that several metres on all sides of the field be converted to a dead zone—herbicided out of existence so that no living creature can cross that barrier to contaminate the crop. Trapped by their own crazed logic and the idea that the natural world must be brought to heel, the FDA will undo one of the essential virtues of organic growing—that it is compatible with the biodiversity that surrounds it.

The most chilling of industrialized agricultures progress traps may be the Enviro-pig. These pigs are being raised in isolation at the University of Guelph in hopes that they will be approved for human consumption. The problem Enviro-pigs are supposed to solve is water pollution from hog manure.

Due to the latest craze in inhumane treatment of pigs: raising tens of thousands of animals in single barns— indoors for their whole lives in cages over metal slotted floors—a new water pollution threat has been created. Liquid hog manure in the millions of gallons is being created in these mega-hog factories across Canada. The ‘disposal method’ is to spray the hog manure on farm fields as fertilizer. But the liquid hog manure is rich in phosphorus. The over-fertilizing effect of this manure in water courses causes eutrophication, choking the life out of lakes and rivers.

A sensible solution would be to return to more traditional ways of raising hogs. I met one farmer in Saskatchewan who had found an ideal solution, even in settings where thousands of animals are raised in the same barn. Allow pigs to move indoors and outdoors and have cement floors covered in alfalfa. Collecting the manure and alfalfa from the floor and composting it created safe, non-noxious compost.

But those caught in progress traps are not likely to think alfalfa represents a solution when the brave new world of bio-engineering is within our reach. So Enviro- pig was born. It is a transgenic pig, with genetic material from Ecoli bacteria spliced into its DNA, reducing phosphorus in manure by up to 65%. Environment Canada has approved continuing work at the University of Guelph. It is still a long way from isolation facilities in Guelph to the hotdog at the Fall Fair, but proponents of Enviro-pig are sold on its benefits.

Against this mad, mad world stand a growing band of farmers, activists, and citizens (with a nod to Salt Spring Island’s John Wilcox, another speaker, who spoke out in frustration at having the actions of responsible citizens denigrated as ‘activists.’) This movement is growing across Canada—motivated for health, slow food, low- carbon strategies, food security, protection of biodiversity, and healthy sustainable communities.

The Galiano Island conference “From Table to Field” (sponsored by the Galiano Community Food Programme) attracted over 80 people from every one of the southern Gulf Islands and from the Saanich Peninsula and Victoria. The number of innovations, workable models and creative experimentation was breath-taking and inspiring.

People are trying out various models to find housing for people willing to work on farms: to give young people access to land to grow food on land owned by older people or by those who may not have the time or inclination to put good agricultural land to use. All kinds of models exist—cooperative growing efforts, leases and Community Supported Agriculture.

On Saturna, an olive growing effort is underway (see ad page 15). On Mayne, there is a growers association to share training and labour. ‘Crop mobs’ may be the modern version of a good old fashioned barn-raising.

The networking and emailing, websites, tweets and twitters can barely keep up with the proliferation of new groups, new initiatives. All of the fertile burbling of the fervour for growing healthy, local food suggests a social movement. It is a peaceful revolution in the making.

The 1960s ‘Green Revolution’ directed us into this particular progress trap. It is premised on massive inputs of fossil fuels, irrigation and chemicals. It has given us more food. It has also given us mad cow disease, new strains of avian flu, depleted soil, redundant trade. Its primary beneficiaries are Cargill and Monsanto and other transnationals. The losers are farmers and eaters.

The good news is that the failure of logic in the industrialized food model will require that we shift to tasty local food—and soon. And those places that already know how to feed their communities will be miles ahead and can show the way.

Eat local healthy food, the life—and community—you save may be our own.

Elizabeth E. May, O.C. is the leader of the Green Party, and parliamentary candidate for Saanich Gulf Islands. Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress, House of Anansi Press was the basis for the 2004 Massey Lectures. Trauma Farm, Brian Brett, D&M Publishers Inc; Galiano Community Food Program can be contacted at: www.galianofoodprogram.ca/contact.

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Occupying one third of the front page with lovely colour images of sockeye and Atlantic salmon, the headline ran: ‘Debunking our fetish of fresh.’ The article started off: ‘The local food movement has made waves among environmentally conscious consumers. Why buy frozen sockeye from Alaska when you could choose the fresh stuff from your backyard? An ecological economist has revealed the burden of buying local: the carbon footprint is much bigger than you’d think…’

Classic Globe and Mail: definitely provocative; debunking what is intuitive; slapping down the locavore movement.

On reading the story and doing a bit more research, I suggest an accurate headline would have been ‘More reasons to avoid farmed salmon.’

It turns out the entire study, a collaborative effort between Dalhousie School for Resource and Environmental Studies, the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology, and Ecotrust, focused only on the environmental impact of salmon production. The researchers looked at wild versus aquaculture, transportation of fresh versus frozen, and the carbon footprint of getting salmon to the plate.

In that analysis it was not so much local versus imported, as local aquaculture versus imported wild salmon. Even accounting for carbon emitted in the transportation, a ‘local’ choice of farmed salmon has a whopping carbon footprint compared with wild, sustainable salmon.

It turns out that the largest carbon component of salmon production is the huge ecological cost of making the pellets fed to farmed salmon. Those pellets are made from fish protein. Currently a significant proportion of the wild fish caught globally is diverted to making pellets for farmed fish. According to the World Resources Institute, 10-15% of the world’s total production of fishmeal—a concentrated mix of anchovies, sardines and other low-value fish—go to aquaculture. The fishmeal, which could feed people, goes to the carnivorous, high-value aquaculture species—salmon and shrimp.

The environmental damage from shrimp aquaculture is horrific—including the destruction of mangrove forests, salinization of local, coastal farmland, loss of habitat for the wild fishery (and a myriad of other species that inhabit mangroves), leading to loss of sustainable livelihoods in countries from Thailand to Ecuador.

Vandana Shiva, heroic Indian scientist and activist, once told me that of all the destructive industries that had ever come to India, shrimp aquaculture was the worst. The Indian Supreme Court ordered a moratorium on shrimp aquaculture on the evidence of the ecological and social devastation it caused. In Thailand, shrimp is referred to as ‘pink gold’, and, as in Bangladesh and Ecuador, those opposing shrimp farms have been murdered.

It takes up to two kilograms of fish meal for each kilogram of shrimp or salmon produced through aquaculture. And that, on top of local environmental concerns of sea lice, destruction of benthic biota, creating anoxic environments due to fish feces, loss of coastal zones for healthy ecosystems, is one more reason not to eat farmed salmon.

As lead researcher, Professor Peter Tyedmers of Dalhousie explained it, ‘Intensive livestock production, whether it be salmon or milk, is predicated on concentrated feeds…that are global commodities.’

It also turns out that fresh versus frozen can lead to poor choices if such decisions are uninformed by the reality. Fish sold as ‘fresh’ may have been air-freighted, while frozen at sea has a lower carbon footprint. It turns out that shipping fish by container ship is less GHG-intensive than most other methods of transport.

I doubt very much that residents of this area, committed to eating locally, would ever make the mistake of thinking that ‘local’ farm-salmon was an environmental choice. The multitude of reasons for shunning this destructive industry are well known. Whether the aquaculture operations contributed to the collapse of returning Fraser River sockeye salmon this year will be determined (we hope) in the judicial inquiry. It is quite likely that the greater damage was done by high temperatures in the river’s waters, due to the climate crisis. Nevertheless, the aquaculture industry is being pressed globally, including by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, to improve its record or face bans.

The overall point that local is not always better is worth elaborating with some sensible ‘life-cycle’ tests of the food in question. So, if you live next to an industrial-scale hog factory, you are better to eat something brought in from an adjoining county that was raised organically. Of course, if you are unfortunate enough to live next to a hog factory, you would not want to eat what is produced there.

A few simple tests will help. Local is best if it is raised organically, always. Local is likely best as long as it is not from an intensive livestock operation or aquaculture. Local may still be best if the ‘food miles’ to import organically grown fruits and veggies begin to circle the globe. And, please, add to your standard restaurant query about the salmon, ‘Is this shrimp local and wild caught?’ If not, do the mangroves a favour and order whatever is wild and local and sustainable.

Elizabeth E. May is the leader of the Green Party of Canada, candidate in Saanich Gulf Islands and Officer of the Order of Canada.

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